What really bugs me is that Craigslist is now being held accountable for this person’s post.

Sure it may not have been in the best of taste, but have you seen some of the other postings on Craigslist? There are many other posts which, while they aren’t similar to this one, are of equally poor taste in my opinion. Yet they are allowed to continue to be hosted on Craigslist.

You see, to me there are so many issues at play in this one simple post. Just consider the racism issue for a second. Who determines that it is racist? And how does one know if a post is indeed racist?

Let’s look at the apartment ratings site for a second. If I was to post there about an apartment complex that housed primarily white people and that was “ok by me,” would I then be considered a racist? If so, why would you consider me a racist? Because I said that it was ok that mostly white people lived there? Does that make me a racist or the apartment owner/manager for renting mostly to white people? Perhaps it is a community that has a small ethnic population – does that mean that the town’s fathers are racist because they are not allowing different ethnicities to reside there?

When does the racist card stop being played?

Racism aside, why should Craigslist have to censor its postings? Is there some acceptability threshold? Some common denominator that says your post is OK but mine isn’t? This then leads to the larger issue of who decides what is “common decency?”

If the community as a whole should decide what is acceptable, why is it then up to the private business (in this case Craiglist) to enforce that “common decency” protocol?

Because this is a privately run, for-profit business it should be up to them to decide how to run their business. I don’t think Google actively filters racist sites from its search results, so why aren’t they being sued because that content is also freely and easily accessible through a Google search?

In the end, I think if you are a believer in true freedom of speech with no strings attached, you must support sites like Craigslist and Apartmentratings. Because if you don’t, you never know where the government or lawyers will stop.

Before you know it our Internet could be as heavily censored as China’s. And then where will democracy live?

Page 2 of 2 :: First | Last :: Prev | 1 2 | Next