Lisa Lerer of Forbes was nice enough to do a feature story this week about my views on the panic over social networking and the push for age verification of such sites. Her piece is entitled “Why MySpace is a Safe Space,” and begins as follows: “Adam Thierer doesn’t look like much of a revolutionary. But last month he challenged both Washington and conventional wisdom with a fairly radical proposition: Perhaps MySpace and the Internet aren’t so scary for kids, after all.”
I don’t really regard what I’ve been saying in my recent essays or big new PFF study as “revolutionary.” Rather, if you spend any time studying this issue and these sites in a dispassionate, educated way, I think the conclusions I draw seem quite reasonable. Unfortunately, I don’t think many policy makers or critics have spent any serious time on these sites or seriously explored the relative danger of online social networking sites relative to offline social networking places. A classic “moral panic” has developed because of this: An older generation fears a new medium that it does not use or understand.
Anyway, read my discussion with Lisa for more details.
The Parents Television Council (PTC), a media activist group that routinely petitions Congress and the FCC for greater content regulation, recently released a new poll which they say proves that the V-Chip and parental control technologies have been a failure.
Their poll finds that only 11% of those surveyed said they used the V-chip or their cable box parental controls to block unwanted content from their television during the past week. And that result is virtually unchanged from a poll they took last September asking the same question. Therefore, the PTC concludes that recent efforts by broadcasters and cable companies to spend hundreds of millions of dollars educating families about these parental control tools have been a failure. And, unsurprisingly, the PTC feels that this again shows the need for government regulators need to step in and do more national nannying for us.
As I’ll make clear in a moment, the V-Chip and current television ratings are certainly not perfect. And I have no doubt that household usage of these tools is quite low for reasons I’ll get into. But let me first address what appears to be a rather glaring methodological deficiency of this PTC poll which makes it difficult to take seriously.
Continue reading →
I’m putting the wraps on a big paper on the dangers of mandating age verification for social networking websites. One of the questions I ask in the study is exactly how broadly “social networking sites” will be defined for purposes of regulation? Will chat rooms, hobbyist sites, listservs, instant messaging, video sharing sites, online marketplaces or online multiplayer gaming sites qualify? If so, how will they be policed and how burdensome will age-verification mandates become for smaller sites? Finally, does the government currently have the resources to engage in such policing activities since almost all websites now have a social networking component? I explore these and other questions in my paper.
But now I have another type of site to add to list, and not one that I originally gave much consideration to: online newspapers. Over the weekend, the
USA Today relaunched its website, not only to freshen up its look, but also to fundamentally change the ways the site works. According to the editors, the new features of the site will give readers the ability to:
Continue reading →
In Part 1 of this series, I argued that the Democratic Party seems to be gradually abandoning whatever claim it once had to being the party of the First Amendment. Regrettably, examples of Democrats selling out the First Amendment are becoming more prevalent and the few champions of freedom of speech and expression left in the party are getting more difficult to find.
For example, in my previous essay, I documented how Democratic politicians were leading the charge to reinstitute the so-called Fairness Doctrine. In today’s entry I will discuss how Democrats are now working hand-in-hand with Republicans to orchestrate what would constitute the most significant expansion of content regulation in decades–the regulation of “excessive violence” on television.
Continue reading →
The idea that the Democrats are the party of free speech and the great protectors of our nation’s First Amendment heritage has always been a bit of a myth. In reality, when you study battles over freedom of speech and expression throughout American history you quickly come to realize that there are plenty of people in both parties would like to serve as the den mothers of the American citizenry. That being said, it is generally true that there have been a few more voices in the Democratic party willing to stand in opposition to governmental attempts to regulate speech in the past.
But I’m starting to wonder where even that handful of First Amendment champions has gone. Sadly, examples of Democrats selling out the First Amendment are becoming so common that I’ve decided to start a new series to highlight recent examples of Dems actually leading the charge for increased government regulation of speech and expression. I want to stress that I’m not trying to pick on Democrats here, rather, I’m just trying to point out that–unless there is a sea change in their approach to these issues by Democrats in coming months and years–both parties now appear to be singing out of the same pro-regulatory hymnal. This constitutes an ominous threat to the future of free expression.
Today, as part of this new series, I’ll be focusing on the Democratic-led efforts to revive the hideously misnamed “Fairness Doctrine.”
Continue reading →
On Monday, October 9th, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-CT) delivered a major address about Internet content and online child safety that was intended to serve as a sort of call-to-arms for policymakers, parents and industry to get more serious about the issue.
In his wide-ranging remarks, Lieberman bemoaned the relentless pace of technological change and how the Internet and digital media technologies were making it increasingly difficult for parents to protect children from objectionable material or, worse yet, child predators. “The Internet is a wondrous, revolutionary medium,” Lieberman said. “But there is too often a thin line between the awe-inspiring and the simply awful, and with each new technological breakthrough, it seems that the opportunities for our children to fall into that awful gap grow greater and graver.”
In this essay, I will dissect Sen. Lieberman’s manifesto and provide a detailed response to his assertions and proposals. I feel this is necessary because his address touches on many of the major themes and proposals that are framing the debate over Internet regulation that is taking place in America today.
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.