This article covers what I was talking about as to what the real downfall of BP was:
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/la-ol...110-story.html
To those who don't feel like reading it, the point is that BP would not have been touchable had LE not been able to determine that ads were edited by BP staff to hide a problem. Had they just outright rejected problem ads, they would not be held liable for the content.
This is a lesson to anyone who operates a web site. If you allow anyone to post anything and it's possible they will post about something criminal, then you should either have to have a total hands-off approach or you auto-reject and manually reject items of concern. Also if someone reports a problem post, you make sure your system automatically sends a message to the person reporting the issue something like, "Thanks for the report, we can't guarantee this will be looked at in time as we don't have enough staff to review every report sent to us." Then if you do look at the reported post, do not edit it. Just reject it if needed. As for people making posts, if you have an internal system auto-check for potential issues, just reject or approve a post through automation. Don't edit the ad and don't allow any internal communication about the ad - simply approve or reject. Make sure it's an auto-approval, because if it can be shown you allow staff to manually approve of ads with blatant illegal content then that's almost as bad as editing the content. You want to take hands-off automation as absolute as possible and when there is any question or gray area that you have to make a decision on, always reject.