Craigslist: When CSR Isn't Straightforward

Recently, I posted a piece questioning whether product safety can rightly be categorized under the CSR umbrella.  While this is in no way an inappropriate question to ask, its significance pales in comparison to some of the broader challenges the CSR field is facing in today's economy.  The article I posted the other day about BP and the Chilean miners illustrated how dire circumstances can push firms to broaden or shift the definition of corporate social responsibility, or at least give companies grounds to attempt to do so.

Today I'd like to discuss how Craigslist is doing something similar (or, again, attempting to do so), reminding us that defining what CSR should mean for a specific type of company is not always as simple as choosing from the typical CSR laundry list of environment, working conditions, governance, and product safety.  Like many internet companies, Craigslist has a fairly minimal footprint when it comes to these categories.  It does not consume an extraordinary amount of energy, give off much in the way of pollution, have workers or supply chains filled with workers laboring under dangerous conditions, or even have the same complexity in governance that large publicly traded firms face.

Nevertheless, current clashes with the government have demonstrated that Craigslist must resolve complicated questions about what it means to manage its websites in a socially responsible manner.  The question at hand is whether it is wrong for Craigslist to allow "adult services" postings.  The argument made by government is that these postings serve as a platform for facilitating dangerous activities like prostitution and trafficking, while the argument for company's traditional position is that censorship is wrong and that shutting down the adult services section of the website violates not only Craigslist's freedoms, but also the freedoms of its customers.

Now, you may object to my summary of the situation on the grounds that Craigslist's position is less about liberties than about making money.   The New York Times explained that Craigslist charges for adult services content and that its censorship argument is a front designed to protect one of the company's most valuable revenue streams.  If this is your criticism of the argument, I'd encourage you to read arguments by scholars like HBS's Michael Porter and Yale's Dan Esty, who function as proponents of the companies-can-do-well-by-doing-good line of thought.  Their advocacy for the triple bottom line principle takes as a given that good CSR involves measures that are financially advantageous for the firm.  If you accept this philosophy, you necessarily allow for firms like Craigslist to make money while doing what they claim is right.

The more interesting question, though, is whether we will allow conflicting positions about what constitutes CSR.  The government's position in the Craigslist debate is that this is a product safety issue, which, as we discussed before, is not always defined as CSR.  Can we allow companies to treat product safety as a CSR issue while also allowing an issue like censorship to on occasion creep into the CSR canon of issues?