PFF has just released the transcript of an event I hosted on May 18th on “The Complexities of Regulating TV Violence.” [The print transcript can be found here and the audio here.]
The event featured Henry Geller, Former General Counsel, Federal Communications Commission, Robin Bronk, Executive Director, The Creative Coalition, Robert Corn-Revere, a partner at the law firm of Davis Wright Tremaine, and Jonathan L. Freedman, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and the author of Media Violence and its Effect on Aggression. It was an interesting discussion and I encourage you to check it out if you are following this issue. Also, I published a report last month on this issue entitled, “The Right Way to Regulate Violent TV,” which focused on the tools and methods parents can use to deal with this issue on their own.
This month, I have been posting a series of essays about how parents can deal with potentially objectionable online content or contacts to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month.” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7). In this series, I have been talking about how parents need to adopt a “layered” approach to online child protection that involves many tools and strategies. And such an approach is certainly needed to address social networking activities.
Social networking websites have become wildly popular with teenagers in recent years. Sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Xanga, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Tagged, Imbee, LiveJournal, Yahoo! 360, and Windows Live Spaces attract millions of users and represent just a few of the hundreds of social networking sites online today. These sites offer their users the space and tools to build the equivalent of an online journal and then to network with others more easily. New sites are seemingly surfacing every week, and they are growing more personalized in an attempt to appeal to specific niches.
But concerns about how youngsters use these services quickly prompted lawmakers to introduce legislation to ban access to such sites in schools and libraries. Others, including several state attorneys general, want such sites to age-verify all users to exclude those over or under a certain age. (I have discussed my reservations with proposals to impose age verification schemes on social networking websites in my PFF white paper, “Social Networking and Age Verification: Many Hard Questions; No Easy Solutions.”)
Continue reading →
The Broward County Commission triggered a political mini-hurricane this week, when it considered cancelling its emergency communications contract with a local radio station because its programming is too conservative. For the past year, WIOD-AM has been the county’s “official” station for emergency news and information. On Tuesday, the county commission delayed its renewal of the station’s contract. The problem: the station airs conservative talk show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. The station is out of step with area politics, explained Commissioner Stacy Ritter. “They have every right to speak, but we don’t have to do business with them,” she said.
How thoughtful. I know when I’m looking for disaster information, I’ll want it to be from someone who is in step with my area’s politics.
The reaction, of course, was swift – with Limbaugh, Hannity and others ridiculing the decision – and county officials were deluged with complaints. And to Broward’s credit, several commissioners on the all-Democrat board who had missed the Tuesday meeting came to WIOD’s defense. Yesterday, the county backed off, with a majority of commissioners pledging to renew the contract.
It’s tempting to dismiss the episode as just another bizarre Broward controversy. But the petty censorship attempt by local officials here may be a dry run for a much broader attempt at content control by Congress. Can you say Fairness Doctrine?
It’s also interesting to observe how the national media covered the story. While the controversy received nationwide coverage from conservative outlets, the mainstream national media largely ignored it. Of course, the Miami Herald – the largest newspaper in Florida – did run a piece on the events in Broward. They missed the censorship angle, though – instead they focused with horror on the fact that Rush Limbaugh had called Ritter a “babe.”
So much for the MSM.
June is “National Internet Safety Month,” and to coincide with it I have been posting a series essays on various aspects of online safety. (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6). In this installment, I will be discussing the importance of online safety education and media literacy efforts.
Education is a vital part of parental controls and online child protection efforts. In fact, if there is one point I try to get across in my new book, “Parental Controls and Online Child Safety: A Survey of Tools and Methods” it is that, regardless of how robust they might be today, parental control tools and rating systems are no substitute for education–of both children and parents. The best answer to the problem of unwanted media exposure is for parents to rely on a mix of technological controls, informal household media rules, and, most importantly, education and media literacy efforts. And government can play an important role by helping educate and empower parents and children to help prepare them for our new media environment.
Continue reading →
Peter Suderman of National Review Online has an excellent piece up this morning on the 2nd Circuit’s slap-down of the FCC on indecency. He argued that even conservatives — especially conservatives — should be concerned about FCC powers to regulate speech:
..from a conservative point of view…FCC regulation of broadcast speech creates exactly the sort of centralized, out-of-touch control mechanism that conservatives should want to avoid. One of the two measures the FCC is supposed to use when deciding whether or not speech is indecent is whether the broadcast is “patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium.” Does anyone really think the FCC is equipped to enforce “community standards” from its coastal perch in Washington? It’s like some Bizzaro-world notion of local governance: putting a single federal agency in charge of “community standards” for a large, diverse country.
