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FYI: Internet censors (fwd)
From: Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>
Date: Tue, 25 May 1993 07:09:33 -0500
------ Forwarded Message From: "Edward P. Richards III" <0002766610 () MCIMAIL COM> Subject: Internet censors X-To: The Law and Policy of Computer Networks <CYBERLAW%WMVM1.BITNET () vtvm2 cc vt edu> To: Multiple recipients of list CYBERLAW <CYBERLAW@WMVM1.BITNET> From: Ed Richards Interesting piece in the Wall Street Journal this morning (Monday) about Internet censors. Seems PC is already on the net. (This is not download, it is only a pitiful scan from my handscanner, so please forgive me for any errors.) ________________________ Copyright Dow Jones, used only for academic criticism. Has political correctness gone on-line in academia? Battles are raging over freedom of speech in university-oriented computer bulletin boards, one of the few places in academia that hasn't been racked for years by this kind of strife. A mild-mannered microbiologist from Rootstown, Ohio, has stirred up a. storm among on-line computer users by devising a computer program that automatically wipes out anonymous messages on Inter- net, the nation's largest on-line network, which is widely used by scholars. He was offended by an anonymous user who posted a joke about the last words of the Challenger space shuttle crew in a scien- tific discussion group. In other cases, Canadian colleges have blocked electronic discussions of sex. A California community college recently suspended a journalism professor for run- ning a computer bulletin board on which male students wrote messages that alleg- edly harassed a female. Many on-line veterans complain that such actions threaten freedom of expres- sion. "This shows how the censors are all among us," says Larry Detweiler, a re- cent graduate of Colorado State Univer- sity, who studies free speech and "hangs around the Internet," which is often seen as a prototype for the information high- way that the Clinton campaign described in last year's presidential election. Such issues are likely to increase as the highway connects more and more computers - especially if the federal gov- ernment funds it. In fact, Congress has or- dered a study of whether electronic bulle- tin boards, on-line services and public-ac- cess cable television are being used to encourage "crimes of hate." For some time now, commercial on- line services such as Prodigy have used computer programs that automatically delete messages that contain certain words. Group moderators who often guide discussions on services such as H&R Block Inc.'s CompuServe also have the power to remove hateful or irrelevant messages as soon as they see them. But many volunteer-run bulletin boards decline to control what people write. Legally, they aren't required to play the censor: Board operators aren't responsible for things other people write in the wake of a court ruling that Compu- Serve wasn't liable for what people wrote any more than a bookseller is responsl- ble for the contents of books it sells. These cozy volunteer communities, the electronic equivalent of Boswell and John- son's 18th century London coffeehouses, police themselves informally. People who are offensive or irrelevant are shouted down by "flame mail," a barrage of mes- sages by angry users that sometimes can even overwhelm an offender's computer. Other times, the indignant wage "cancel wars" in which they send commands to cancel the foe's message from the bulletin board. On Internet, people order their computers not to accept any messages from particular senders. But a few years ago, users developed "anonymous servers" - computers con- nected to the network that stripped away the original sender's name before sending it on Internet. The capability was designed to encourage open discussions among vic- tims of child abuse or AIDS and originally was used only in such groups. However, a computer in Helsinki, Finland, was de- signed to send anonymous messages wher- ever the sender wanted. Some of these messages on the "sci." section of Internet's Usenet subsystem ticked off Richard DePew, the professor of microbiology! and immunology at North- eastern Ohio Universities College of Medi- cine. "The anonymous servers were break- ing down some of the barriers and tradi- tions that keep the Internet useful," says Dr. DePew, whose battle was reported in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a trade weekly. After numerous on-line discussions of the anonymous-server problem, Dr. De- Pew wrote a program he called ARMM for "automated retroactive minimal modera- tor." Although the program ran on the computer he operates in Rootstown as a local node of the Internet, it canceled messages from the Helsinki computer to any sci. discussion group. As soon as he activated it in April, Dr. DePew was flamed by other users, illus- trating the passion with which people defend computer speech. He was called a "maddog [sic] on the loose who needs to be sedated." He was called a "rhino- cerous [sic]." He was compared to "a child-molestor [sic] who goes out and reoffends immediately upon release." He was called an "ignorant petty tyrant." Within 12 hours, he shamefacedly recalled the program, admitting he made a mis- take. He says he will never do it again. In another controversy, bitter debates raged at many Canadian universities last year over three Internet discussions: "sex: bestiality," "sex: torture" and "sex: bondage." Some weeks, those dis- cussions were dominated by legal scholars, but other weeks, they included brutal stories and pictures of screaming women. Several colleges, including Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, cut those discussions off their computers. In the U.S., California's Santa Rosa Junior College recently suspended tenured journalism teacher Roger Karraker while it tries to determine whether he's respon- sible for student messages on a school bulletin board that he operated. The board has some 200 discussion groups that are used by faculty and students. Earlier this year, at student request, Mr. Karraker started men-only and women-only conferences in which users had to promise not to reveal the contents. When one woman learned about allegedly obscene messages that an ex-boyfriend had written about her on the all-male board, she complained to Mr. Karraker. He immediately shut down the conference and banned the students who had broken the confidentiality pact. She then complained to the college of sexual harassment based on the messages, and Mr. Karraker was put on paid leave. James Mitchell, the college's personnel director, said the leave was "for his own protection" and isn't a punishment. He says that under California harassment laws, "we had a situation that appeared to be serious." Mr. Mitchell says that if the item had been in a student newspaper, it probably would have been protected under the First Amendment. But outside of student news- papers, speech can be challenged as ha- rassment, he says. Even if it was written on a bathroom wall and a janitor didn't wash it off, "we'd warn him" of the risk of harassment charges. Mr. Karraker says that as a bulletin board operator, he's protected just as booksellers are. "This isn't publishing in the sense that there's an editor who knows everything that goes in," he says. end of document Internet censors ------ End of Forwarded Message
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