alt.aol-sucks FAQ Part 1/3 - Censorship
David Cassel
Posting-Frequency: monthly
*** FAQ (Part I - Censorship ) ***
How can I leave AOL?
Delphi has full internet access. Netcom has a new graphical user
interface, and commercial GUI's also work on any UNIX account.
For a list of internet access provider's sorted by area code, send an
e-mail message with the subject "send pdial" to kami...@netcom.com, or
to archive...@cs.widener.edu with the subject "send nixpub long".
There's also a Usenet group called alt.internet.access.wanted to help
you leave AOL.
Did AOL really change the names of the newsgroups?
Yes. alt.aol-sucks appears on AOL as "Flames and complaints about AOL."
Well, this is because AOL didn't like the word "sucks", right?
Nope. This is because they didn't like the content of the name. AOL
didn't touch the names of five other newsgroups with "sucks" in their
name. A newsgroup with the name alt.aol.rejects also had the AOL in
its name concealed--it was changed to "Why We Don't Play by the Rules"
for a while. Ironically, that newsgroup was created to try to
circumvent AOL interference.
Are you saying that AOL censors?
Yes. Messages are frequently pulled from AOL public posting areas.
Your service can be revoked if you say certain words in public chat
rooms. Anyone seeing you use such a word can page an AOL Guide, who
will appear in the room to monitor it's content within 5 minutes.
(This has been used by ultra-conservatives that taunt gay users into
using profanity, then summon a guide to get their access revoked.)
AOL's terms of service also specifically prohibit certain topics
which cannot be discussed; for instance, it's forbidden to advocate the
use of drugs. Restrictions on "discussing with the intention to
commit illegal activities" are applied to chat rooms about "Hackers".
Okay, but people don't just go in and arbitrarily shut down things on a
whim.
The New York Times ran a story about AOL shutting down any public chat
room with "Riot Grrl" in its name. (Riot Grrls are young punk feminists.)
They didn't like the content.
At the time, the reason given was "riot" implied violence. But compare
that to the story of the Michigan man charged with electronic stalking:
after calling a woman and leaving a message on her answering machine
saying "I stalked you for the first time today", she called the
police, who told him not to contact the woman again. *That night* he
sent e-mail to her AOL account using his AOL account, and when she
reminded him that the police had asked him *not* to contact her, he
sent her threatening e-mail...
Criminal charges were filed. But AOL never touched his account. He sent
me e-mail from AOL the day his story appeared in the New York Times.
You can still download his GIF from the AOL gallery, or read his AOL
profile--including his quote, "Sometimes you just gotta go for it".
Come on, that's just your opinion. If AOL is censoring, how come the New
York Times hasn't run a front-page story about it?
They have.
Peter H. Lewis
New York Times Wednesday, June 29, 1994
Censors Become a Force on Cyberspace Frontier
Freedom of expression has always been the rule in the
fast-growing global web of public and private computer
networks known as cyberspace. But even as thousands of
Americans each week join the several million who use computer
networks to share ideas and "chat" with others, the companies
that control the networks, and sometimes individual users, are
beginning to play the role of censor.
Earlier this month, the America Online network shut
several feminist discussion forums....
[copyright New York Times]
The American Library Association felt so strongly about the issue,
they reprinted the article in their newsletter, "Intellectual Freedom".
Andrew Kantor reported in Internet World that AOL even edits the
results of their Gopher searches.
Why don't the AOL user's complain?
A Usenet posting listed the headings of dozens of complaints AOL-ers
posted in the complaint area devoted just to complaints about AOL's
internet access. Among the headings were "Suggestion box broken."
Also included were:
>Newsgroup suggestion box
>Does the suggestion box ever work?
>Please respond to this!
>Is anybody listening?
>I wonder if anyone reads these?
AOL's philosophy borders on net-abuse. They went online with a Usenet
software containing a bug that re-posted every message seven times, and
even without that, the worldwide cost of transmitting AOL messages just to
the alt.binaries.pictures.* groups over one year has been calculated to be
700 million dollars. { 1790.69 kilobytes per two weeks x 26 x .264 ("cost
per byte for each site") x 58402 (number of sites) = $717,836,278.34 }
Allowing their one million users access to FTP sites without consideration
of the load was similar; straining resources shared for other work often
forces sites to close. Several sites have blocked AOL access because of
this. And because of net-citizenship issues: AOL users can *take* files
from FTP sites, but they can't leave any, and while AOL charges for access
to resouces made available to them freely, they prohibit access to any of
their own.
This gets into an ideological war. Technology now allows people to freely
exchange information at an amazing rate. AOL attaches a meter to that
process. In addition, aggressively pursuing new users, AOL exploits the
lack of awareness of existing technological capabilities, and establishes
a model that follows the traditional role of pre-packaged entertainment
designed for a mass audience. New users are taught to expect commercial
content, pay-as-you-go access, and regulatory oversight determining what's
appropriate. Last October there were rumors that AOL even wanted to
acquire their own backbone to exploit changes in internet backbone
status. This has come to pass. The internet community is left to hope
that as the internet and information technology evolve, the greater good
will prevail.
[End Part I]