Self rating the web to fight censorship (long)

Oct 12 22:23 UTC 1996

I would like to encourage each person who maintains a web site here on 
GREX to consider submitting their site for rating -- even if there isn't 
anything even slightly objectionable on your site.

If we submit to a voluntary rating system like the motion picture 
industry has done for years, we cut the "achilles tendon" of the major 
arguments in favor of censorship on the web.

This is from http://www.rsac.org/why.html:

********************************

Rating the Sites
<Picture: RSAC>

Rating The Web 

Our aim in creating RSACi: RSAC on the Internet, was to provide a
simple, yet effective rating system for web sites which both protected
children and protected the rights of free speech of everyone who
publishes on the World Wide Web. 

Parental Controls 

We also designed a system based on the tried and tested content advisory
system used for computer games and one which could be simply understood
and set by parents at either the browser level (eg. Microsoft's Internet
Explorer 3.0) or blocking device (eg. CyberPatrol). We urge parents,
educators and other interested individuals to SET THE LEVELS at the
growing number of browsers and software devices that are designed to
read the RSACi labels. 

Content Providers 

Another essential part of this highly ambitious task, is to encourage
internet content providers of all kinds to use our voluntary,
self-disclosure rating system. There are a number of compelling reasons
why a provider or web master would rate with RSACi, not least that it
sends a clear signal to governments around the world, that the World
Wide Web is willing to self-regulate, rather than have the heavy hand of
government legislation decide what is or is not acceptable. 

Commercial Web Sites 

Commercial sites, with little or no objectionable material will want to
rate. When a parent sets the levels for their child, they will also be
offered an option that says, "Do not go to unrated sites". Most sites
want the maximum number of visits to justify advertising or other
related commercial activity. It would make good marketing sense for all
commercial sites to rate whether or not they have any content that could
be described as harmful. 

Protecting Free Speech 

RSACi has been an enthusiastic member of a number of initiatives that
would support the protection of free speech on the Web. We work closely
with PICS, the Platform for Internet Content Selection, based at MIT.
This standard format provides us the means by which our rating system
can be read by browsers and selection software around the world. 

We support the work of the Center for Democracy and Technology in their
efforts to persuade government to back away from ill-informed
legislation and action against the interests of a free Web. And we will
be taking our system to Europe and beyond in an effort to head off other
governments efforts to censor and limit the free flow of information and
exchange on the Internet. 

Setting The Levels 

Please have a look at the table below. It gives you, at a glance, the
four categories of the RSACi system with the five levels and their
descriptors. It is these levels that parents and other interested
individuals will set at their browser or blocking device. 

Please let us have your thoughts on RSACi. Contact us at: 
rsacinfo@rsac.org

------------------------------------------------------------------------
<Picture: RSAC>
Copyright ) 1994-1996 RSAC 

response 2 of 28:

Oct 13 10:08 UTC 1996

The day I "voluntarily" submit a creative work of mine to a review board such
as is suggested above will be the day after I voluntarily surrender my guns.
What an asinine suggestion.

response 4 of 28:

Oct 13 18:59 UTC 1996

Actually its past asinine....

response 6 of 28:

Oct 13 20:59 UTC 1996

Well, yeah; I'll share my reasoning.  First article of amendment to the United
States Constitution.  Try reading it some time.

response 8 of 28:

Oct 14 01:51 UTC 1996

Yeah.  Volentary, I'll do.  Legal contract, I won't.  I like to write and
maintain my own page.  For example, I have a humor page, that is a list of
isms with "Shit Happens" definitions.  I think, and have heard from a number
of people, that it's funny.  However, it has profanity galore. (It says "shit"
at least 100 times)  http://www-personal.umich.edu/~dang/inisms.html  How
would it be rated?  Would UM cancel it if it was rated too high?  Yuck.

response 10 of 28:

Oct 14 03:22 UTC 1996

Yes, that's an inherint problem slowly being recognized; a movie
is static, so you can just have a reviewer look at it once and
assign it a rating.  Network content is dynamic and so you can't
really do that; rating by impartial third parties is not very
feasible.

I'd also worry about the implicit legal stipulations, of course.
If you rate a web page as "OK for kids" and somebody somewhere
doesn't agree, can they sue you for corrupting minors or god
knows what else?  So self-rating also has its problems.

response 12 of 28:

Oct 15 09:44 UTC 1996

I definitely wouldn't care to encourage rating systems.  Yuck.