Worth reading. (Content warning: contains words “heck” and “asparagus.”)
I have been posting a series of essays to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5). In today’s installment, I want to discuss the idea of a voluntary code of conduct for online safety.
Yesterday, the National Cable & Telecommunications Association (NCTA) announced an impressive new campaign by its members to offer parents an unprecedented level of assistance in keeping their children safe online. The NCTA’s new effort is called, “Cable Puts You in Control: PointSmart, ClickSafe.”
The NCTA’s new effort closely tracks a proposal outlined in a report that the Progress & Freedom Foundation published last August. In that report, I recommended that:
All companies doing business online… must show policymakers and the general public that they are serious about addressing [online safety] concerns. If companies and trade associations do not step up to the plate and meet this challenge soon–and in a collective fashion–calls will only grow louder for increased government regulation of online speech and activities. What is needed is a voluntary code of conduct for companies doing business online. This code of conduct, or set of industry “best practices,” would be based on a straight-forward set of principles and policies that could be universally adopted by the wide variety of operators mentioned above. These principles and policies, which could take the form of a pledge to parents and consumers, must also be workable throughout our new world of converged, cross-platform communications and media.
The cable industry has responded to this challenge in a major way with the announcement of its new “PointSmart, ClickSafe” initiative.
Continue reading →
In this fifth installment of my series to coincide with “National Internet Safety Month” (Here are parts 1, 2, 3 and 4), I will be outlining search engine filters and kid-friendly web portals.
Safe Search Tools
Parents can use tools embedded in search engines to block a great deal of potentially objectionable content that children might inadvertently stumble upon during searches. For example, Google offers a SafeSearch feature that allows users to filter unwanted content. Users can customize their SafeSearch settings by clicking on the “Preferences” link to the right of the search box on the Google.com home page. Users can choose “moderate filtering,” which “excludes most explicit images from Google Image Search results but doesn’t filter ordinary web search results,” or “strict filtering,” which applies the SafeSearch filtering controls to all search engine results.
Similarly, Yahoo! also has a SafeSearch tool that can be found under the “Preferences” link on the “My Web” tab. Like Google, Yahoo! allows strict or moderate filtering. Microsoft’s Live Search works largely the same way. Other search engine providers such as AltaVista, AskJeeves, HotBot, Lycos, and AllTheWeb, also provide filtering tools. Working in conjunction with other filters, these search engine tools are quite effective in blocking a significant amount of potentially objectionable content.
Continue reading →
The Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down an important 53-page decision today in the case of Fox Television Stations v. Federal Communications Commission. This was the indecency case involving the FCC’s new policy for “fleeting expletives.” [The “Janet Jackson case” is taking place in the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals and oral arguments will be held in September.]
In a 2-1 decision, the Second Circuit ruled that “the FCC’s new policy sanctioning “fleeting expletives” is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act for failing to articulate a reasoned basis for its change in policy.” As a result, the FCC’s order is vacated and remanded to the agency. Specifically, the Court held:
We find that the FCC’s new policy regarding “fleeting expletives” represents a significant departure from positions previously taken by the agency and relied on by the broadcast industry. We further find that the FCC has failed to articulate a reasoned basis for this change in policy. Accordingly, we hold that the FCC’s new policy regarding “fleeting expletives” is arbitrary and capricious under the Administrative Procedure Act.
The decision goes on to demonstrate how, over just the last few years, the FCC has arbitrarily thrown out 30+ years worth of precedent on this front in order to greatly expand the scope of its regulatory authority over speech on broadcast TV and radio.
While the decision was reached solely on the procedural issues at hand, the Court had some very important things to say about the First Amendment-related concerns that were raised by the networks and the other groups and individuals who filed in the case. I filed a joint amicus brief in the case along with John Morris and Sophia Cope of the Center for Democracy & Technology. And, as I explain below, I was happy to see that many of our concerns were taken seriously by the court when discussing the free speech implications of this case.
Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.