Jim Sanders censored no more

[Andrew Burt]

I feel like I'm about to step from the frying pan into the fire...

Well, here's the verdict -- Jim Sanders will be allowed back on the air again.
BUT READ THIS ALL BEFORE YOU FLAME... this is a very difficult matter,
not a black and white issue; I'll try to convince you this is the "right"
choice; or at least the lesser of two enormous evils.

People are on both sides of the fence about this, of course, but please
read through this all before flaming... (and if you can avoid flaming, please
do!) We're trying to get this resolved in the way fairest to all concerned,
"society as a whole" included.

CLEARLY we can't please everyone; and there have been plenty of flames so
far. So let's let this lengthy posting be the final one on the matter.

I'll try to go through the history a bit, inject some personal opinions, and
tell you DU's opinion, while I explain how decisions were made.

Pertinent Background:

Nyx is a public access system run by DU, specifically the Math/CS dept.,
wherein I (Andrew Burt) am a professor and system admin for our various
departmental machines. Nyx is NOT an official project of the department
or DU; it's all volunteer run and donation funded. I run Nyx on my own time;
DU owns the hardware. DU does not "support" Nyx in any way other than
pay the electricity and allow the use of old hardware that would otherwise
be shut off. I started Nyx as a personal project, to give Unix/net access
to the public; consider it a hobby of mine. DU tolerates it.

Nyx is completely open to the public; it is completely free to users --
no charges. Anyone can sign up for an account. We have a full newsfeed,
and allow posting to anyone. All users are asked to read the netiquette
documents, which are made easily accessible (the whole thing is menu oriented).
I believe Nyx provides a valuable community service, by making netnews
accessible to many who would otherwise never know of it.

Jim Sanders is one of the 3000+ people who've tried it. He has NOTHING
to do with DU -- not a student, employee, anything. (And, as it goes, he's
the only user we've had any kind of "problem" with.)

We have a disclaimer as users log in that reads:

Disclaimer: The University of Denver disclaims everything it can
relating to Nyx. DU doesn't support Nyx in any way. There. We said it.

DU's policy for its students, staff, etc., forbids doing anything
"inconsiderate" with a usercode.

Also, DU is a private school, with a nominal Methodist affiliation. (Though
I haven't a clue how many Methodists are in high places. I doubt it's much
more than a nominal affiliation. I'm not Methodist at any rate, nor are
the few people whose affiliations I am aware of.)

And bear in mind that DU shut down the school paper for several months
last year because it ran blatantly offensive, sexually biased "advertisements".
Well, not ads, but the back page was sort of a free-for-all; folks paid
to say whatever they wanted, and it wasn't censored. Some of the remarks
were patently offensive, and the staff didn't seem to care. They were also
in the red financially. So they just shut it down, fired all the workers;
it has just recently resumed publishing (mid-March).

What Jim Sanders did:

Jim Sanders began posting pretty inflammatory material, heavily criticizing
lawyers, oilmen, etc. Later, the criticisms were leveled at one particular
ethnic/religious group, namely Jewish people. His postings were of personal
opinion mixed with quotes from various published sources. They often included
considerable profanity (even after being asked to stop).

Further postings in his name appeared apologizing for the original notes.
He alleged he did not send them; or sent the wrong file; even though postings
weeks earlier promised these files would be posted. He later alleged that
his account had been violated (I found no local evidence of this, but forging
e-mail and postings is simple enough without that). At any rate, he began
posting from the account of Evan Ravitz, apparently a business associate
of his. Since eravitz's account predates jsanders, I presume eravitz
gave jsanders his password to use. (I don't see this as an issue, however --
since jsanders could have signed up under any name at all just like a new
user would. I remove obvious phony accounts like 'mmouse', but a qsmith
or whatever wouldn't get removed.) Additionally, he posted the same
files on a regular basis, a basic breach of netiquette.

What other people did:

With his anti-semitic postings, tempers flared wildly. Many people,
including people from inside DU, voiced their outrage at his postings
(lots of adjectives were used... "filth", "trash", "anti-semitic
drivel", and on and on). The outrage was both directed at his opinions
and at the fact that DU/Nyx's-system-admin (me) would allow such postings.

