Craigslist Permanently Closes "Adult Services"
Craigslist Inc. said the move to take down its adult-services listings was permanent as the online-classified website faced renewed criticism for facilitating child sex trafficking during a House Judiciary Committee hearing.
In testimony, Craigslist’s external lawyer, Elizabeth McDougall, a partner at Perkins Coie in Seattle, and William Powell, Craigslist’s director of customer- service and law-enforcement relations, offered the San Francisco company’s first comments on its Sept. 3 move to shutter the adult-services section and replace it with a banner reading “censored.”
Craigslist has no plans to reopen its adult-services category in the U.S., and the company is now employing technical and manual review measures to keep illegal sex ads from migrating to other parts of its site. Mr. Powell said sex ads are moving from Craigslist to other sites, including Village Voice Media’s Backpage.com.
He said no other site had adopted its best practices, which included creating special victim search interfaces for law enforcement and manually reviewing every adult-service ad.
