Posted on 04/22/2009 8:16:27 AM PDT by bornred
Craigslist chief executive Jim Buckmaster told a CNN cable TV news program this morning that the company feels terribly that an accused killer in Boston allegedly used the online service to target his victims.
"We feel terribly, and it's quite sad that anyone would lose their life," Buckmaster told CNN. "And we're horrified that use of Craigslist could in any way be connected with a violent crime of this nature. It just causes us to redouble our efforts to try to get across to users to take a few common sense precautions that eliminate most of the risks.
(Excerpt) Read more at boston.com ...
People will just list in other sections, under code words, just as they do with drug sales. That just makes it more likely that some naive person will end up in contact with a prostitute when they didn’t want to be, and do nothing to stop the use of the site by those who want to buy and sell prostitution services. I really don’t think the Craigslist CEO should feel responsible for this. These were adult women, advertising their availability as prostitutes to total strangers on the internet, and then telling those strangers where to come and meet them. Anybody with a high enough IQ to figure out how to post an ad on Craigslist is smart enough to know this is extremely dangerous.
craigslist is a portal for creeps, peeps and perverts.
For a “de facto” rebuttal, consult “The Craigslist Crime List”.
It lists a couple of (usually “adult ads”-related) crimes virtually every day.
http://crimene.ws/category/craigscrimelist/
The media have been using the words “craigslist killer” a lot. That’s like saying “telephone book killer” for someone who looks up his victims in the phone book. It’s just about the media hyping things that should not be hyped.
Nevertheless, Craig should charge a nominal amount for ads and not have pick up or sex ads.
We prefer that Craigslist be connected only with nonviolent crimes of a prurient nature.
I’ve heard a couple of other Craigslist-is-evil stories in the MSM in the wake of this one. I agree with a poster yesterday who said hyping this particular case could well be an effort by the dinosaur media (especially newspapers that have seen sites like Craigslist decimate their advertising dollars) to make Craigslist radioactive..
Setting aside the matter of the whore killer for a moment:
Craigslist is providing a highly visible forum for criminals to advertise illegal activity out in the open. It is reasonable to expect that this leads to an increase in criminal activity involving individuals who might not normally know where to look.
That must explain all the positive feed back I have.
If they close “erotic services” the hookers will just move to the “dating” section, which is already hurt badly by all the press given to these isolated incidents. The real solution is to close down craigslist entirely, since one person, out of the hundreds of millions of times the site has been used, was killed.
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