Censoring Craigslist Adult Services: Right or Wrong?

After the murder of a masseuse in a Boston hotel pointed a lurid finger at Craigslist, the company has been under tremendous pressure to shut down the Adult Services portion of the site. Recently they did just that. But was that a good thing or not? danah boyd SM ’02 says censoring the site will not have the intended effect.

boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England and a Fellow at Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, says pitting the people who want to protect vulnerable populations—like those in the sex trade—against those who advocate for freedom of speech is the wrong fight.

In a Huffington Post article titled How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags, boyd writes about the lost opportunity to make prostitution more visible and thus make the victims easier to find. “It makes me scream when I think of how many resources have been used attempting to censor Craigslist instead of leveraging it as a space for effective law enforcement,” she writes.

Of course, her view is controversial. Read her post for a deeper dig into the issue.