Everyone stated their displeasure with his postings. Most asked that Jim
Sanders not only be told that his behavior was not appropriate for the
net but also that he be stopped, or asked to stop. I read the net articles
in response to his, and saw articles saying he shouldn't be allowed to say what
he said, but none (over the couple days that I watched anyway) saying
"no, that's censorship, don't do it". The general consensus on the net
seemed to be that his postings were absolutely ludicrous and a waste of
net bandwidth, not to mention that he was "breaking" many net "rules" of
conduct.

Some netlanders even contacted DU administrative officials to complain about
the situation. This is when the real problems started. DU brass are not
computer people. They don't understand bulletin boards, let alone the
Usenet anarchy; they're not sure DU even should be involved with a "BBS"
type system.

What DU did:

Legally, DU has the right to decide what postings are allowed or not
allowed from DU property, which Nyx's hardware is. The initial reaction
was to apply the same regulations to Nyx-originated postings that apply
to all other systems -- again, not to allow postings that are construed
as inconsiderate, into which category racist and profane postings clearly are.
Indeed, some DU brass had a MAJOR fit about this -- and talked of
shutting Nyx down (remember, DU has reservations about running Nyx in
the first place; racist postings "from" DU don't help, and this is how it
was presented to them by some net folks, or is at least how they understood it;
they were told "DU students are sending obscene messages"). It would
certainly silence Jim Sanders to kill Nyx; but it would also be a loss
to the community.

Remember, this sounds a lot like the newspaper issue. People being offensive,
nobody doing anything about it, etc. From a school with a religious
affiliation to "answer to", "uphold", phrase it how you will.

So the basic idea was: if I don't shut Jim Sanders down, Nyx is shut down.
To prevent Nyx from being shut down, and feeling that (a) he had broken
net rules, and (b) he had gotten his message out (over and over in fact) -- so
I wasn't really preventing him from airing his views (I mean, he had done
so for a while and was only being redundant) -- I chose the lesser evil.
I asked Jim Sanders not to post, and enforced this restriction at the software
level. Since he could easily get back on under another name, I
monitored outgoing postings to verify he didn't post (he didn't). I
didn't intend to censor anything else; and nothing was censored at
all. Jim Sanders did not attempt to post once asked not to.

[begin personal opinion:] I *personally* am totally against
censorship. I thought it was pretty ironic to get called a nazi
fascist pig censor! I told Jim Sanders many times that I disagreed
with his opinions vehemently, but I believed in and would defend his
right to express them. I did not WANT to censor him, but I didn't want
Nyx shut down either. It skates on thin ice as it is. And he'd made his
point thoroughly anyway; so while an evil, it looked better to keep
Nyx -- I mean, Jim Sanders loses the ability to post from Nyx either way.

I firmly believe in freedom of speech; after further discussion here,
and with the help of overwhelming net protests against censorship,
I have gotten DU to agree that freedom of speech is more important than
silencing offensive speech.

DU as a whole in no way supports the views of ANY Nyx users, Jim
Sanders included. (Indeed, I have added a "Disclaimer:" header to
all Nyx postings stating exactly this point. Too many people seemed to
assume that DU supported jsander's views simply because it came from a
DU system. Silly, but true.)

Rationale for final decision:

I could offer the "easy" way out, and point out that Jim Sanders could
have been cut off for knowingly breaking net rules. But that too would
be censorship, in the same vein as convicting Al Capone on tax evasion
was convicting him for his other crimes. Further, it *is* DU's
system. DU is a private school, and can decide what constitutes
inappropriate use of its hardware. DU has the right to censor
postings. Again, this is an easy way out. If Nyx is truly a public
system, all the views of the public should be allowed, no matter how
offensive to groups or incredibly ridiculous readers may find them. If
the posting was clearly illegal, that's different (e.g., posting credit
card numbers). Nyx will, however, adopt the stance that it is simply a
carrier, and not responsible for the postings of its users; like the
phone company isn't responsible for, e.g., drug deals done by phone.

