Porn & The Net - what's special about Usenet
David Newman, of Queen's University, Belfast, examines how most pornography
is transmitted on the Internet and options for control.
November 1996
Current concerns
Yet another scare story about computers and pornography has hit British
tabloids like the Observer, after the Metropolitan Police Vice Squad has
written to companies providing Internet services suggesting that they censor
some of their services. Let's try and separate different issues.
Two years ago there were a lot of articles about the availability of pornographic
images on disc, or downloaded from bulletin boards by children. At that
time, an M.Sc. student here studied all the arguments raised, and showed
that they were rehearsing arguments previously raised about every other
medium: books and magazines, theatre, radio and TV. People dissatisfied
with the previously established compromises were using the new medium to
reopen settled arguments, sometimes allied with psychological attitudes
to computers (fear of machines vs. inevitable progress).
Separate from this are the issues raised that are specific to the particular
technology used. "Porn on the net" is about as meaningful as "Porn
on paper". The Internet is merely the wires joining networks of computers
together, like a telephone system for data. Over the Internet, we can communicate
with other human beings in a number of quite different ways, such as real-time
chat (a kind of typed CB radio), browsing the Web and Usenet. People like
the Metropolitan Police Vice Squad and Observer journalists get these confused.
So what's special about Usenet?
In the 17th Century, Samuel Hartlib corresponded with most of the scientists
in Europe. He employed copyists to write out copies of the letters he received
and send them on to his contacts interested in the same things. They were
interested in all human knowledge, in particular the experiments and ideas
that led to the founding of the first scientific societies such as the Royal
Society of London. His papers are archived at Sheffield University. But
once the Royal Society started publishing journals, scientists no longer
needed to engage copyists to keep in touch. They relied on central publication,
with editors and printers.
How Usenet works
Now in the 20th Century, we are using computer networks to do what Hartlib's
copyists did in the 17th century. Sending one person's short messages to
exactly those people interested in the subject. We write our messages in
a newsreader, then newsservers copy them and send them on to the next server,
then the next, until they get around the world. For 20 years, people with
special interests, like Artificial Intelligence or keeping cats, have used
this system, called Usenet, to converse about their pet (sorry) subject,
and get answers from the world's experts in their on-line club.
This is not publishing in the normal industry sense of the word. There is
no central journal editor or printer. The computers forward everything.
They do not understand the contents of the message, any more than the illiterate
copyists in early monasteries who copied manuscripts as drawings without
understanding the latin words within them. Unlike the monks, after a few
days they delete the messages (to free up file space). Our server only keeps
messages for two days. So Usenet messages are also ephemeral.
Those who treat the automatic forwarding of individual letters or messages
as publishing clearly understand neither the technical nor social nature
of Usenet. To talk about "pornography existing on the net" in
this context, is like talking about "pornography existing within the
post office". It is hard to see how anyone running a newsserver can,
with existing software, exercise control and responsibility for the contents
of hundreds of thousands or millions of messages passing through the server
on the way to the next stop, any more than a mobile telephone company.
The Philadelphia Court judges who declared the Communications Decency Act
unconstitutional described communications over the Internet as a big, continuous,
worldwide conversation. This certainly applies to Usenet newsgroups and
the way people use them. We post messages asking questions, giving information
or whatever then someone comments publicly on the message, someone else
takes it up, and an argument develops.
Uses for Usenet
Over a few weeks, several different discussions start, grow and decline,
like conversations during an evening at the pub. Socially, most newsgroups
seem like more or less sedate versions of the conversations we hold at academic
conference coffee breaks, pubs, football matches or London clubs (from the
Reform Club to specialist S&M venues). If we need real world analogies
to Usenet discussions, I would think of pubs, Cambridge Union debates, and
experimental theatre where the audience gets involved, not publishing. You
could think of each group as different Edinburgh Festival venue, where a
performance takes place for an hour or so, then gets emptied for the next
one. Maybe we should be looking to apply theatrical censorship standards?
What people discuss depends on the nature of the group, as Usenet has developed
a far more specialised and sophisticated classification scheme than the
cruder ones we use for magazines: General, Sports, Womens, Computing, top
shelf, sex shop. Talk and pictures about feet in alt.sex.fetish.feet does
not interest me. But it is available for those people who are turned on
by feet, instead of having to find a specialist club in a big city (which
is hard if you are disabled and housebound). Thanks to this, readers of
Usenet can choose what kind of material to read, and avoid that which offends
them.
But since anyone can post to any group, from time to time we find people
posting things that others object to (e.g. hundreds of chain letter money-making
schemes). This is normally controlled like an offensive remark in a pub.
Other people complain, shaming the offender into changing his behaviour.
As the numbers of posters and messages increased we may need to develop
better ways of handling such social problems.
One way is by the application of laws to set limits on social behaviour.
So there is a law against assault which helps prevent pub arguments degenerating
into physical violence (something that cannot happen when the person you
are arguing with is behind a computer half-way around the world). We usually
apply such laws to the individual offender, not the pub landlord.
