It’s Official: Craigslist Personals are Gone!

I'll admit that the Craigslist Personals we're fun to check out from time-to-time. If you've tried to scroll them lately, you'd have noticed that they've shut them down. Here's what they say now.

The ever famous "missed connections" in the St. Cloud Craigslist were always a fun game to look at for us here. It was only 1 time in the past few years that one of us knew the person being sought after, and they happened to actually work here at the radio station!

That is now a thing of the past, thanks to the new HR 1865, "FOSTA" act recently passed, and Craigslist didn't find it worth it to take any chances.

Craigslist still has their main links to the "Personals" section up, but here's what you'll find when you go to any of the pages inside:

US Congress just passed HR 1865, "FOSTA", seeking to subject websites to criminal and civil liability when third parties (users) misuse online personals unlawfully.

Any tool or service can be misused. We can't take such risk without jeopardizing all our other services, so we are regretfully taking craigslist personals offline. Hopefully we can bring them back some day.

To the millions of spouses, partners, and couples who met through craigslist, we wish you every happiness!

What is "FOSTA" and why did it suddenly start making websites like Craigslist and Backpage worried? The acronym stands for "Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act" and it was passed late last year because of the big problem of sex trafficking by use of the internet as its main hub for connecting. Basically the government has shut it down with this umbrella act that doesn't name any party (like Craigslist) directly, rather just makes those websites want nothing to do with any kind of personals where sex trafficking could be done through their online service.

So what does central Minnesota do to find love now? There's still services like Match.com, Tinder, and various others depending on the lifestyle you're interesting in. There's also the old fashioned way to consider, like just going out and meeting people in person. I know that sounds scary these days, but we could always use to refresher in learning how to be social again.