Posts Tagged ‘craigslist’

The Center for Health and Gender Equality in Washington D.C. became the latest organization to turn down a “sizeable” donation from the Craigslist Charitable Fund. Read the rest of this entry »

Women’s Funding Network in partnership with “A Future. Not A Past,” just released the results of its Georgia Demand Study, looking at the statewide demand for female adolescent prostitutes. The first in a series of several being conducted across the U.S, the Georgia study found that Craigslist ads yielded three times the responding transactions as competitor BackPage.

This point is important, as Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster has long been saying that Craigslist, whose ads aren’t nearly as raunchy as Backpage, is monitoring better and working well with law enforcement, but still being singled out for negative publicity – basically, that it’s being picked on. We’ve had to agree with him.  His latest blog posts on the subject seem rather pleading and a little desperate. Perhaps more so than ever before, the pressure is on Craigslist, and it seems that Buckmaster is really feeling that.

“It’s not the number or the raunchiness of the ads — it’s the fact that more men respond to ads on Craigslist than to ads on other sites,” said Alex Trouteaud, Ph.D., in the announcement. Trouteaud is lead researcher for The Schapiro Group, an independent research firm conducting the studies.

For the Georgia study ads were placed on Craigslist and other sites where men typically look for adolescent prostitutes. As a result of covertly questioning the men, study participants found that 47 percent of them still wanted to continue with the transaction after three warnings that the girls were under age.   

According to a January 2010 fact sheet from the Governor’s Office for Children and Families, an estimated 405 girls are prostituted each month in Georgia, 76 percent by way of the Internet. The Georgia Demand Study estimated 7,200 men knowingly or unknowingly pay for sex with adolescent females in Georgia each month.  The study survey engaged with 218 men. It was a partnership with an organization called A Future, Not a Past. AFNAP’s mission is to measure the scope of prostituted adolescent girls. 

 A confession: Even though we’ve promised to never run another “look at what you can find on Craigslist” or ” … on EBay” article, rules are made to be broken. Right? So here goes:

Jason R. Clark, an independent candidate for governor in Colorado, decided Craigslist was the best place to find a running mate.

He advertised on Craigslist  <link: http://denver.craigslist.org/gov/1724308813.html > for someone to run with him as lieutenant governor. The job pays $68,500 a year.

“We want some new ideas, new leadership,” he said on a TV interview show this week. < link: http://www.9news.com/news/article.aspx?storyid=138533&catid=339 >. “If you’re out there and you think you might be interested in this area, give me a call. We’ll interview you and put you on the list.”

Only residents of Colorado are eligible.

And no, it was not placed in “adult services.” This is a different kind of adult service. It was placed under Denver à jobs à government jobs.

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, leader of the pack of U.S. attorney generals that led the fight to close down Craigslist erotic services advertising, is once again center stage in an online “clean up”  – this one to remove sex offenders from Facebook and MySpace. To date, the work of he and his coalition of multiple-state attorneys general, has helped to remove nearly 150 Connecticut-based convicted sex offender profiles and 110,000 across the U.S. after crosschecking their social networking sites with e-mail accounts provided by state police.

“A new law requiring sex offenders to register their email accounts [with state police]enables more effective vetting and vigilance — and both are vital,” Blumenthal said, in the announcement. We made a call to Blumenthal’s office to find out more about this legislation – whether national or Connecticut-only, and to ask what other states are part of the coalition but were adamantly refused the information.

We talked instead with LT. J. Paul Vance in the office of the CT State Police who verified that legislation was passed approximately October 2009 that required that sex offenders include e-mail addresses when they first register as sex offenders, and that they confirm the address within 90 days. The legislation is Connecticut-only, though we believe this is common practice elsewhere as well.

“These [sex offender] numbers prove the need for perseverance and persistent protection — preventing predators from seeking easy Internet access to minors,” Blumenthal said, in the announcement.  “I commend Facebook and MySpace for working with my office and our coalition of states to sever sex offenders from their sites. My office will continue to work tirelessly to stop sex offenders from mingling with minors on such sites.”

