Blacklisted by Cyber Patrol: Gay Sites

Blacklisted by Cyber Patrol

From Ada to Yoyo

A report from The Censorware Project

Gay Sites

The following four sites oriented toward alternative sexuality have been blocked as FullNude SexActs. Two cases are completely inappropriate and two are cases of overbroad blocking.

(It bears repeating that these improper blocks, indeed all the improper blocks listed in this report, are the tip of the iceberg, found in just a few dozen hours' time by a handful of volunteers. There are over 50,000 entries in the Cyber Patrol database and most of them have not been investigated.)

Gay Daze: "Fairy Tales and Dyke Dramas."

This site invites the reader to follow the daily adventures of five gay men and a lesbian in a sort of online soap opera. The characters go through the same trials and tribulations found on, well, any other online soap opera: boy trouble, girl trouble, job trouble. Included are a sampling of short stories: touching, funny, thoughtful.

And now men like me CAN have a family; we CAN have a child like Benjamin.
Suddenly deep inside me I felt my biological clock ticking and a voice screaming, "I WANT A KID!" Of course, a lot of people would think I was crazy; particularly other gay men and who knows-- even Eric-- but I can see the reality of a family.
"What kind of fruit is in Juicy Fruit gum?" asked the precocious Benjamin.
I looked at him, smiling. "What?"
(Andrew, Dec. 8, 1997)

There appears to be no nudity or explicit sexual material on the site, yet it is blocked as FullNude SexActs.

Gay Mart: "The world's largest gay & lesbian internet catalog."

Are you looking for Address books (Women's), Baseball caps, Beach blankets, Black triangle (Lesbian Liberation), Blankets, Books, Bubble bath, Cake topper (Commitment Cakes), Candles, Caps, Car mats, Cat-collars, -leashes, -supplies, -tags or -toys, CD-ROMs (Adult), Clocks, Coasters, Commitmen, Certificates, Compact Discs (Audio), Computer accessories, or Cookie jars? That's just A through C.

There are two areas on the mall that have adult content; both lead to a warning page before presenting anything adult-oriented, and both are in their own directories which could easily be blocked themselves. One is the adult CD-ROM link listed above (/shopcdr/) and the other is the Rainbow Sex Shop (/shoprss/). There does not appear to be full-frontal nudity on the site; in other words, the FullNude category has no basis.

Even if there were, the question would remain: why is the entire website blocked instead of those two specific directories?

Stonewall, Inc.: gourmet coffees, teas, food, and gifts.

Stonewall was the site of a 1969 riot in New York City that was the spark for protest against anti-homosexual laws and police brutality.

Stonewall, Inc. is a coffee vendor in West Hollywood.

What nudity is there on the site? None. The pictures are pictures of coffee filters and of gift baskets. The site is blocked as FullNude SexActs.

Speaking of West Hollywood...

West Hollywood: the GeoCities neighborhood.

Now we come to one of the most contentious blocks Cyber Patrol has ever enacted. In recent weeks, it has come to light that the software blocks this entire GeoCities neighborhood. There are over 23,000 user sites covered by this block, totalling well over 50,000 webpages. Like all other blocks listed in this report, it has been in effect for an unknown period of time, without the knowledge of the site's webmasters.

On November 7th, David Smith posted to the fight-censorship mailing list a short report on improper blocks, including:

West Hollywood is a gay and lesbian site for Geocities, which prohibits sexually explicit images on the sites that they host.

An advocate of filtering, David Burt of Filtering Facts, pointed out that, despite GeoCities' strict policy against explicit material, there was still some to be found on West Hollywood. Throughout the next weeks, discussion continued; most of the explicit material David Burt claimed to have found was no longer present on the site, and that which was, was removed within days and sometimes hours.

There are dozens of other GeoCities neighborhoods, each of which certainly has webpages who display explicit material. Sites like GeoCities which provide free web hosting will always have a small percentage of users who abuse the service. But only two neighborhoods have been blocked as FullNude SexActs: West Hollywood, and ironically a neighborhood physically located in West Hollywood, the Sunset Strip. (The Sunset Strip is devoted to music, and is discussed in the Introduction.)

On December 9th, David Burt reported that Cyber Patrol had reviewed the West Hollywood block, and

CP recently told me that WestHollywood and DejaNews will not be unblocked. WestHollywood continues to offer a parade of shifty porn sites.

Mr. Burt then listed five "porn sites," none of which contained sexually explicit material.

Once the site had been reviewed and the block upheld, the administrators at the site itself were contacted and informed of the block (a step which Microsystems Software had never taken). On December 14th, Bob Parker, the Community Leader Liaison for the West Hollywood neighborhood, sent a long post regarding the block to several mailing lists including fight-censorship. An excerpt:

If CyberPatrol is going to block sites based on content they believe is objectionable, then they need to take some responsibility to at least verify the facts on those sites before blocking them. I notice that members.aol.com is not blocked by CyberPatrol - yet I know for a fact that porn is pervasive throughout the directory, as is many other objectionable and illegal subjects.
[...] all it would have taken was a few minutes of investigation on the part of Microsystems to find out about the Neighorhood Watch program at GeoCities, get the sites taken care of and avoid this whole situation.

But a few minutes would have taken far too long. With over 50,000 entries in the database, spending even two minutes reviewing each block would take 1700 person-hours, easily over $20,000 in payroll and other expenses. It would not make economic sense for the company to examine its blocks too carefully.

But one single improper block, out of the 50,000, can blank out the websites of tens of thousands of people.

Later that day, Loren Javier, Interactive Media Director for GLAAD, shared his own comments. Excerpt:

Dick Gorgens, the company's CEO, has even admitted to the prejudicial blocking. To quote him, "We took the 'easier' approach to blocking the small number of actionable non-nudity publishers in that area rather than individually sanctioning them." Mr. Gorgens has also mentioned that within "the next week the problem will be corrected."

That was Sunday, December 14th. A new version of the Cyber Patrol database was released in the middle of this week, but West Hollywood is (as of Sunday, December 21st) still blocked as FullNude SexActs.

It will be nice if this one block is, eventually, corrected. But the problem itself will not be corrected. The real problem is not the individual errors, but the system which allows such errors to secretly and silently block good sites, without review -- and which allows a block to be reexamined dismissively, as David Burt reports this one was, until the potential media pressure of a group like GLAAD was brought to bear.

GLAAD has a member on Cyber Patrol's oversight committee, which meets bimonthly to discuss issues relating to blocking policies (but not any specific blocks). GLAAD has recently urged Microsystems Software to end its discrimination and has hinted that its participation on the oversight committee may be pulled; an upcoming GLAADAlert will denounce previous actions and hold the company to its pledge to "fix the problem."

A transcript (250K) of the discussion on fight-censorship regarding the West Hollywood block, from November 7th to December 12th, is available.