Commentary: Dear Craigslist, Grow Up

The website shuttered its U.S. "adult services" section. If it really wants to fix the problem, it has to operate like the mainstream site it is

Sexual solicitations have migrated to the personals section

By Brad Stone

Serra Sippel is not accustomed to receiving large, unsolicited donations in the mail. Nor is she used to sending them back.

That's what happened earlier this summer, however, when Sippel, president of a Washington (D.C.)-based nonprofit women's safety organization called the Center for Health and Gender Equity, received—with little explanation—a $25,000 check from the Craigslist Charitable Fund, a philanthropic arm of the famously nonconformist classified ad website headquartered in San Francisco.

Her organization needed the money, so Sippel spent a weekend studying Craigslist, which helps people buy and sell used products and find jobs, housing, and companionship on more than 700 local sites around the world. Clicking on adult services, she noticed obvious solicitations from prostitutes; browsing through its blog, she came across Chief Executive Officer Jim Buckmaster's testy replies to allegations that the site facilitates sex trafficking. Ultimately, Sippel decided she was uncomfortable keeping the donation. "I just didn't understand why they wouldn't express more concern," Sippel says. "They did the minimum to address the demands of law enforcement, expecting some goodwill. But there was clearly more they could do to fight trafficking."

Does Craigslist care more about its legal rights or its social responsibility as a dominant site with 50 million users in the U.S. alone? After two years of near-constant criticism from state attorneys general, on Sept. 4 the site finally shuttered its controversial adult services. Instead of simply dropping the header, however, Craigslist replaced it with a single word: censored. And then it went silent, refusing to comment on the move.

Adult services had become an uncomfortably profitable business. Craigslist, which started charging for sex ads in 2008 at the behest of law enforcement officials who wanted the company to verify the identities of adult advertisers, was on track to earn $44.4 million from the section in 2010 alone, according to a recent estimate from the AIM Group, which monitors classified advertising. That's almost a third of the company's projected annual revenues of $122 million. The adult revenues have helped make Craigslist a target not just of law enforcement officials but of nonprofits that fight human slavery and child prostitution. "Law enforcement and anti-trafficking experts all agreed that Craigslist, through its adult services section, was the No. 1 platform for buying and selling sex with children and young women online," says Bradley Myles, executive director of the Polaris Project, an anti-trafficking organization.

Under a provision of the 1996 law called the Communications Decency Act, Web companies cannot be held liable for the material users post on their sites. Even so, most popular Internet firms have come to the conclusion that they have a larger ethical responsibility to tame the wild beast that is participatory media. Over the last 15 years, one after another, companies like AOL (TWX), Yahoo! (YHOO), MySpace (NWS), YouTube (GOOG), and Facebook added staff and filtering technology in an effort to monitor their sites, reassure parents, calm advertisers, and position themselves as good corporate citizens. They remove pornography, profanity, and other illicit content from their user-generated forums, quickly eradicating pages designed to attract such material.

Craigslist, with all of 30 employees working in a Victorian house in San Francisco, has taken a different approach. It was never as irresponsible as its critics charged, or as good a corporate citizen as Buckmaster professed to be in his blog postings on the topic. Over the years, Craigslist changed the name of its adult listings from "erotic services,"

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