Over the weekend I stumbled on a blog post entitled Sex Baiting Prank on Craigslist Affects Hundreds which contains the following excerpt
On Monday, a Seattle web developer named Jason Fortuny started his own Craigslist experiment. The goal: "Posing as a submissive woman looking for an aggressive dom, how many responses can we get in 24 hours?" He took the text and photo from a sexually explicit ad (warning: not safe for work) in another area, reposted it to Craigslist Seattle, and waited for the responses to roll in. Like Simon's experiment, the response was immediate. He wrote, "178 responses, with 145 photos of men in various states of undress. Responses include full e-mail addresses (both personal and business addresses), names, and in some cases IM screen names and telephone numbers." In a staggering move, he then published every single response, unedited and uncensored, with all photos and personal information to Encyclopedia Dramatica (kinda like Wikipedia for web fads and Internet drama). Read the responses (warning: sexually explicit material). Instantly, commenters on the LiveJournal thread started identifying the men. Dissenters emailed the guys to let them know they were scammed. Several of them were married, which has led to what will likely be the first of many separations. One couple in an open marriage begged that their information be removed, as their religious family and friends weren't aware of their lifestyle. Another spotted a fellow Microsoft employee, based on their e-mail address. And it's really just the beginning, since the major search engines haven't indexed these pages yet. After that, who knows? Divorces, firings, lawsuits, and the assorted hell that come from having your personal sex life listed as the first search result for your name.
The question I've been asking myself from the first moment I saw this story is "What is CraigsList's response going to be?". The blog post indicates that there is a growing trend of people posting requests for romantic liasons on CraigsList only to turn around and embarass all the people who responded by posting their responses on the Web. If this trend continues, it will likely lead to a chilling effect towards using CraigsList as a dating service. The folks at CraigsList must realize this yet I haven't found any official response from them on this issue available online.
This highlights one of the key problems with social software. When you build software that enables people to interact with strangers, you run the risk of people interacting with strangers who aren't so nice. The practice of griefing in multiplayer games is an example of when human interaction in social software goes awry. Other examples include fraud in eBay transactions, stalkers on social networking sites, con artists on dating sites and spammers in all their various forms. All of these problems make people less likely to use certain online services and may be the death knell of certain websites if they don't figure out how to handle malicious users of the service.
Different services resort to different mechanisms to prevent griefers, however most of them are preventive. There is little that is or can be done once the malicious act has been committed by the 'griefer'. Given that I work with the teams that produce services that can be harmed by griefers as part of my day job (e.g. Windows Live Spaces and Windows Live Expo) this worries me. What can sites like CraigsList do to prevent people like Jason Fortuny from turning people away from their service because they fear having a negative experience? My gut feel is that Craig Newmark would go a long way in reassuring users of the service if they stepped in and took [legal] action against "griefers". Users feel a lot safer about using the service if they know that someone is looking out for their well-being if something bad happens. Consider it the social software equivalent of a "money back guarantee".
What do you think?