EBay Broadens Ban on Hate-Related Items

EBay said Thursday that it would start banning Nazi-related items, Ku Klux Klan memorabilia, and other types of hate propaganda from its auction site.

The company's announcement broadens an existing ban on many of those items. Under EBay's previous policy, hate-related items could be offered for sale on the site if the items were more than 50 years old and had historical value.

But the San Jose, California-based company says it wants to enact an outright ban, citing potential conflicts with foreign countries as it embarks on an aggressive push to establish or buy auction sites internationally.

The new policy takes effect May 17 and will also outlaw posting crime-scene photographs and letters, and artwork of notorious murders.

EBay's announcement is part of a broader break with freewheeling attitudes that generally governed sales over the Internet for many years. Throughout the late 1990s as e-commerce grew, many mainstream online sites maintained they had little responsibility for policing what people wanted to sell online. It wasn't until January, for example, that Yahoo started banning Nazi-related materials.

Before enacting this new ban, EBay began using software programs to help deter sales of items that are illegal in other countries. In Germany, for example, it is illegal to sell Nazi memorabilia, and EBay's German site will not allow sellers to post-Nazi-related material. Germans attempting to log onto EBay's U.S. site will be blocked by special software.

EBay says blocking software is in use in Germany and France. But the company is now in 13 countries and an outright ban on hate-related items could help make it easier for EBay to counter criticisms about its sales policy.

EBay says it has been in discussions for more than a year with human-rights groups as it crafted its selling policy. On Thursday, a representative of the Simon Wiesenthal Center says EBay's new policy sent an important message.

"You can't eliminate hate in the real world, so you'll never eliminate hate on the Internet either," says Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean of the Los Angeles-based Jewish rights organization. "But if we can marginalize this [hate] stuff and put it back in the sewer, that is the most we can hope for."