A strong libertarian strain persists among parts of the US ‘digerati’. This manifests itself problematically when it comes to issues around hate speech. By an odd coincidence this issue popped up twice for me today. Google News somehow managed to list National Vanguard (a nasty neo-fascist rag) as a news source and has now removed it. And I was surprised when I looked at the rules for submitting content to Ourmedia the other day that pornography (not defined) is banned while no rules govern hate speech. When I raised the issue, I was told by one of the site’s creators that they, “don’t want to be in the business of deciding what constitutes hate speech” (though they are apparently happy to decide what constitutes porn).

It would be nice to think that this won’t turn out to be a problem for them but I fear sooner or later it will. I have urged them to reconsider and at least introduce some tagging system for their content - not because I am worried myself about harmful media effects but because, as I said, “I worry that if teachers and librarians have no way of “protecting” kids from content that might offend those kids’ parents, they will not direct them to ourmedia and indeed might end up blocking access to it.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 24th, 2005 at 12:24 pm and is filed under About the Internet, Content Regulation, Media Regulation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.