United Press International – Feb. 8, 2006:
Craigslist faces a lawsuit from a fair house group in Chicago, accusing the Web site of allegedly publishing discriminatory advertisements.
The case could test the legal liabilities of online ad venues as housing watchdogs want to hold online classified sites to the same standards as publishers of print classifieds, reports the Chicago Tribune.
Craigslist’s Chief Executive Officer Jim Buckmaster says full screening of its vast classified listings, which range from babysitters seeking work to those selling tickets for baseball games, would be “physically impossible,” the report said. He says the site doesn’t pre-screen or approve new ads, which number about 8 million each month.
Does anyone but me think that perhaps the Chicago Tribune is actually behind this suit?
Meritless –> probably
it’s no big deal to run a robot that would flag the emails with (expandable) list of ‘bad’ keywords.
if craigslist would do that they would have no problem protecting themselves (so the robot would have bugs – no big deal) .
Position “it is impossible” is *very* lame.
In the business world impossible == to expensive and it is pretty lame.
To Paul:
Roommate needed. Nice 3bdrm apartment on Black Currant Road. A great neighborhood with lots of culture: Mexican Markets, and many gay and lesbian friendly business in the area.
Roommate needed. Not interested in you if youare Black, Mexican, gay or lesbian.
Blacklists are stupid and don’t work.
shouldn’t be a federal law in the first place. should be the province of the states — see 10th amendment.
Newspapers have had this sort of thing automated for years. Perish the thought some peon intern gets to do the final skim, right. You just set standards for read/filter for the ads to meet in the first place.
If your ad doesn’t get published, that’s YOUR problem.
for an update, please check my blog, cnewmark.com
thanks!
craig
It’s people looking for roomate, of course they can specify what they are looking for. Some of them maybe racist or whatever, but that’s really not up for Craiglist to judge.
Moss, your analogy fails because there is no newspaper on the planet that publishes 8 million classified ads per month.
The idea of treating a completely automated online classified site like an old-school newspaper is as lame as AOL/Yahoo/Goodmail trying to treat e-mail the same way as snail mail.
To: Adam.
1. My posting was *not* about possible efficiency of block lists. Try re-reading it?
2. Block list per se can not provide 100% quality.
Block lists + typing monkey can provide 100% quality.
3. Nevermind.
Which would be better. an add for “Room mate needed” specificaly states no black/gay/jewish room mates because he is a KKK member or just an add that says “needs one one room mate”. Why would you want to live with someone like that. The first add lets you know, screw that guy he hates me, why would i want to live with him? “Well maybe by living with him the impossibly unlikely room maters will make a change for the better” then they can sell their script to LifeTime and make a crappy TV movie.
I know i would not want to live with someone who hated me just for my background.