Fight Internet Censorship

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Jonathan Wallace, publisher of The Ethical Spectacle, didn’t know why his site was being blocked by the “filtering” program CYBERsitter, which was designed to keep minors from accessing objectionable materials online. He wrote to the manufacturer, Solid Oak Software, to find out why — and claims that the company responded by sending him threatening e-mails.

We were surprised at Wallace’s complaint, since when we had written to Solid Oak to ask why The MoJo Wire was being blocked, we received a polite reply from the company’s president and were immediately unblocked. But our own inquiry about The Ethical Spectacle was not as successful.

We received a seemingly automated reply rejecting “unsolicited e-mail that is intended to be harrassing.” Further attempts to contact the company resulted in the same automated e-mail or no reply at all, suggesting that, while Solid Oak may not be harrassing Wallace in particular, they are certainly on the defensive when it comes to questions about their blocking policies.

A marketing representative for Solid Oak says that the blocking of The Ethical Spectacle was “…very simple: they contain or have links to sites that contain hacking information.” Wallace believes that he was censored not for his coverage of issues of law, ethics, and politics, but for mirroring a critique of CYBERsitter. The article in question originated on Peacefire, an anti-censorship student group which exposed how CYBERsitter blocked “indecent” information like NOW‘s home page, the entire WELL online community, even Yahoo searches for “gay rights” or “women’s issues.” (Solid Oak explained their previous blocking of The MoJo Wire by citing “educational customer complaints (9) for gay/lesbian issues.”) Solid Oak says it banned Peacefire for advocating no parental control on the Internet.

Solid Oak’s criteria for blocking includes not only sites that directly contain objectionable material — such as pornography, information on drugs, computer hacking, or other illegal activities — but by “any site maintaining links to other sites containing any of the above content.” I guess we’ll soon find out if linking to a blocked site is enough to get blocked (again).

Peacefire’s “online car wash”

Peacefire is one of fifteen plaintiffs in the ACLU‘s lawsuit against the New York Communications Decency Act. To help defray the costs of this lawsuit, Peacefire is recruiting Web-savvy youth (and their allies) to write Web pages.

If you can volunteer to write HTML, Java, CGI, graphics, etc., or if you’re a potential customer who would like to get a home page on the Web for only $10/hour and contribute to the ACLU legal fund against the New York CDA at the same time, Peacefire needs you. E-mail bennett@peacefire.org if you’d like to get involved.

And e-mail Solid Oak at support@solidoak.com or bmilburn@solidoak.com if you’d like to try to express an opinion about CYBERsitter.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate