lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/22/85)
The recent mention of someone who removed certain messages from the netnews systems under their control reminds me of something rather important. While it is unfortunate when "ad hoc" message removals occur, it is clearly the responsibility of each site's operational staff to determine what materials they feel are appropriate to be on their system. Nobody on conventional Usenet today is under any specific obligation to allow their facilities to be used for the storage and/or forwarding of materials they do not feel are appropriate. As the phone-based net continues to grow, there will probably be increasing numbers of cases where messages are posted which some administrators feel are in bad taste or that might subject them to internal or external company/legal sanctions. The increase in this sort of situation would appear inevitable, given the public posting nature of Usenet. Also, there have been recent court cases where computer bulletin board operators have been held potentially liable for unscreened messages on their systems. It is natural that people would be getting increasingly concerned. One major advantage to the sort of carefully worked out and organized moderation system proposed for Stargate would be the availability of clearly spelled out criteria for message screening. Given the participation of the network in designing such a system (and the ongoing monitoring of such a system by the net) the necessity of "ad hoc" filtering of messages by individual sites and administrators would hopefully be greatly reduced, at least for traffic coming over Stargate. This would, to my mind, be a substantial improvement. --Lauren-- P.S. Please note that I may be unable to reply to messages for a few days while I'm in Dallas. I'll see some of you there, I assume.... --LW--
gam@amdahl.UUCP (gam) (01/25/85)
> = Lauren > While it is unfortunate when "ad hoc" message removals > occur, it is clearly the responsibility of each site's operational > staff to determine what materials they feel are appropriate to > be on their system. Nobody on conventional Usenet today is under > any specific obligation to allow their facilities to be used > for the storage and/or forwarding of materials they do not feel > are appropriate. While I agree that no one on Usenet is obliged to forward materials that they do not feel are appropriate, I would like to distinguish between the erasure and termination (non-transmittal) of "inapppropriate" (slanderous, libelous, or otherwise illegal) articles and outright censorship of an individual or their articles because the Usenet administrator disagrees with them. I propose that the Net-Etiquette should also point out the unethical nature of this sort of censorship. I must concede that any Usenet administrator has the right to remove articles from their machine for whatever reason, but to affect the transmission of traffic in this manner (censorship) is, to my mind, a grave moral offense. -- Gordon A. Moffett ...!{ihnp4,hplabs,sun}!amdahl!gam
lauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/27/85)
I agree that blocking all messages from a particular individual is wrong. Administrators have the right to control what is on their systems, but I would certainly hope that they will use such controls through guidelines which are fairly established and evenly applied. Simply saying that one person is annoying and refusing to forward any mail from that person from then on (even if that person is indeed annoying) is not a correct way to proceed. Of course, individual messages (from anyone) that did not meet the established critera for that site might be removed (libelous, copyrighted, newsgroups that they don't want to carry, etc.) if the administrator wished, but I don't approve of singling out individuals for blanket censorship under any conditions. --Lauren--