Banned by AOL

American Spectator ^ | 12/22/2003 | Kathy Shaidle

[walford]

Special Report
Banned by AOL

  Print Friendly Format
  E-Mail this to a Friend

By

Published 12/22/2003 12:05:50 AM

For more than three years, I've run a weblog about religion, politics -- the usual non-dinner-table topics. And each December, regular as Rudolph, I diss Kwanzaa. The fake "African harvest festival" (invented by a Marxist black supremacist ex-con in 1972) is now celebrated by school kids in place of Hanukah and Christmas. Call me crazy, but I don't like that one bit. So earlier this month, I knocked off a bit of doggerel about Kwanzaa and posted it to my site. That's when the spam hit the filter. Or something. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how my poem and I became two of America Online's most wanted. A few days after I posted the poem, a site called Bressler.org promoted it on the front page. I was flattered, then troubled by an anonymous message in the comments section: Very odd. I tried to forward this link to an AOL subscriber, but I got a 'Delivery Status Notification' message from postmaster@mail.hotmail.com saying that the link was reported as offensive and automatically blocked. Does AOL really censor email? A string of number-heavy headers follows, but one phrase stands out in plain English: The URL contained in your email to AOL members has generated a high volume of complaints. Wow! -- my stupid poem, my puny blog, deemed "offensive" by a colossal corporation. My first reaction was that "Banned by AOL" would look great on my homepage. Then I started to wonder, as the anonymous commenter had: Does AOL censor email? And if so how? When and why? Come to think of it, Is that even legal? What constitutes "a high volume of complaints" and who is doing the whining? IRONICALLY, MY E-MAIL INQUIRIES to AOL bounced back. Their online Customer Service form didn't work, either. While waiting for a media contact to return my call (she never did) I made like a professional journalist and Googled, "AOL + sucks." That led me to David Cassell. "AOL has a reputation for censorship," says Cassell, who should know. He's run the AOL Watch Newsletter since 1996. "AOL uses [its Parental Controls feature] as a marketing device, touting their ability to restrict children's level of internet access. There's just one problem with that. In any attempt to censor, there's 'collateral damage.'" Cassell reels off a list of infamous incidents: In 1994 AOL made the New York Times for prohibiting chat rooms for feminist punk rockers known as "riot girls." AOL's spokeswoman told the Times they were afraid young girls would "go in there looking for information about their Barbies." Nine years later, that word ["girl"] is still off limits. "Girl Scout Cookies," "The Girl From Ipanema" -- forget it. A woman wrote a book of online dating tips called You've Got Male. She filed a lawsuit in 2000 alleging that AOL was blocking their members from accessing her web site, Youve-Got-Male.com Reuters reported that AOL had earlier demanded she stop selling the book and to never re-print it. In 2000, CNET News reported that AOL's "youth filters" were preventing young surfers from accessing liberal websites; "your children can easily view the site of the Republican National Committee," Brian Livingston reported at the time, "but the Democratic National Committee is blocked." But those are chat rooms and websites. Cassell has fewer documented examples of email "censorship" -- which may in fact simply be nothing more than an overly sensitive spam filter in action. Then again, he says, "AOL blocked delivery of my AOL Watch newsletter to its 25,000 subscribers on AOL. That particular edition had included the phone number for canceling your AOL accounts." Cassell explains that "AOL's privacy policy also specifies that AOL can read your e-mail 'to protect the company's rights and property.' Whether they do or don't -- they can." IN OUR E-BUSINESS AGE, this is no laughing matter. A bounced contract or RFP could cost a company business and its good name, not to mention hefty attorney fees in the event of a lawsuit. That's why the Electronic Frontier Foundation argues vigorously that "all nonspam email should be delivered." The EFF's Lee Tien says, "We've received many questions of this type over the years regarding AOL; we've never found any evidence that AOL practices any sort of institutional censorship." But there's institutional and then there's institutional, and the EFF itself hasn't entirely avoided AOL's heavy hand. According to a recent Wired News story, EFF's newsletter was blocked "because it contained the word 'rape,' used when talking about EFF's advocacy on behalf of an online group, Stop Prisoner Rape." AOL also blocked emails from another EFF client, the liberal pressure group MoveOn.org, possibly because its mailing list grew so quickly during the Iraq war. So, is AOL, intentionally or otherwise, censoring political speech? And if so, can anything be done to stop them? Tien admits that as a private company, AOL is "generally not affected" by the First Amendment when it makes its own "content based decisions." A federal statute also protects AOL and other Internet Service Providers against lawsuits if they remove content for being "offensive." As for my own experience, Tien says his "technical expert, who in a past life worked on spam control code, says it's highly likely this is occurring because of spam filtering, but it's hard to know. And if there is a bigger issue here, it's the effect of efforts to control spam on Internet information flow." Right now, the EFF is concerned that well-meaning anti-spam legislation may criminalize everyone who tries to "spoof" or disguise their identity in an email FROM line: penalizing not only spammers, but whistleblowers at home and political dissidents abroad. Cassell concurs: "Because of AOL's reputation as a heavy-handed censor, people assume their email is being censored. AOL policies -- and their unresponsiveness -- make it hard to determine whether this is the case. The best thing you can say is: Cheer up. They may just be incompetent." (View the poem that inspired this article here and send it to friends with AOL.) Kathy Shaidle runs the website Relapsed Catholic.

Subscribe

[dagoofyfoot]

I banned AOL from my computer...I still remember why too...


It seemed like every other day Rosie O'Donnells fat face would show up on my homepage.

I told them one more time and I'm pulling the plug.

Two days later there she was again...That was it! I couldn't take anymore, last chapter in the book for AOL!

Best thing I ever did!

[Hildy]

I still have my AOL account, I can't let go of it. I got it in 1991. I was truly one of the first. My first name is my email account, that shows how early I was. Back in the early days, AOL was the greatest. I mean it. The political chat room were fabulous. The people who used the internet in the early days were people who knew computers...academia...military, government..etc. There were no teenagers asking you how big your breasts are. I met Tony Snow in a political chat room on AOL in 1992 and we remain friends today.

The only other browser was the early netscape and when I think about it today, it's incredible how the world has changed in less than 15 years. I don't know why I hang on to the account now, though. I have a different email account so all I get is junk mail there. I think it's time to let go of it. But I do get angry when people bash AOL so much. It broke the ground for what the internet would become and it was easier to teach someone with no real computer experience the internet starting on AOL than flinging them out on their own. Oh well.

[AbsoluteJustice]

"It broke the ground for what the internet would become and it was easier to teach someone with no real computer experience the internet starting on AOL than flinging them out on their own. Oh well."

Its time has come and gone. Why do you think Ted Turner dumped them. They are a leftie driven organazation that blocks items it deems not appropriate to the leftie leaning persuasion. There are SO MANY MORE ISP's out there. With the influx of Cox Cable and Roadrunner....BLEH why go AOL?!!

[Hildy]

Did you read my whole post? I have high-speed access and rarely use AOL. My point was that AOL was very, very good when it first started and I have an emotional tie to it. That's all.

[Doctor Stochastic]

AOL also blocks MoveOn.org which is causing the Left to claim that AOL has given to the Bush Crime Family.

[walford]

ladyinred:
"Is your screenname related to the EastEnders?"

http://mason.gmu.edu/~walford/AboutTheAuthor.html

Hildy:
Now that I'm middle-aged, I don't care how big they are. I won't ask you any questions about them at all. I'm just as interested as before, but more circumspect. But you have got me wondering...

[Hildy]

Geez...you made me scroll back like 100 posts to remember what the hell you were referring to! You'll forgive me if I do not answer your question :)

[walford]

For the record, I didn't actually ask. You have all my respect...

[Dont Mention the War]

Very clever. That will get you banned, all right. But it may not stop AOL from billing you forever. I'd love to hear a clever way to stop them from doing that!

Call your credit card company or local bank (depending on how you're being billed) and inform them the charges are fraudulent. They're required by law to remove them immediately and deal with the company themselves.

You should then also file a complaint with your state's Attorney General's office, as well as Virginia's (where AOL is headquartered). You could even file a lawsuit, if you had the time, money and inclination.

[Dont Mention the War]

I still have my AOL account, I can't let go of it. I got it in 1991. I was truly one of the first. My first name is my email account, that shows how early I was.

AOL, in more or less the form we currently know it today, dates back to 1985. The company itself in earlier incarnations dates back to either 1982 or 1978, depending on how one wishes to interpret Steve Case's involvement and how a couple of older online services run by eventual key AOL figures managed to get folded into AOL Inc later on.

