The American Spectator

Special Report

Banned by AOL

By Kathy Shaidle on 12.22.03 @ 12:05AM

For more than three years, I've run a weblog about religion, politics -- the usual non-dinner-table topics. And each December, regular as Rudolph, I diss Kwanzaa.

The fake "African harvest festival" (invented by a Marxist black supremacist ex-con in 1972) is now celebrated by school kids in place of Hanukah and Christmas. Call me crazy, but I don't like that one bit. So earlier this month, I knocked off a bit of doggerel about Kwanzaa and posted it to my site.

That's when the spam hit the filter. Or something. I'm still trying to figure out exactly how my poem and I became two of America Online's most wanted.

A few days after I posted the poem, a site called Bressler.org promoted it on the front page. I was flattered, then troubled by an anonymous message in the comments section:

A string of number-heavy headers follows, but one phrase stands out in plain English:

Wow! -- my stupid poem, my puny blog, deemed "offensive" by a colossal corporation. My first reaction was that "Banned by AOL" would look great on my homepage. Then I started to wonder, as the anonymous commenter had: Does AOL censor email? And if so how? When and why? Come to think of it, Is that even legal? What constitutes "a high volume of complaints" and who is doing the whining?

IRONICALLY, MY E-MAIL INQUIRIES to AOL bounced back. Their online Customer Service form didn't work, either. While waiting for a media contact to return my call (she never did) I made like a professional journalist and Googled, "AOL + sucks."

That led me to David Cassell.

"AOL has a reputation for censorship," says Cassell, who should know. He's run the AOL Watch Newsletter since 1996. "AOL uses [its Parental Controls feature] as a marketing device, touting their ability to restrict children's level of internet access. There's just one problem with that. In any attempt to censor, there's 'collateral damage.'"

Cassell reels off a list of infamous incidents:

New York Times Times

A woman wrote a book of online dating tips called You've Got Male. She filed a lawsuit in 2000 alleging that AOL was blocking their members from accessing her web site, Youve-Got-Male.com Reuters reported that AOL had earlier demanded she stop selling the book and to never re-print it.

In 2000, CNET News reported that AOL's "youth filters" were preventing young surfers from accessing liberal websites; "your children can easily view the site of the Republican National Committee," Brian Livingston reported at the time, "but the Democratic National Committee is blocked."

But those are chat rooms and websites. Cassell has fewer documented examples of email "censorship" -- which may in fact simply be nothing more than an overly sensitive spam filter in action. Then again, he says, "AOL blocked delivery of my AOL Watch newsletter to its 25,000 subscribers on AOL. That particular edition had included the phone number for canceling your AOL accounts."

Letter to the Editor

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