Legal Commentary

AP Writer Learns that Online Speech Isn't Always Free

By TChris

Yahoo is not the government. It has no obligation to respect your right to free speech. In fact, you give Yahoo the right to delete anything you upload if it contravenes Yahoo's difficult-to-discern standards. When Yahoo deletes publicly displayed content (or when TalkLeft does, for that matter) it is not playing a "governmental role," as this writer asserts. Substitute "managerial role," and the writer has a point.

Companies in charge of seemingly public spaces online wipe out content that's controversial but otherwise legal. Service providers write their own rules for users worldwide and set foreign policy when they cooperate with regimes like China. They serve as prosecutor, judge and jury in handling disputes behind closed doors.

The governmental role that companies play online is taking on greater importance as their services - from online hangouts to virtual repositories of photos and video - become more central to public discourse around the world.

Sometimes those judgments seem arbitrary: [more ...]

Dutch photographer Maarten Dors met the limits of free speech at Yahoo Inc.'s photo-sharing service, Flickr, when he posted an image of an early-adolescent boy with disheveled hair and a ragged T-shirt, staring blankly with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

Without prior notice, Yahoo deleted the photo on grounds it violated an unwritten ban on depicting children smoking. Dors eventually convinced a Yahoo manager that - far from promoting smoking - the photo had value as a statement on poverty and street life in Romania. Yet another employee deleted it again a few months later.

Sometimes the desire not to offend is carried to extreme lengths:

[I]n response to complaints it would not specify, Network Solutions LLC decided to suspend a Web hosting account that Dutch filmmaker Geert Wilders was using to promote a movie that criticizes the Quran — before the movie was even posted and without the company finding any actual violation of its rules.

One remedy is to try a site that might be more receptive to the user's taste. True, as the writer notes, leaving Facebook or YouTube or Flickr for a less populated if more forgiving website might be tough, but if enough users disagree with a site's posting policies, competing sites will attract more users and become the new cool place to hang out. Such is the beauty of the internet.

Another remedy is to keep complaining. In Dors' case, it worked.

Dors ultimately got his photo restored a second time, and Yahoo has apologized, acknowledging its community managers went too far.

Actually, if you look at Dors' work, it seems that Flickr has given him a fair amount of leeway to post some photos that some might deem controversial.

None of the AP writer's observations are shocking. It has long been understood that freedom of the press belongs to those who own a press. The electronic equivalent of the press is a website. If you want to participate in a privately owned website, you play by the owner's rules, whether or not they seem fair to you.

Full post as published by TalkLeft on July 06, 2008 (boomark / email).