Craigslist Sued by Chicago Housing Group Over Discriminatory Postings

Posted on | February 11, 2006

Slashdot is reporting that a fair-housing group based in Chicago has filed a federal lawsuit against San Francisco based Craigslist for violating the fair housing laws. The group is distressed over posts on the popular site for housing that included statements in housing listings that include things like "No minorities" and "Muslims only". The group says there are over 100 ads that violate these laws. A sitter group in Louisiana filed similar complaints against Katrinahousing.org for 68 ads with similar, discriminatory

The group demands that Craigslist and others be treated no differently than newspapers and such. However they are ignorant to the fact that the laws are easy to apply to newspapers and other printed classified ads because of the fact that the ads are assembled and printed at the source so a sales person can reject and ad before it ever sees print. However Craigslist is a user-driven publishing model so the ad sales person is cut out and the content goes directly into publication so therefore the censorship has to occur after publication. And since these are user-made postings, Craigslist is not in violation of the laws because they are not generating the content. It could be argued that they run afoul of the laws if they are made aware of the discriminatory postings and do nothing about them, however there is no evidence to indicate that they are ignoring them given that the post with "No Minorities" was removed within two hours and that Craigslist does have items on their pages that allow users to report problem posts that even triggers automatic removal if there are enough complaints. Craigslist also provides a link to information on the Fair Housing Act which informs posters, prior to posting, what is acceptable. Screening would be next to impossible given that it would take a staff of thousands working 24/7 and would require fluency in all the languages the site accepts. Additionally this housing group wants Craiglist to be forced to turn over information on these posters to the government. What kind of bullshit is that?

This lawsuit should be tossed out for the fact Craigslist is doing what it can do to get rid of the content and not fuck up their business. Additionally, Congress granted protections to information providers like Craigslist since they have no control over the content of the postings until after they have been made. Filtration would be next to impossible because they would have to cover every single phrase that people could use and every variant of that. A filter against posts discriminatory against black people would need triggers such as "No blacks", "No african-americans", "No African-Americans", "No Afro Americans", "No Afro-Americans", "No blaks", "No blks" and the list could go on. They could also be written out longer like "I will not accept black renters" and such. The filter would have to be so large and so specific that it would probably take more resources to create and maintain than just simply doing what Craigslist is doing by patrolling the posts and giving users the ability to help by reporting problem posts. If this group wants to clean Craigslist up, then its money and time would best be served helping Craigslist police listings by browsing them and flagging ones that are a problem rather than suing.

One thing the article I did not get from the article is what kind of rentals were being offered. Were they apartments or houses where the entire unit was up for rent, or were they rooms in houses or apartments? In my opinion, a listing for an apartment or house up for rent is a completely different ball game from it being listings for a roommate. In the apartment/house scenario it is pretty cut and dried that anyone willing and able to pay the rent and abide by the rules set forth by the property manager/owner should be able to go in there with few exceptions like criminal history and such. However if these are ads for roommates then the listings should stand as they are because an individual should have control over the people with whom they live since these people have to get along and such in order to live together. Say you were black, non-Christian, or gay and you are looking for a place to live. Would you rather see an ad explicitly telling you not to bother even looking at the place or would you rather waste time, effort, and money investigating it or even worse move in to find the people you live with are racist, will be proselytizing to you daily, or are homophobes who preach how evil you are or try to "convert" you to heterosexuality? People are going to be bigoted assholes and the discriminatory postings just let them announce it to anyone who happens to read it.

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