Opinion: Craigslist encourages more subtlety among prostitutes

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Or at least, that’s how it seems to me. After meeting with the angry attorneys general of Connecticut, Illinois and Missouri, Craigslist has decided to end its ‘erotic services’ ad section and replace it with an ‘adult services’ section. Ostensibly this new feature is for adults who don’t want to do erotic things. You know, they’ll be hooking up to do the Sunday crossword puzzle together.

Craigslist’s new policy comes in the wake of the death of a masseuse in a Boston hotel room and an assault on another woman in Rhode Island; the 23-year-old medical school student charged in the murder allegedly had responded to the victims’ ads on the site.

New ads will cost $10 and will be manually approved by Craigslist before being posted. How this will prevent a ‘masseuse’ from posting an ad and meeting a strange man in a hotel for, let’s say, an innocent back rub isn’t clear to me. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal says he’ll be watching to see the change really does eliminate prostitution and pornography, so we’ll see.

According to cnn.com, last year Craigslist added some safeguards to the erotic services section, including requiring a verified credit card number and a phone number from people participating in the world’s biggest brothel. The changes still relied on Craigslist users to police the site, however, which wasn’t enough for Cook County (Ill.) Sheriff Tom Dart, who sued Craigslist in March for facilitating prostitution. The company has argued that the changes it made last year were successful, reducing the amount of illegal services being advertised and making it easier for police to enforce vice laws. It also has argued that Craigslist users are responsible for fewer violent crimes than, say, readers of newspaper classifieds. Besides, its executives said, the federal Communications Decency Act immunized it from liability because it acted as a conduit for information posted by its users. By actively reviewing the adult ads submitted to its site, the company may be putting its immunity in jeopardy.

Help me out here. Will this change really make a difference in Craigslist’s ads? Or is something better than nothing?