Craig Newmark: How Being a Geek Made it Hard to Respond to CNN's Ambush
While the reporter's methods were questionable and she was going for a gotcha instead of real dialogue, it does seem that Craigslist's public-messaging about controlling underage prostitution and their real response are 2 different things. They're saying they're on it, but they're not really doing much.It's difficult to pin the blame on Craigslist since they are simply a medium of communication; prostitution is something that will happen regardless of the communication media available. Before Craigslist, it was newspaper classified ads or Yellow Pages. Before that, it was a certain neighborhood or brothel. Is underage prostitution more common now with digital communication channels available? I don't think so. Look to India or Thailand or the underage trafficking in other parts of the world. It has gone on since well-before anybody heard of Craigslist, the web, or the internet.The difference is how easy it is to (a) communicate that you are a prostitute and (b) find prostitutes. In other words, as technology has improved, so have the means to quickly find information that you're looking for, whether that information happens to be what the weather is in Cupertino, or which prostitutes are available in your city.All that being said, it seems that with Craigslist being the source of more and more of the "where are adult services in my neighborhood?" queries in the 21st century, they have responsibility to make sure that underage girls aren't being taken advantage of. How they do that? I'm not sure. Off the top of my head, I can't think of a good solution if your goal (as it seems Craiglist's is) is to facilitate consensual adult sexual connections. If that's your goal, you don't want to turn away prostitutes by actually verifying their age, because that would require ID-based verification of some kind, which I'm guessing most prostitutes wouldn't want to volunteer (fear of law enforcement, etc.) So short of that, what do you do? Image-verification to verify age? That's next to impossible with so much variation among people.Prostitution is an ugly world. If I were suddenly given the reigns of control at Craigslist, I think I would turn off adult services, even knowing that within very-short-order another site or sites would pop up to fill the gap. I personally wouldn't be able to sleep at night knowing that even a few people were being exploited because of a communication medium that I created. I guess that's sort of a philosophical debate that needs to be had. Because if you take that to its logical conclusion you shouldn't be able to sleep at night if you created the foundations of the Internet, or the foundations of the Web, or even a communication medium like the telephone. Heck, even going back further, wouldn't that also mean that even creating something like a piece of real estate -- say, a hotel -- is bad because somebody might at some point be exploited at the place you created.I'll have to give this all some more thought, as I've found myself trapped in a strange place where my logical mind tells me I should have a laissez faire attitude about what I create because people will do bad things with technology and I can't control that, while my "heart" ,for lack of a better word, tells me that if I were in charge of Craigslist I should try to do something. But then I'm back to the, "what should I do?" question. Oh, life.