Smut

(via Sivacracy)

Knee jerk legislation isn't limited to national security. Alice Marwick of U of Illinois at Chicago's First Monday details the sad, reactionary story of the Communications Decency Act (CDA):

On 3 July 1995, Time magazine published a photo of a horrified child on their cover with the tagline “Cyberporn: A new study shows how pervasive and wild it really is. Can we protect our kids — and free speech?” (Elmer–DeWitt, 1995). The article was precipitated by a new study released by Carnegie Mellon, one of the premiere computer science schools in the country. The study found that 83.5 percent of online images were pornographic, and that adult material available online was more extreme and problematic than its print and video equivalents (Rimm, 1995).

[snip]

The Cyberporn scare story and Rimm study gave concrete evidence to Exon’s claims that pornography ran rampant on the Internet, was readily available to children, and needed to be tightly controlled. The Time magazine story spawned a nation–wide media interest in the topic and the CDA passed the Senate 84–16. The Telecommunications Act, including the Exon Amendment, was signed into law by President Bill Clinton in 1996.

[snip]

The Rimm report, though, was far from a typical peer–reviewed scholarly source. Marty Rimm was a 30–year–old undergraduate at Carnegie Mellon (CMU) who had finagled publication in the Georgetown Law Journal by promising spectacular results in exchange for complete secrecy.

[snip]

Unfortunately for all parties involved, Rimm’s results were found to be a combination of shoddy social science methodology, questionable research ethics, and wishful extrapolation. Far from analyzing all online images, Rimm had looked solely at adult bulletin boards and the alt.binaries hierarchy of newsgroups, places where adult content was prevalent (Hoffman and Novak, 1995a; Mullin, 1996). Less than a month later, two marketing professors at Vanderbilt University wrote a lengthy critique of the study that threw its results into question. The 83.5 percent statistic which had prompted the Time story and fueled the entire cyberporn panic turned out to be largely made up (Hoffman and Novak, 1995b).

Ready, fire, aim.

The CDA got struck down, but remains a rallying cry for outraged conservatives who feel there's just way too much freedom going on out there. And the same forces that spawned CDA have not been idle:

This is of particular interest currently as a new Internet content bill, the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), is being debated in the U.S. Congress. The technopanic over “online predators” is remarkably similar to the cyberporn panic; both are fueled by media coverage, both rely on the idea of harm to children as the justification for Internet content restriction, and both have resulted in carefully crafted legislation to circumvent First Amendment concerns. Research demonstrates that legislation proposed — or passed — to curb these problems is an extraordinary response; it is misguided and in many cases masks the underlying problem.

No one's against protecting kids - but legislation that purports to defend children should be scrutinized as rigorously as one that that vilified them.

There's a big difference between what a bill says it will do, and what it would actually do if enacted.

It's a great report.