Worries About Big Brother at America Online

January 31, 1999

Worries About Big Brother at America Online

By AMY HARMON

ike the divided generations of Irish before them, the two opposing camps of contributors to America Online's discussion group on Ireland rarely agree on anything. But when the world's leading online service suspended their contentious electronic debate last month, participants on both sides were united in their dismay.
"Don't stop just to appease the AOL Thought Police," one proponent of a united Ireland wrote to the Unionist contingent. "I'd much rather have someone vehemently disagree with me than know that anyone has been silenced!"

Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times
Renee Rosenblum-Lowden and her husband, Michael, in Riegelsville, Pa. They were cited by America Online for posting a message in an abortion debate advising, "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen."
America Online reopened its Irish Heritage discussion after a 17-day "cooling off" period, and if there was a strangely muted quality to the contributions at first, things are mostly back to normal. The politics folder, which now bears the slogan "a place for cordial political debate in the spirit of harmony," has spawned more than 12,000 of the usual postings regarding British treason and Sinn Fein terrorism since the beginning of the year.
But the episode has fed a growing discomfort with the social and political power America Online has come to wield by dint of its surging popularity and its unusual purview over individual communication. And it underscores the challenges the company may face as it seeks with mixed success to maintain both civil discourse and satisfied customers while presiding over 180,000 continuing conversations on topics from the teen-age idols 'N Sync to Presidential impeachment.
Balancing free expression with civility has always been a struggle for America Online and other electronic publishers that provide areas where people can voice their opinions by typing them into the ether. But it is America Online's scope combined with its editorial control that some critics say is cause for concern.
With 15 million subscribers, America Online is now the gateway to cyberspace for more Americans than the next 15 largest Internet service providers combined, according to a report released last week by the International Data Corp., a market research firm. This week, announcing strong earnings, the company said 1.6 million accounts were added in the last three months of 1998 alone.
But some members have begun to chafe at its definition of civility, or at least the way it seems sometimes arbitrarily applied. And some civil liberties advocates are scrutinizing the service more closely as a new breed of institution that governs speech and yet is immune from First Amendment claims.
A flurry of recent clashes in discussion areas ranging from race relations to fiction writing have served to heighten concerns over the company's more subtle methods of monitoring the discussions on its message boards -- the continuing discussions that subscribers can follow and contribute to over time, as distinct from the simultaneous and sometimes chaotic (but also monitored) exchanges in what it calls chat rooms. In particular, some subscribers cite the online service's practice of deleting message board postings without explanation and of attaching the equivalent of demerit marks to the accounts of individuals deemed to have offended another subscriber.
Who Decides What's Offensive?
he question is, who gets to decide what's 'offensive?"' says Renee Rosenblum-Lowden of Riegelsville, Pa., who recalls being cited for a violation for posting a message in a debate on abortion advising an opponent, "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen."
Under America Online's contract, universally referred to among members in both noun and verb form as TOS, for "terms of service," all subscribers promise not to "harass, threaten, embarrass, or do anything else to another member that is unwanted." Often transgressions are reported to America Online officials by other discussion group participants, whose identities are not released to those they accuse. According to the company's subscriber contract, three such violations may result in the suspension or termination of an account.
Ms. Rosenblum-Lowden -- whose screen name is now "Prejteach 2" because her "Prejteach" account was closed -- says she and a group of other women who take part in discussions on the Women in Action board have been picked as targets for complaints by those who disagree with their liberal views. "Unlike a court of law, you don't face your accusers," she said. "That gives people free rein."
America Online officials concede that judging what is unduly offensive in often-complex political disputes or long-running personal battles can be tricky, especially given the volume and range of messages. That is why the company has enlisted nearly 14,000 volunteers to patrol the boards, and employs a group of about 100 known as the Community Action Team to determine when a comment crosses the line.
In intervening in conversations between its users, America Online says its objective is to maintain a sense of community. Although legal liability for libelous statements appearing on its boards was once more of a concern, a provision of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 essentially grants online services immunity from prosecution over such matters, characterizing them as a "common carrier" like a telephone company -- simply a means by which information is transmitted, with no responsibility for the information itself.
Most terms-of-service violations are handled case by case. In an extreme case like the Irish board, where dozens of violations were being reported every day by the most active participants, the company said there were enough profane and offensive postings that it became necessary to shut down the whole discussion. The discussion archives, which sometimes remain on the service for several years, were wiped clean during the weeks that the board was shut down, so no trace remains.
"There's a certain amount of judgment required in situations on whether something is particularly harassing or threatening of other members," said Katherine Boursecnik, America Online's vice president for network programming. "That's where things get the most difficult. We train people to be agnostic about the specific content and to look more at things like tone: Is it threatening, harassing, profane, vulgar?"