AOL was the greatest. I mean it. The political chat room were fabulous. The people who used the internet in the early days were people who knew computers...academia...military, government..etc. There were no teenagers asking you how big your breasts are.

Oh, they were there. They just kept to the rooms where they thought they stood the best chance of getting some action because they were paying six bucks an hour. ;)

The only other browser was the early netscape and when I think about it today, it's incredible how the world has changed in less than 15 years.

Not to be pedantic, but AOL didn't offer web access of any sort until mid-1995, two and a half years after Mosaic/Netscape was first released for users of real ISPs (which AOL was not at the time).

But I do get angry when people bash AOL so much. It broke the ground for what the internet would become and it was easier to teach someone with no real computer experience the internet starting on AOL than flinging them out on their own.

I think the reason for the overall hatred of AOL is that the service, for the longest time, was not part of the Internet at all, except for some rudimentary email relay capabilities. For many years, including a period well after it became obvious that the Internet was the way of the future, AOL went out of its way to develop proprietary services that could be accessed nowhere else. But when AOL did decide to link itself to the Internet, they did it in a coarse, break-down-the-door fashion that literally destroyed Internet culture as it was known up to that point, drastically lowering the overall IQ of the Net in the process. (For more on this, Google the phrase "The September That Never Ended" sometime.) For obvious reasons, this gave the service a nasty "trailer park" reputation and caused almost everyone already on the Net up to that point to develop a permanent hatred for AOL.

Ironically, as the evidence became overwhelming that remaining a proprietary service was becoming a recipe for eventual bankruptcy, AOL did a 180-degree turn, killing off almost all its proprietary services and turning itself into a regular ISP, except that it was designed as "the ISP that's easy to use." This, naturally, only further cemented AOL's reputation as the online home for people incapable of doing anything online that was more complex than clicking on pretty buttons. (Whether this rep is fair or not is open to debate, of course.)

Even more ironically, now that there's so much competition out there both from other "easy" ISPs such as MSN and from cable modems, AOL is once again trying to build up some proprietary services to give consumers a reason to choose it over all the other services, and it's having no success at this whatsoever; its subscriber numbers continue to plummet.

AOL had its day, but that day is long gone. Steve Case made the very smart move of waiting until the dotcom bubble hit its peak and then using AOL's grossly inflated stock value to eat up a solid, profitable company with a real business plan before the bubble burst. He did, and the idiots at Time Warner were left holding the bag after the Internet collapse. If it wasn't for that merger, AOL would probably have gone out of business two or three years ago. (As it is, I believe Time Warner is now worth only about half of what it was pre-merger, almost entirely due to the drag on earnings caused by AOL.) Now that the old TW management has succeeded in overthrowing the AOL gang and regaining full control of the company, a lot of analysts expect TW to spin off AOL at some point and leave to to sink or swim on its own. Within a year or so after that, it'll likely sink.

[martin_fierro]

I hate AOL.

[Malacoda]

I only have three words:

"SUCK IT, TREBEK!"

[sweetliberty]

Simple solution, dump AOL. I have never used AOL and if I am on someone else's computer who does, I simple do not use their browser. Most surfing complaints I've heard have been from AOL users. Also, if they can manage to get anything on your computer, it is virtually impossible to get rid of. I know I went to try and play some media thing a while back, (I had nothing of AOL on my computer at the time) and was told I had to upgrade Real Player. When I did, I suddenly had AOL icons on my system. Given the way they operate (or DON'T operate might be more accurate) I wouldn't have anything to do with them.

[walford]

"...if they can manage to get anything on your computer, it is virtually impossible to get rid of. I know I went to try and play some media thing a while back, (I had nothing of AOL on my computer at the time) and was told I had to upgrade Real Player. When I did, I suddenly had AOL icons on my system..."



Yes, anything AOL-affiliated will imbed AOL executables on your system. Given that I prefer the Netscape browser, every time I do an upgrade, the next step is removing these unrequested programs.

McAfee's Quick Clean [formerly Network Associate's Uninstaller] is highly effective at doing that. They finally have a version that is compatible with Win2k/NT. It is offered as a yearly subscription, but that isn't necessary. It is a good program for removing garbage files also. It has a 'quick clean' feature that removes invalid registry files that is helpful when your browser gets stuck/slows down while surfing. [ps - I'm getting no commission on my suggestion]