We have many unanswered questions – such as what, if any, noted actions these sex offenders must take before being removed from Facebook and MySpace, – and will continue to look for answers. While the attorneys general’s actions, as with their actions to remove offensive erotic services listings from Craigslist would seem noble at first glance, its seems rather heavy-handed if their being a registered sex offenders is the only requirement for demanding they be removed from these social sites. It would also seem a little futile, as both social sites make it easy for someone to disguise his or her real identity.

UPDATE:

Hemanshu Nigam, Chief Security Officer of MySpace and News Corporation, gave us the following statement by e-mail:

“We applaud and support Attorney General Blumenthal’s successful implementation of Connecticut’s registered sex offender email registry law and his continued commitment to helping make the Internet a safer place.  MySpace utilized CT’s offender email registry to complement technology we had already put in place to remove registered sex offenders from our community as part of a comprehensive approach to protecting Internet users from predators. Together with Attorney General Blumenthal, we encourage other sites to follow our lead and support important legislation that protects teens online.”

A Facebook spokesperson e-mailed us the following statement:

“Protecting our users, especially the many children who use our site has always been a top priority for Facebook. We have devoted significant resources to developing innovative and complex systems to proactively monitor the site and its users, including those not on a sex offender registry, for suspicious activity (such as contacting minors or users of predominantly one gender). We are glad to be able to report that the success of our techniques means that we have not yet had to handle a case of a registered sex offender meeting a minor through Facebook. We are working hard to make sure it never happens.

“We have been working proactively with states’ attorneys general, including Attorney General Blumenthal, to run their lists of registered sex offenders against our user base. Our team uses various internal tools to automatically find matches. Any potential matches are evaluated more fully by our internal team of investigation professionals. If we find that someone on a sex offender registry is a likely match to a user on Facebook, we notify law enforcement and disable the account. We applaud the work that Attorney General Blumenthal’s office has done to help keep registered sex offenders off social networking sites, and we will continue to partner with policymakers, law enforcement, parents and educators to make the Internet safer for everyone.”

PC Magazine has named several online classifieds sites to its list of “Top 100 Web sites of 2009.” In real estate, Trulia and HotPads took away awards. Simply Hired won a place on the list for an employment site. And, no surprise here, Craigslist also jointed the top 100.

PC Magazine said that it specifically chose sites that were not the flavor of the month, favoring “classic Web sites that we all know and love and new and/or undiscovered sites that you may not have heard of yet.” The magazine cited Twitter as a site it would not be including.

Other sites included: Comsumerist.com, Amazon.com and Etsy.com.

     Another slaying and several more sexual assaults have been linked by law enforcement officials to connections made through Craigslist.

     Three separate reports of violent crime in the Austin, Texas, area have been listed by police as Craigslist-related. One of them, the slaying of prostitute Amy Elizabeth Dickey, occurred last month. Police said she was killed by Nathaniel Briscoe, who responded to an ad she had posted on Craigslist.

            “We are aware that suspects do gain access to victims by using sites similar to Craigslist,” police Lt. Allen McClure told KVUE television. “We always encourage people where they are in situations where people are able to remain anonymous that they exercise reasonable care.”

            In North Carolina, Kannapolis police arrested a man on charges he used Craigslist to arrange for another man to rape his wife at the couple’s home while he watched. Police said the woman was assaulted at knifepoint while the husband watched; their two children were home at the time, but were physically unharmed. The Charlotte Observer has details.

Does Craigslist founder Craig Newmark want to go into politics? His comment during a keynote at the annual Computers Freedom & Privacy conference in Washington this week that he is considering whether to “dedicate a big chunk of my life” to those who are driving change in Washington certainly opened up the possibility.

“Things are changing in ways we’ve never seen before in human history,” Newmark said, adding that he wants to “find the people who are doing the real work” and act as their cheerleader and champion. “As a nerd and former engineer I’m used to being the person who does stuff. Now they tell me my great value is primarily being a person who talks about the good work other people do,” Newmark said.

Newmark also lauded the Obama administration’s recently launched open government initiative and Data.gov, a site intended to “democratize data” by offering raw feeds of government information.

Links to articles from the conference are here.

UPDATE: Craig tweeted me to tell me that he’s not interested in going into politics. Here’s what he wrote:

craignewmark@brianblum no, not interested in politics, very interested in governance.