PICS is described in http://18.23.0.23/pub/WWW/PICS/.  A list of PICS
rating services (including RSACi) is in
http://www.classify.org/pics.htm.  Some of the links don't work (if you
ask me, a sure sign of information paranoiacs.) A list of software that
supports PICS is in http://www.microsys.com/pics/software.htm.  I didn't
see netscape in there, but perhaps some of these work with netscape.

response 14 of 28:

Oct 23 00:31 UTC 1996

For approximately 100,000 years, children in most parts of the world
have been exposed to every conceivable evil, uncensored.  Death,
disease, naked sex, war, adults at work & play, up close, in your face,
and personal.  Now, granted, these influences aren't always good,
nevertheless, I think it's a gross exaggeration to say these influences
are always bad, and I believe it would be much more nearly correct to
say that to totally exclude all of these elements is in itself
inherently unhealthy.  There seems to be plenty of evidence, for
instance, that children who don't see healthy examples of people who
love each other, people doing work, & so forth, end up having a much
harder time in relationships and in the workplace.  There also seems to
be evidence that people who are "sheltered" and do not receive exposure
to the less kind parts of the world, have trouble coping with it when
they discover those parts.  Some of those people even dive into the
crud, much as if it were a sort of dreadful disease against which they
have no resistance.  From everything I've heard, I gather that even very
young children have a very effective internal censor, and when exposed
to "adult" material, are quite capable of either filing away, or
ignoring, material which they aren't ready for yet.

This censorship move also of course poses an incredible risk for "the
rest of us" -- us adults who should presumably be responsible for the
material we see.  A recent very graphic example, about which plenty of
information is available today, is the "red scare" of the 50's, with the
accompanying black-listing of many hollywood stars.  Just as today, the
genesis of much of this system was at the instigation of the
politicians, who were investigating the perceived dangers of communism.
Just as people today perceive pornography as threatening the very fabric
of our existance, so communism was perceived back then.  The results of
black-listing was horrible, but it only directly affected a very small
percentage of people.  Censorship (even, or especially
'self-censorship') of the internet could have far more catastrophic
consequences for the society we live in.  It could very easily splinter
the society in which we live, causing people who actually believe in
freedom to give up on government and go underground, giving apparent
open reign to the forces of oppression and central control, and set the
stage for a future clash that could have truely terrifying consequences,
for all of us.

response 16 of 28:

Oct 23 06:08 UTC 1996

Of course, those young adults weren't paragons of virtue either, as
recorded in all the goings-on in the Greek and Roman societies. But I
agree with Marcus that an excessive fear of "bad influences" is
pathological. I think it is more important that parents be honest,
straightforward, loving, and able to interpret the world logically for
their children - which tends to bring up children with similar abilities.

response 18 of 28:

Oct 25 06:39 UTC 1996

I agree with some limits imposed by parents on what their children are allowed
to see, but a rating system is doomed !!
There is one simpel reason, besides of course that I don't feel the need for
laws that just cannot be imposed on such a scale: There is no one set of rules
that can be applied that everybody agrees with. Also, ther is a problem I
think, with limits: how to interpret them? Another reason for not setting up
such a system is that I think kids will not exclusively look for such material
when they are treated in a normal way and grow up in an environment where
violence and sex are not taboo, but can be discussed. Also, parents should
trust their kids and not try to continually check up on them. All of the above
does not mean that I am totally against rules, just that parents are the ones
that can best judge the individual set of rules for their kids. Government
has no place in setting up such rules or a rating system.

response 20 of 28:

Oct 25 15:26 UTC 1996

I think you miss some of the points I made: I am not against a rating system:
it indicates of some films what certain people think about them. The ratings
are an indication for parents, but no more: if they think that their children
of 14 can watch movies with a 16 rating that is up to them not to the people
who rate movies, and certainly not by people in video-rental stores. 
Within limits of course: if a kid of 8 wants to take out a movie rated 18,
in that case a video store-owner is, entitled to say no, in my opinion.
The same goes for the internet. But noone should be required by law, or else,
to rate their sites. 

response 22 of 28:

Nov 5 16:50 UTC 1996

Unfortunately most laws are made to deal with situations that make exceptions
dificult. A law that prohibits a video-salesman from selling a video
to a kid that is clearly younger than the age of the rating technically
also applies to situations where seniors are present. Such a law is
foolish though, if you are not always there when kids rent or watch 
video's. My point is: you cannot prevent kids from watching video's that are,
according to some governing body, unsuitable for them.

response 24 of 28:

Nov 11 00:31 UTC 1996

Movies are normally made and distributed by a fairly small number of
fairly large & well financed organizations.  The same goes for TV.
Whether justified or not, these markets make an easy target for
regulation & content restrictions.

The same cannot be said of web pages.  In most instances, web pages
represent nothing more than personal self-publication, and as such, are
kind of unprecedented in modern civilization.  To find the closest
examples, we have to go back to colonial and early independence america
(before 'In god we trust' appeared on US currency), where we find a
plethora of small newspapers, coffee shops, and all sorts of persons
going town to town doing lectures.  Back then, of course, people felt
strongly enough about keeping those avenues of expression unregulated
that specific guarantees were worded into the constitution.

I don't quite see how *any* form of content regulation, even sanitized
as "content rating", would fit in with individual self-publication,
without being so onerous as to amount to de facto censorship.