People posting messages on Usenet are clearly responsible for what they
write. They have been sued for libel and copyright infringement, and can
be made responsible for posting images that would be illegal to pass around
to people in the pub, or for setting up confidence tricks. Police can set
up squads to track down who posted messages which break particular laws,
and charge them. Traditional investigation techniques like infiltrating
groups work on-line as well as they do face-to-face, and Usenet messages
leave trails or paths showing where they were posted (just like letters).
Control of Usenet
The current brouhaha is not about individual responsibility for messages
posted on Usenet, but about a request to get the ISPs to change the way
they administer Usenet to prevent particular messages being posted and/or
read. There are two questions: what can they do? and what ought they to
do?
Tracking users
They could help the police track down the local posters of messages illegal
under the relevant nation's law. This is something many would do already
when searching for hackers. They ethical questions come when dealing with
anonymised messages like the tips sent to journalists: under European law,
journalists' sources are protected. But apart from this proviso, this should
be a promising line of approach, since child pornographers using Usenet
are more easily traceable than those using the post, and more easily deceived
by undercover detectives posing as paedophiles.
Stop passing newsgroups
The ISPs could stop passing on particular newsgroups. Unfortunately, anyone
in the world can post any message to any newsgroup. This leads to two problems.
In any newsgroup, no matter how serious, there will be the occasional posting
of say, a picture of bestiality. So if a newsgroup is stopped as soon as
an illegal message appears, very quickly most of Usenet will have been closed
down, cutting off our country from the professional discussions that maintain
the competitiveness of our newest information industries (rather like Japan
at the time they allowed no westerners to enter).
Or we could merely cut out the newsgroups whose purpose is illegal (such
as the few set up for the distribution of erotic images of children). Unfortunately,
the people posting to that group can easily start posting to another (which
is why there are hard-core pornographic images turning up in alt.disney).
The one thing that can be done at the group level is to supply specialised
newsreaders or other software to parents that prevent some of the newsgroups
from being read by their children.
Classify and/or filter individual messages.
This is not possible with current technology: except at the level of searching
for keywords, and not showing an article to children if it contains a word.
on the banned list. I hope that such software will improve on current levels
of intelligence that cut out all references to Scunthorpe (idiot programmers
on America On-line didn't even think to check for where words start and
end) or beer (American suppliers of lists of banned WWW sites apply their
standards on alcohol to CAMRA sites in the UK).
However, there is a general need for some way of rating the quality of the
floods of messages coming over Usenet each day, so that readers do not waste
so much time finding the one useful message in masses of American college
student postings. Solutions to this problem could also help with rating
pornography on Usenet.
Now since Usenet is distributed and ephemeral, central rating agencies are
impractical. There are no central publishers to send in material for rating,
and there are too many messages posted daily for any professional group
of reviewers to read more than a miniscule proportion. So instead we can
try what papers do at the Edinburgh Festival. They have lots of amateur
reviewers going around. I could read several reviews of the same play, and
make up my mind which to trust. Similarly, all experimental Usenet rating
systems rely on readers voluntarily rating any message they read. By collecting
the opinions of many readers, the systems calculate an average score for
the message.
Most of these systems rate messages from very bad to very good. When dealing
with pornography, there are two types of rating that might be useful. The
first is a minimum recommended age (like in films). If each Usenet message
had a Minimum-age: header, then children's newsreaders could use it to prevent
them seeing messages intended for adults. The second type of useful rating
would be one indicating the actual specialised area of the message (e.g.
sexual preference, body part, equipment or whatever). Then the reader's
newsreader could skip messages containing keywords of things not to his
or her taste, thus avoiding having to clean vomit off the keyboard. There
already is a keyword header in Usenet that could be used for this purpose.
How would the messages get the ratings? Well there are several ways of doing
this, but here is a suggestion. The initial poster fills in keywords and
a suggested minimum age. At present readers of Usenet messages can from
their newsreader software post a reply that appears in the group. So how
about allowing a different kind of comment or reply: a review message. The
reader fills in his or her recommended minimum age, any extra keywords needed
to better describe the message, and a rating of how important, or relevant
or novel or well-argued the message is. This could generate a special kind
of Usenet control message, a review message, which passes from server to
server around Usenet. The servers could then combine the keywords into a
long list, and average all the ratings, putting the results into the headers
of the reviewed message.
Such an approach could both save busy people time in reading Usenet, and
help parents protect their children for material that needs more maturity
to be appreciated. It would however take some time to develop and test such
a modification of Usenet. Given the small numbers of people reading Usenet
in the UK at present (only 1.5% of the people look at the Worldwide Web,
which is much more popular than Usenet), isn't it better to fund research
into Usenet rating and wait a bit, rather than to be paniced into closing
down part of Usenet now without actually actually affecting the amount of
pornography on it?
Dr. David R. Newman
Queen's University
School of Management
Belfast BT7 1NN
Northern Ireland.
mailto:d.r.newman@qub.ac.uk
http://www.qub.ac.uk/f&info/staff/dave/index.html