Quoted from herbertbsharp:The want to buy ads get flagged by CL because there are so many of them from so many users that they look like spam. A large portion of craigslist flagging is automated by Craigslist itself. All the want to buy ads are so similar they can get flagged off the bat. You can tell because they can get removed before they are even searchable on CL. It also takes multiple flags from multiple users to influence CL. So it isn't one or two greedy flippers flagging all the ads. Try flagging an ad and see if it gets removed, it most likely won't work.
You can refresh and flag multiple times. The threshold is set by a percentage of flags/views. So when an ad is brand new, 3 or 4 flags is enough to knock it out. This is super common in the real estate industry and car industry. Competitors spend time knocking the ads of their competition off. Some folks run bots to do it automatically.
