Craigslist: Stop Allowing Abuse and Misuse of the Flagging System and Slanderous Postings!

This petition requests the following:

1) A call on Craigslist to revamp the current flagging system and have a staff of people to ensure that flagging is not abused.

2) Request that ads be screened for slanderous and faulty information or imposters.

According to Wikipedia, In December 2006, at the UBS Global Media Conference in New York, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster told Wall Street analysts that Craigslist has little interest in maximizing profit.

Analysts and commentators have reported varying figures for its annual revenue, ranging from $10 million in 2004, $20 million in 2005, and $25 million in 2006 to possibly $150 million in 2007. With that said, Craigslist has the funding to be able to hire a staff to either be in charge of flagging inappropriate ads or at the very least to monitor the flags that are currently processed to ensure that they are legitimate flags.

Local and small business owners and other individual sellers are being bullied by competitors who create and buy computer programs such as Craigslist Auto Flagger which use proxies and fake ip addresses to illegitimately remove posts.

I am a mother of four young children with a home-based business and I have been bullied by a local competitor who has gone so far as to post negative information about my company on Craigslist. This person has driven by my home and has even gone so far as to post the type of car I drive. This person has posted about other local companies in the same business and has also posted fake ads pretending to be other business offering the same services at locations far away and at a highly discounted rate. I have stacks of phoney postings from this person and have emailed and called CL on numerous occasions with no response. Eventually the postings are flagged and removed but they just get posted up again.

We, as companies and individuals, should not have to put up with slander on your site until someone else flags or remove it. It should not make it up in the first place. Furthermore, our legitimate postings should not be removed by our compeitors. This is something that I am sure happens not only at a local level but nationwide.

Join me in calling Craigslist to take action on flagger abuse and slanderous postings and stop it so that it does not continue any further.