Some folks might say "we pay for our newsfeed, and don't want to waste
our money on this." I think the best analogy here is to a newspaper.
If a newspaper carried a story you found offensive, you wouldn't get a
refund of 1% because you disliked one of the 100 articles. You bought
the whole paper, both good and offensive. (You could cancel your
subscription, or not buy it again -- with respect to netnews, you can
drop your feed or quit reading some groups; or put jsanders in your
kill file. The "Just say 'n'." approach. Or get the net to agree that
we need alt.jsanders, get him to post only there, then don't carry
it.) But say jsanders posts one offensive article a day (to err on the
high side), that's what, one article out of 20,000; maybe you pay,
what, $5/day for news (sounds high, would cover the cost of a uunet
feed) -- then jsanders cost you $.00025. You undoubtedly lose more
money than that in work time lost worrying about it.

Some said "this isn't tolerable on a government supported network". Well,
the government is MORE likely to support it under the freedom of speech
amendment than is a private network. Government support doesn't mean
the government supports every opinion expressed -- no more than DU or I
support Nyx users' opinions.

Another tack was "posting is a privilege, not a right". Agreed, but revoking
the privilege simply because it contains highly unpopular opinions isn't
fair. Perhaps his opinions are "over the line" -- but who's to judge?
Me, or the whole net? I never wanted to be the judge; that leaves the net.
Did he abuse the privilege in other ways? Profanity? Well, we all do it,
it's part of being human; again, the net can judge. Apologizing then
not apologizing, etc.? It still isn't clear who posted what, if any
forged articles were sent. I can't hold that against Jim Sanders.
Posting for different accounts? Well, he thought his account had been
hacked into and presumably wanted to prove he hadn't posted the next
allegedly forged message. Besides, it's better that he uses his real name
(I presume it IS his real name, but no matter) than a lot of pseudonyms.

What about the issue of "his postings are WAAAAAY out of line"? Well,
that's for you to decide and argue with him about. YOU decide, not me.
I won't decide for you.

[Let me suggest this: If everyone really hates his postings so much,
let's just NOBODY reply to them. If he's ignored, he'll likely go away.
I argued with him once; he ignored my argument, so I quit arguing. Now
I personally just ignore his postings.]

Complaints on this matter have really been swamping my mailbox. First
it was "shut jsanders up"; then "don't shut jsanders up". I would say,
though I didn't count, that the anti-censorship letters were 5 to 10 times
as many as the pro-censorship letters.

Most people who said let him speak made one or more of the following points:

- they disagreed with him entirely
- they felt he had a right to his opinions
- they would rather be the judge of his opinions than a censor
- censorship was far worse than offensive opinions
- he wrote nothing illegal -- no slander, no libel
- they felt the net folks as a whole were pretty intelligent,
and nobody would be likely to buy his ideas anyway, or at
least he was unlikely to convert anyone to his ideas
- private (legal) censorship whittles away our rights too, just
like government censorship
- silencing him only makes him a martyr
- silencing him only helps prove his point about group X controlling
the world

Plus:

- a couple people said they thought his postings were "interesting"
- one person even agreed wholeheartedly with him
- some said they like to watch the fireworks

All critics of the censorship decision presented good arguments against
censorship, no matter how offensive the material was. The critics of
jsanders in favor of censorship, presented weaker arguments, which I've
discussed above.

Conclusion:

On balance, the cost of freedom of speech is allowing the speech you
disagree with.

So to wrap this up, I personally disagree with jsanders writings. But
I respect his right to say it. I want to keep Nyx a place where people
can express their opinions freely.

If you disagree, fine, I respect that. But please accept the judgement
of the net and DU, which is what I consider the outcome to be. Please don't
try to subvert it, or Nyx, by, e.g., bitching to DU officials, filling
up jsanders mbox with megabytes of XXX's or whatever. (Someone did
that. It never got to jsanders because it filled up our disk and I had
to delete it; royally screwed things up, ticked me off bad.) Try Nyx
before you condemn it; and regardless, don't take matters into your own
hands trying to shut jsanders down, that just hurts the hundreds of
other regular Nyx users, and makes you guilty of censorship. If you
want to argue with him, please do. Keep it to words, not actions
though. Keep it a clean fight. Remember that a lot of people want him
to be able to post whatever nonsense he wants to, even though they
nearly all disagree with him.

Any replies should be mailed to me, as I don't really read these groups.

Again, if you can let it rest now, please do.
--
Andrew Burt uunet!isis!aburt
or ab...@du.edu

"Kwyjibo on the loose!"