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Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

craigslist.org

21–30 of 654 posts

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#22
post #14

I hope a lawyer will chime in, because this seems pretty obviously to be an indefensible law. If you make analogies to other services, the justification falls apart. Are landlords responsible for weed dealers' business cards stuck to peg boards? Is USPS responsible for people mailing bombs? Even under DMCA, no public/high-traffic communication service is responsible for its users this way.

Actually, a landlord can be responsible for tenant's drug dealing. https://www.legalmatch.com/law-library/article/landlord-liab... Granted, they have to at least have a suspicion it is occurring, but there is potential liability there, and business cards stuck to a pegboard may be enough.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#23
post #13

How soon will reddit follow? The great purge has started. Guns removed from YouTube and reddit. Now meet up portions are being nuked.

Guns removed from YT and reddit are totally different. They're corporations choosing to ban certain content from their own platform. Craigslist is responding to a change in the law, which isn't comparable.

It's comparable insofar as, in each case the sociopolitical temperature of the moment has resulted in a reduction of the content available to users, even if the actual dynamic varies in the important ways you point out.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#24

How soon will reddit follow? The great purge has started. Guns removed from YouTube and reddit. Now meet up portions are being nuked.

If you mean Reddit's Personals, a major difference is that the posts don't use pictures--and it's not like the posters use their first and last name as their username or anywhere in their post--so hopefully that'll keep it safe. After all, the main personals section has "148,372 readers" and right now, as of 11:57 PM Eastern Time, "1,946" are logged in. https://www.reddit.com/r/r4r/

"If you mean Reddit's Personals, a major difference is that the posts don't use pictures"

Craigslist did not require ads to have pictures, and there were plenty of ads that didn't have them.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#25
post #5
post #3

Obviously driving prostitution underground and out of reach of researchers will improve the lives of sex workers. Prostitution is a very recent industry and was invented by the internet

I know several people who met and got married with children on CL. It was a normal dating site, and it also has(d) "strictly platonic" and "missed connections"- all of it is shut down now. Are dating sites/Tinder next? We will miss the days when internet wasn't like cable TV.

I loved browsing the strictly platonic section looking for sweet/bizarre/novel posts, but it was definitely full content that was _not_ platonic.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#26
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know several people who met and got married with children on CL. It was a normal dating site, and it also has(d) "strictly platonic" and "missed connections"- all of it is shut down now. Are dating sites/Tinder next? We will miss the days when internet wasn't like cable TV.

It was definitely fun to find dates and quirky people on there. I was finding it especially useful now that I'm in a new city and just looking to meet new people.

I feel ya dude. I just moved to an entirely new city, and being in my 30's, meeting new people outside of work just isn't what it was in college. I met some pretty cool girls there. Yea, lots of creeps and prostitutes, but there were real people on there too if you took the time to screen them.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#27

This is completely bizarre, we can't go down this route with the internet. It is madness.

The internet is not "the internet" any more. It's a corporate owned, tapped and monitored, centralized data warehouse. Another decentralized network needs to be formed separately adhering to the original ideals of the internet. In fact this turnover may need to happen periodically. Jump ship from the current so-called internet.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#28
We're taking our ball and going home. Very mature.

It's total BS, of course. People can just as easily advertise prostitution services in other sections of CL. Something tells me their deeply principled stand won't extend to shutting down the whole site.

Instead, they will take reasonable steps to control the proliferation of sex trafficking on their site.

Some magical force somehow precludes them from extending that same concept to personal ads, I guess.

Re: Craigslist takes personals sections offline in response to FOSTA

#29
Would it be possible to update this post with a direct link to the Craigslist notice at https://www.craigslist.org/about/FOSTA?

It seems a bit... inappropriate to deep link to a screenshot posted by a Twitter user with a bio of "CRUSH THE PATRIARCHY DICK BY DICK! XY = man & XX = woman FOREVER"

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