Safe Internet Use Said to Require Education, Private Action
The debate over how best to keep the Internet safe and civil will center next on Web site terms of service and the role that Internet service providers should play, panelists said Thursday at the National Press Club. They said the American solution certainly will differ from that in Europe, where people are more accepting of government intervention.
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Attorney Christopher Wolf said Web sites aren’t limited by the First Amendment in the way that governments are. Wolf also is co-chairman of Hands Off the Internet, the anti-net neutrality group. The First Amendment allows hate speech and graphic images, but Web sites’ terms of service can prohibit such content, he said. Under pressure to change its algorithm so the Jew Watch site wouldn’t appear as a result in a search for “Jew,” Google decided it didn’t want to change its algorithm for special cases but would ensure that a sponsored link appears next to Jew Watch to explain how and why the site appears and give links to sites that dissect hate speech. Wolf called Google’s approach a creative solution to a difficult problem.
No bright line separates acceptable and unacceptable speech, Wolf said after the discussion. Web sites have great leeway in determining what’s acceptable in the communities they create, he said, but a site that over- edits postings will find users pushing back. Wolf said he’s not about to write a new “seven dirty words” list, and the matter demands thought and debate.
The community flagging systems employed by YouTube and other sites are probably the most effective way to enforce service terms, said Stephen Balkam of the Family Online Safety Institute. The sheer number of videos uploaded to the site make it difficult for staff to monitor, but the community will notice inappropriate content, he said. The next battleground, he said, will be over what content the terms of service treat as acceptable.
AT&T sees its role as providing tools to parents so they can provide the supervision in the online world that they do elsewhere, said Brent Olsen, assistant vice president for regulatory policy. Families’ choices differ, so AT&T doesn’t try to make the decisions, he said. Obviously AT&T removes illegal content like child porn, he said, but it’s not clear whether American ISPs should take a broader role in removing content. “That debate is still percolating,” he said.
Society is just emerging from a long period of techno-panic, Balkam said. There are scary sites and people online, but society and individuals shouldn’t overreact, he said. Instead, he said, people should educate their children about safe ways to use the Internet.
Online safety has languished for eight years for lack of high-level leadership, Balkam said. Too many agencies are trying to do their own thing with few resources, he said. A new broadband law addressing online safety education is a good step, he said, but it’s unfunded. He hopes the next administration coordinates the agencies and sets goals, he said, adding that both campaigns have indicated that Internet safety would get some attention.
But more thought is needed on how to handle online misdeeds, Balkam suggested. “We have to be careful about criminalizing the behavior of our kids,” he said. In recent cases, teens have been charged with possessing or distributing child porn for showing nude cellphone photos of classmates, he said. “Is that child pornography? I don’t know,” he said. Many times children are both victims and wrongdoers online, he said.