Censorship Comes To Online Classifieds

Craigslist, a dominant player in online classified segment would soon get rid of its “erotic services” section.This would in turn be replaced by a section called Adult Services with heavy moderation.

This means all ads under the section would attract moderation before being published which in turn would lead to higher costs and slow postings.

This comes in the wake of serious charges being framed against craigslist as various cases cropped up revealing the use of online classified as brothel and murder centric purposes despite the use of social moderation on site.

The major heat turned on the craigslist when cases of violent crime erupted recently and was even termed as “the single largest source of prostitution in the nation” by a Illinois sheriff.

Craigslist currently serves billions of page views and has till date published some 1.15 billion classified ads much bigger in size even to print ads.

This type of government scrutiny is to make web safer but would not help much as posters would find a way to defeat the system ,in these case even moderation of adult services category won’t stop violent crimes to happen again.

This action would also ignite similar actions from biggies like OLX, BACKPAGE and many others as they would not want to face similar law proceedings or class action suit in future. OLX India website which also  has a personals page which throws up the over 18+ age terms acceptance before one can proceed. The content of that personals page is ofcourse filled with inappropriate classifieds.

Even facebook is not far behind when it comes  to moderation in disguise of profanity charges. They even have a team of 150 people to moderate the site in terms of status updates and personal pictures.

It would indeed be interesting to see how these portal attain moderation and make the web safer as these online portals have now attended a sheer mammoth size.

The bigger question it raises: Isn’t social moderation on these sites enough and will these steps help?