The Short-Sighted Campaign against Craigslist

One option is to regulate it. You could make it illegal to pick up someone on the street and regulate it so that most if not all meetups would occur either online or by someone calling a number they found in a phone book. I would think that it could be set up so that finding a prostitute goes similarly to finding a contractor, or anyone else in the home service industry. Other than hiring someone from the parking lot of Home Depot you don't generally see contractors soliciting. Additionally advertising could be regulated so that you don't see it happening unless you look for it. That won't appease the religious extremists but it will help prevent parents from having to deal with kids asking "Mommy, what's an escort?"

Was the additional sentence "Learn the facts" really necessary?

from Webster

"witch hunt" 1 : a searching out for persecution of persons accused of witchcraft 2 : the searching out and deliberate harassment of those (as political opponents) with unpopular views

Obviously this case has nothing to do with witches. In general, it is about using people's strong fear of something (is this something real or unreal - it doesn't matter, the fear itself is what only matters), like witchcraft or the threat of Finnish and Mexican immigrants taking away kernel hacking jobs, to energize and direct the crowd against one's enemies and advance the one's leadership position over the crowd.

You are assuming that it is a term that can be understood strictly from first principles. With an idiom, such an assumption is silly, as idioms come to their meaning based on a series of historical events, accidental mis-uses, literary uses (and therefore references) and certain assumed shared views.

So to understand why witch hunt actually makes sense as a term, you must first look at the real witch hunts that happened. These happened at a time and place where witchcraft was "known" to be real. Of course there weren't witches, but everyone then thought there were, so effectively hunting for witches was a valid thing to do.

At the time, they also didn't know lots of other things, so if a person falls sick, or a cow dies, or a house burns down, scientific evidence based explanations were not so easy to come by. However witches were "known" to curse people, and a curse causes misfortune.

So what would happen is a random person would decide to pay back a grudge, or look good to his fellow citizens or whatever, and accuse some 3rd party of witchcraft, for something like giving the evil eye, or dancing, or whatever. This would lead to a burning, and everyone would be happy again. Most of the time anyway. Sometimes, a series of unfortunate events would be construed as a major witch, or a whole coven of witches. Then everyone would go crazy, true beleivers would be terrified, ambitious social climbers would be accusing all their enemies of witchcraft, and so on. There would be attempts by authorities to get to the bottom of it, and many witches would be found. Mass burnings ensued, and eventually everyone would calm down and be happy again.

So, looking back, this whole course of events is ridiculous, the root assumption of witchcraft is just plain silly. The mass panic/hysteria over it downright dangerous, and those taking advantage of the situation were repugnant.

So, now, looking at the above situations, and refactoring a bit, so we can get a more generic algorithm, we see these key components:

1. A label that classifies someone as bad

2. A deep underlying fear of what the bad label stands for, but the fear must be non-specific.

3. A set of actions and vaguely sort-of correlated events (if you squint just right), that looks like: "bad things from #2 are happening to us!".

4. A set of people willing to manipulate the many for their own gain.

If those conditions are met, you have a prime candidate for a "witch hunt" (keeping the name because it describes the original stuff well, and everyone knows what happened in those cases). Just start sending authorities after anyone labeled as the bad thing.

There are of course some variations, and deeper nuances, but that is the gist of it.

You're right, I should have mentioned Nevada as an exception to the legality.

The "sex surrogate" stuff is pseudo-scientific nonsense, and has no relation to what was being offered on craigslist anyway.