According to a recent 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals opinion authored by Judge Posner, the answer is “no.” In a Forbes article, Nick Sibilla of the Institute of Justice wrote about the case—Backpage.com, LLC v. Dart—and court’s opinion:
Late last month, the 7th Circuit ruled against Thomas Dart, sheriff of Cook County, Illinois, who had been waging an intimidation campaign against Backpage.com, a popular classified ad site. Among advertisements for appliances, job listings, rentals and the like, Backpage offers ads for a wide variety of “adult services.”
In order to deprive Backpage of ad revenue, Dart targeted the payments-service providers for the site. Neatly capturing the essence of this tactic, Judge Richard Posner compared Sheriff Dart’s campaign to “killing a person by cutting off his oxygen supply rather than by shooting him.”
The full article is available here.
And the court’s opinion is available here.