Does Craigslist discriminate?

By Wendy Cole

Need a job, a date, a shady guy with a truck to cart away your home-renovation debris? The website craigslist.org helps folks in 190 U.S. and foreign cities find almost anything. It's also a cornucopia of classified ads that would never make it into your local paper. Here are a few listings that have appeared in the housing section on Craigslist's Chicago-area site: "Ladies Please Rent from Me," "Requirements: Clean Godly Christian Male" and "African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won't work out."

Offensive as these ads are, should Craigslist be liable for them? A civil rights group thinks so. The Chicago Lawyers' Committee recently sued Craigslist for running ads that allegedly violate the Fair Housing Act, a federal law that bans housing discrimination. "The laws against discrimination don't change because you add technology," says Stephen Libowsky, an attorney for the group. At issue is whether Craigslist is a publisher, subject to the Fair Housing Act, or a content distributor, which may not be liable for discriminatory ads, according to the Communications Decency Act. Housing-advocacy groups say the definition is crucial, because they think websites should abide by the same standards that newspapers are held to, especially since so much classified advertising is moving online.

Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster says his company hasn't broken any laws. He points out that users flag unlawful ads, which are quickly removed, and that the site warns advertisers not to violate housing laws. "Once you say that Internet sites are responsible for postings, companies will have no choice but to take down highly valued venues," he wrote in an e-mail to TIME. And then how could we find shady garbage-removal guys?