But given the well-documented tendency of normally sober citizens to act out on line, the problems of privacy protection and threats to minors -- as well as Congressional efforts to regulate online speech -- Ms. Boursecnik said the company's supervisory policies were necessary to provide the open atmosphere its customers wanted.
"We are a service that prides ourselves on having a wide-ranging appeal to a wide range of individuals," she added. "But at the same time we're also a family service."
For Some, Control Is Seen as a Virtue
ndeed, for many subscribers, America Online's virtue is its controlled environment. A members-only online service distinct from the unfettered Internet, America Online has achieved market dominance by promoting itself as a place where families and first-time Internet users can feel comfortable. While members can venture out into the World Wide Web and other parts of the Internet from the online service, many seldom do, preferring America Online's relative safety and familiarity.
The service is far from the only Internet discussion area to enforce its own standards of acceptable speech. Popular Web destinations like the search and directory site Yahoo, discussion-oriented sites like Theglobe.com, and sites operated by traditional publishers (including The New York Times) reserve the right to remove postings on the message boards they provide to Internet users. And those who find America Online's terms unacceptable can always go to another online service, or to the Internet's entirely unmonitored forums called news groups.
But America Online's extraordinary market dominance, critics argue, makes it the only place in practical terms for a growing number of people to speak their mind in cyberspace. Many Internet users find the unmoderated news groups too technically complex to use and too overrun with advertising to be productive for discussion. Since it serves as an Internet service provider, America Online has a far more potent enforcement mechanism for its rules than most other discussion areas on the Web. Since subscribers pay a monthly fee with a credit card, the company can bar individuals from logging on -- thereby denying them, among other things, access to e-mail.
"America Online is the operating system of the Internet," said Andrew L. Shapiro, the First Amendment fellow at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, comparing the service to the Microsoft Corp.'s Windows operating system, which runs on 90 percent of the world's personal computers.
"We've moved distressingly close to the model that the Internet was supposed to replace, which is a couple of big companies having a disproportionate amount of control over the information market," Shapiro added. "A good argument can be made that AOL needs to take on more responsibility for protecting free speech, whether courts require it or consumers simply demand it."
Canceling Service as Sign of Protest
lthough some subscribers, like John Navin, 38, of Mount Lake Terrace, Wash., said he had dropped his America Online account to protest the Irish board shutdown, others dissatisfied with its interventions remain with the service out of choice, habit or necessity.
When Sheila Fahey found the Irish discussion shuttered last month, for example, she and others tried to migrate their discussion to a site on the World Wide Web called Ireland Uncensored. But she found the forum confusing and too difficult to follow. Instead, she says she and several other Irish nationalists now screen each other's postings before making them public to vet them for possible terms-of-service violations.
"We've all learned not to use first-person pronouns," said Ms. Fahey, 41, a paralegal in Chicago. "If an English teacher looked at some of our postings, they are so passive-language-filled they'd have a cow."
(When the discussion was reopened, the monitor posted a message pleading for harmony: "We encourage you to make this a more amiable place where any person, regardless of faction, can openly discuss political issues and current events.")
For Robin Olderman, 54, a high school English teacher in Houston, it means putting up with what she describes as feeling like a kid in a playground whose friends go running to the teacher.
"I take issue with the way the rules are enforced arbitrarily," said Ms. Olderman, who is currently operating under a "mutual nonharassment notice," an e-mail message from America Online explaining that she and another subscriber are never to speak to each other via the service again.
Perhaps more disturbing to some subscribers is the removal of postings from message boards. On the Writers Club board, which like many areas of America Online is administered by a separate company that contracts with the service, more than a dozen of the most active participants over the last several years recently left en masse after the board monitors began removing their postings and reporting terms-of-service violations more frequently to the Community Action Team.
The writers now congregate on a board called "Sanctuary" in the American Civil Liberties Union area on America Online, where the terms-of-service rules do not apply.
On the race relations message board, Jay Lutsky, 31, of Edison, N.J., said he compared an active participant who accused everyone on the board of being his enemy to Robespierre, the French Jacobin leader responsible for the revolution's Reign of Terror. It was removed by monitors after the other participant said it was slander.
"I said it was opinion; I'm entitled," Lutsky, a teacher, said. "I understand AOL is a large private corporation, and I guess it's technically their property, but I don't think it should be allowed to interfere with the First Amendment rights of people."
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Amy Harmon at amy@nytimes.com welcomes your comments and suggestions.

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	Rebecca Cooney for The New York Times
	Renee Rosenblum-Lowden and her husband, Michael, in Riegelsville, Pa. They were cited by America Online for posting a message in an abortion debate advising, "If you can't stand the heat get out of the kitchen."