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Free Speech, Rights Regulated By Individual Web Sites

Posted on: Monday, 7 July 2008, 13:50 CDT

Issues require a delicate balancing act

Companies that run seemingly public online spaces are taking on governmental roles by regulating content added by their users.

As everything from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video become more central to public discourse around the world, the Internet could become a new arena for government regulation.

Yahoo Inc.’s photo-sharing service, Flickr, was responsible for deleting a photograph posted by Dutch photographer Maarten Dors. The image, which depicted an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth, was removed without prior notice on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking.

After Dors convinced a Yahoo manager that the photo was meant to depict the level of poverty in Romania, the image was deleted by another employee a few months later.

"I never thought of it as a photo of a smoking kid," Dors said. "It was just of a kid in Romania and how his life is. You can never make a serious documentary if you always have to think about what Flickr will delete."

But the law is clearly on Yahoo’s side. It’s terms of service give Yahoo “sole discretion to pre-screen, refuse or remove any content." While service providers aren’t required to filter user-submitted content, they aren’t prohibited from doing so either.

There may be legitimate reasons to take action, such as to stop spam, security threats, copyright infringement and child pornography, many cases aren't clear-cut.

"We often get caught in the middle between a rock and a hard place," said Christine Jones, general counsel with service provider GoDaddy.com Inc. "We're obviously sensitive to the freedoms we have, particularly in this country, to speak our mind, (yet) we want to be good corporate citizens and make the Internet a better and safer place."

Guidelines help "engender a positive community experience," one to which users will want to return, said Anne Toth, Yahoo's vice president for policy.

Dors ultimately got his photo restored a second time, and Yahoo has apologized, acknowledging its community managers went too far.

"We're humans," said Heather Champ, community director of Flickr. "We're pretty transparent when we make mistakes. We have a record of being good about stepping up and fessing up."

But this highlights another issue with public online forums: rules aren’t always clear, enforcement is inconsistent, and users can find content removed or accounts terminated without a hearing. Appeals are solely at the service provider's discretion.

For example: Verizon Wireless barred an abortion-rights group from obtaining a "short code" for conducting text-messaging campaigns, while LiveJournal suspended legitimate blogs on fiction and crime victims in a crackdown on pedophilia. Two lines criticizing President Bush disappeared from AT&T Inc.’s webcast of a Pearl Jam concert. All three decisions were reversed only after senior executives intervened amid complaints.

"As we move more of our communications into social networks, how are we limiting ourselves if we can't see alternative points of view, if we can't see the things that offend us?" asked Fred Stutzman, a University of North Carolina researcher who tracks online communities.

With online services becoming greater conduits than shopping malls for public communications, some advocacy groups believe the federal government needs to guarantee open access to speech.

However, this would allow the government to be able to regulate the Internet with certain restrictions much like those seen in the television and radio broadcasts.

Others believe companies shouldn't police content at all, and if they do, they should at least make clearer the rules and the mechanisms for appeal.

"Vagueness does not inspire the confidence of people and leaves room for gaming the system by outside groups," said Lauren Weinstein, a veteran computer scientist and Internet activist.

"When the rules are clear and the grievance procedures are clear, then people know what they are working with and they at least have a starting point in urging changes in those rules."

Marjorie Heins, director of the Free Expression Policy Project, said written rules mean little when service representatives applying them "tend to be tone-deaf. They don't see context."

At least when a court order or other governmental action is involved, "there's more of a guarantee of due process protections," said Robin Gross, executive director of the civil-liberties group IP Justice.

Many leading services, particularly online hangouts like Facebook and News Corp.'s MySpace or media-sharing sites such as Flickr and Google Inc.'s YouTube, have acquired a cachet that cannot be replicated. To evict a user from an online community would be like banishing that person to the outskirts of town.

Other sites "don't have the critical mass. No one would see it," said Scott Kerr, a member of the gay punk band Kids on TV, which found its profile mysteriously deleted from MySpace last year. "People know that MySpace is the biggest site that contains music."

MySpace denies engaging in any censorship and says profiles removed are generally in response to complaints of spam and other abuses.

YouTube has policies against showing people "getting hurt, attacked or humiliated," banning even clips OK for TV news shows.

"Balancing these interests raises very tough issues," YouTube acknowledged in a statement.

Source: redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports

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