Internet Firms Launch New Web Rating System

Jeremi writes: "Salon has a brief article about a new content self-rating system being proposed to Congress in lieu of government-imposed restrictions. I wonder if this is a good thing or bad, and whether or not it will succeed where previous attempts failed?"

Comments

From a teaching point of view......

[vstat]

Coming from a future teacher I am divided on the issue of self assessment. On the one hand, students can be harder on themeselves when assessing because they know themselves better than a teacher does. They know their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to the task at hand. However in every bunch you will have those few students who always give themselves an A.

The point here?

I don't think you can rely solely on the industry to do it themselves. Especially where money is involved. Like a classroom there are mostly the good students who take it seriously, but I can tell you from experience that it only takes a few bad ones and an opportunity to corrupt the rest.

Great idea

[UserChrisCanter4]

(Please excuse US centered nature of post. I have no experience with foreign ratings systems)

Self-imposed rating systems have generally worked fairly well, with the bonus that they keep Congress off of the entertanment industry's backs.

Think about the Motion Picture Ratings Board. They're completely self-created. They rate the movies according to their standards. The movie theaters voluntarily choose whether they want to carry an NC-17 or Unrated film, and all goes well. As far as I know, the under 17 w/o parent at an 'R'-rated movie isn't a law, it's just something the theaters choose to follow.

Ditto for the ESRB (the guys that handle videogames). Completely voluntary, but it helps parents make a decision. I'd rather have 'M' slapped on the front of some Zombie game than Congress telling me there will be no zombie game.

I could see this working very well for Website rating. A simple HTML extension ([rating="13"]) could be picked up by the browser, and displayed/not displayed accordingly. Simple enough. And the pr0n sites can go on to advertise "Super XXX pr0n... there isn't a rating on the books bad enough for this stuff!!"

Re:Great idea

[2Flower]

Unfortunately, the movie rating system doesn't work well. Theatres rarely carry NC-17 or unrated films, under the assumption that they're pornography, which would get them in hot water.

As a result, dramas and other films which have nothing to do with pornography (ie, materials designed to stimulate) will never get proper exposure unless they are trimmed down to R rated levels. You could have the best movie ever made, oscar material up the wazoo, but definitely intended for a mature audience who can approach the concepts it explores in an adult fashion... but it better be R, or it's bad bad pr0n.

Websites will likely work the same way; if your site is rated too high, regardless of the INTENT of the site (sexual education materials, evidence of war atrocities in other counteries, etc) it'll be blacklisted.

Re:Great idea

[Black Art]

Volentary at the point of a gun.

Most, if not all, of the rating systems mentioned have been imposed out of fear that "if we do not do it, congress will do something worse". (What part of "Congress shall make no law" do they not understand? All of it, judging by their actions.) The implied threat of congresional action has been the driving force for every one of these censorship systems.
The MPAA's ratings were due to congresional hearings. So was the Comics Code. So was the record labels. So was the V-Chip.

Each was an attempt to supress material that some congresscritter did not like. (In violation of the constitution of the US and their oath of office.)

Taking complex material and rendering it into narror catergories of acceptability is what gave us Network television. Hopefully the web will not turn into something that bland and sanitized. Ratings will only accelerate that process.

It'll kill small sites through litigation

[ghostlibrary]

Oh, this is pretty clear, but not necessarily good.

Optional ratings. But the free filters will likely default to automatically blocking unrated sites. After all, the goal is clearly stated that they want to convince parents to install the software, ergo, they need the ratings to have value in order to convince them, ergo unrated sites have to be put down.

So site owners have to rate. But, aha, rating incorrectly will have to be made a crime, else those illegal pornographers will rate themselves as 'kid-friendly', dontchaknowit.

After all, if there isn't a _law_ forcing honest ratings, who can trust the ratings? They'll fail otherwise.

Then, with this law, hmm... we'll need a way to handle complaints and dispute ratings. Hey, they do a good job with those domain disputes and such, use a closed board like that. Heck, use the same WIFO!

