Bigots’ Growing Use of Computer Networks Assailed
Alarmed by the growing presence of hate groups in cyberspace, the Simon Wiesenthal Center Tuesday sent a letter to the Prodigy on-line computer service protesting the “continued use of Prodigy by bigots to promote their agendas of hate.”
The Los Angeles-based center said it has tracked increasing activity over the last few months by more than 50 hate groups using on-line services and the popular Internet global computer network. “More and more of these groups are embracing and utilizing the information superhighway,” said Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean of the center. “The slurs are the same but the venue is different.”
The center called on commercial on-line services to keep hate groups out and proposed that the government play a similar policing role on the amorphous Internet. Of particular concern, Cooper said, is that young people could be exposed to white supremacy in an environment unmediated by teachers, parents or librarians. Much of the activity takes place on open electronic forums accessible to anyone with an Internet account or a subscription to a commercial service.
About 20 million computer users are connected to the Internet, and another 5 million use commercial on-line services, including more than 2 million on Prodigy.
But civil libertarians--and white supremacists themselves--say that cyberspace, like any other medium of expression, must remain open to free speech. And in an uncharted territory where the rules of engagement are still unformed, the center’s offensive is sure to sharpen the ongoing debate over electronic censorship.
“It’s a genuinely difficult problem,” says Marc Rotenberg, director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, an on-line civil liberties organization. “And there are no paradigms to turn to.”
It’s a problem that is quickly becoming relevant to a lot more people. All sorts of enterprises, from businesses to charity organizations, have been rushing to get hooked up to computer networks, which offer fast, convenient communication at increasingly lower prices.
But for white supremacist groups like the National Alliance and the American Renaissance, cyberspace offers benefits that are proportionately far greater.
Marginalized by traditional media and short on funds, hate groups have been learning to use low-cost on-line communications to gain recruits and spread propaganda across state and even national boundaries, giving them access to a far wider audience than they have historically been able to reach.
Valerie Fields, for example, a West Los Angeles resident and political junkie, signs on to her Prodigy account a few times a week to read the discussion of local politics. Last month, she clicked her way into the “News” forum to find an anti-Latino diatribe that closed with a plug for a $20 subscription to the newsletter of Louisville, Ky.-based American Renaissance.
“Around the election the messages about (Prop.) 187 got pretty nasty,” Fields said. “But then I saw this one that seemed to be from an organized white supremacist group, and that really freaked me out.”
The message Fields saw, and several others, including one that referred to “The Diary of Anne Frank” as a “Jewish hoax” prompted the Wiesenthal Center to ask Prodigy to strengthen its guidelines to delete such messages from its boards.
“We’re having a discussion with them,” Prodigy spokesman Brian Ek said Tuesday afternoon. “Our feeling is we already have a good system in place. But we have more than 1.7 million notes on the board at any given time, and we can’t read them all.”
Prodigy was the focus of controversy involving anti-Semitic comments in 1991, and worked with the Anti-Defamation League at the time to craft a policy that forbids “blatant expressions of hatred” on its boards. All messages are also run through a computer that scans for obscenities before they are posted. But Cooper says the service should look more carefully at messages that target groups rather than individuals.
Prodigy is not the only on-line service to be utilized by hate groups.
Kevin Strom, who produces a weekly radio show for the National Alliance, and has been active on-line, said he was recently blocked from the “Political” and “Issues” forums on Compuserve.
“Apparently somebody complained that our articles were bashing ethnic minorities,” Strom says. “So the system operator decided we didn’t deserve freedom of speech.”
Strom says the articles he posted on the forums were among those which users transferred most frequently to their home computers. One titled “The Wisdom of Henry Ford,” which reviewed the book “The International Jew,” was downloaded 120 times one week, he said.
Compuserve leaves the decision of what to screen out to the individual “sysops” who are hired to moderate the service’s discussion forums. Says Georgia Griffith, the Politics sysop: “We don’t block users for what they believe or say, but how they say it. The First Amendment allows people to publish what they choose, but we are not obliged to publish it for them.”
The legal issue of who is ultimately responsible for what does get “published” on-line is a thorny one that has yet to be entirely resolved.
A federal judge ruled in 1991 that Compuserve was like a bookstore owner who could not be held accountable for the contents of books on his shelves--a precedent the on-line services support.
But activists say there are ethical issues at stake, which public opinion can help to enforce--at least in the private sector.
The Internet, a web of several hundred computer networks not owned by any one enterprise, is a more difficult proposition. Cooper wrote a letter to Federal Communications Chairman Reed E. Hundt last summer suggesting that it “may be time for the FCC to place a cop on the Superhighway of Information.”
But such an effort would involve significant technical difficulties, and would also likely encounter vehement opposition from civil liberties groups who want to preserve the Internet as a democratic forum that provides open.
Because of its anarchic structure, the Internet has generally been viewed as a “common carrier” much like the telephone company, which cannot be held liable for what passes over its lines.
“That would be a very dangerous path to go down,” says EPIC’s Rotenberg. It would lead to an extraordinary amount of censorship and control that would be very inappropriate.”
Discussion groups geared toward white supremacist propaganda on the Internet have labels such as “skinheads,” “revisionism” and “vigilantes.” The Institute for Historical Review recently set up a site on the World Wide Web portion of the Internet, where some of its literature can be obtained for free. A document called “Frequently Asked Questions about National Socialism” is available at several sites.
The computer commands used on the Internet also allow users to access information anonymously, which far-right activists say helps many to overcome the inhibitions they might have about signing up.
The National Alliance rents space on a computer at Netcom On-line Communication Services, one of the largest Internet access providers in California, where texts of its radio programs are available. It has also posted flyers on the Internet promoting its radio show, urging readers to send “minority parasites packing to fend for themselves” and condemning community development funding as support for black “breeding colonies.”
“We’ve seen a huge growth in use of the Internet by our people,” says Alliance Chairman William Pierce. “The major media in this country are very biased against our political point of view. They present us with ridicule or in a very distorted way. The information superhighway is much more free of censorship. It’s possible for a dedicated individual to get his message out to thousands and thousands of people.”