Small sites then get "Your site was reported as illegally abusing the rating scheme with inaccurate ratings. Please reply to each complaint in this 20-page form within 10 days or your domain will be revoked."

Suddenly, small sites are either a) bogged down in paperwork or b) unrated and thus blocked by most browsers.

*sigh* And don't even get me started if they decide they don't need a top ratings board, that ratings can be enforced through 'local standard', i.e. any state can file in their state court to contest your site's ratings. Suddenly, small sites get suits in any state that disagrees with the site owner's interpretation of the ratings.

Then there's the world level...

Re:It'll kill small sites through litigation

[ghostlibrary]

We use server-side includes (SSIs) with our side, i.e. a standard header file for every page. Over 9000 pages, and I can change them all by editing one file.

So it would be very easy for me to add a uniform ratings tag to each and every page. You might want to consider such a system, it's easy to implement on most machines and really saves time when you need to do changes-- or even redesign the site.

You do raise a very good point, though-- what if each article you publish may have a different rating than 'the default'.

Does 1 article about sex mean the entire site is R-rated, or does per-article blocking take effect? I can see front pages that are (of course) 'G' rates even when the content is 'X'-- naturally a visitor to that site will obey the filtering of the lower pages.

So a child seeing the 'G' cover for "House of Goatsex" will no doubt say "oops, no need to alter the filter, I didn't want to go deeper" [err, bad choice of words there, but you get my meaning]

So will it be per-site or per-page? If per-page, you get the 'lure' factor above. If per-site, how do you rate geocities.com?

Ah, rating is always sticky.

Needs integration to succeed

[e5z8652]

IMHO this won't go very far unless browsers integrate the codes and let the user set levels of access similar to the security levels - i.e. no porn, but online casinos are OK.

As long as you need to download a list, too many people will be too lazy to do it, or just not computer literate enough to realize that they *can* download a list.

Then again, I wonder what percentage of users 1) know that their browser has security settings and 2) how to set them.

Self-Imposed Standards come and go

[Speare]

The Associated Press had a story also reprinted on salon.com, describing one view of the fall of the Comics Code Authority, a "self-imposed" ratings system that either turned all comics into pablum, or saved the industry, depending on who you ask.

• The Code was created in 1954, when comic books were read by many more children than they are today. A product of the McCarthy era's witch hunt for "unAmerican" activities, the major comic book companies adopted the Code as a form of self-regulation to avoid sanctions from a Senate committee investigating the corrupting impact of comics on America's youth.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Or, if you can't learn from history, you're doomed to repeat it.

Re:So...

[w.p.richardson]

Hrmmmm....

Guess it depends on what threshold you have:
-1 = XXX
0 = X
1 = R
2+ = PG-13

Yet Another Censorship Plan...

[Black Art]

This is yet more of the same. They seem to believe that if there are little labels on everything, then those things that they do not like can be blocked.

Previous attempts at this have failed. This one will too. They will try again with yet another plan. Loop until universe ends.

TV ratings and the V-Chip were a way to "save our children", Now the groups that pushed for them are upset that noone but them are using them to block what kids see.

What these people really want is for all content *they* find objectionable to be driven off the net. (Be it porn, descriptions of anti-social behaviour, criticism of their religious beliefs, people who are not good liberals/conservitives/communists/Americans(tm)/wh atever, and anything else that twigs them at a given moment.)

They use children as an excuse. It is not the children they wish to protect, but their own fragile sensibilities.

What they do not believe in is the right to freedom of speech, freedom of thought or freedom of action for anyone other than themselves.

Childhood is supposed to be a time to train children to be adults. What happens to these kids when they get out into the unfiltered world on their own? The answers seem to be overindulgence in the things that they were forbidden to do by their parents. This leads to a bunch of self-destructive adults.

Seems to me that filters are a panecia for parents who are afraid or unable to teach their children about the real world.

Re:Yet Another Censorship Plan...

[Masem]

Where is censorship coming into this???

No one is telling sites that might not be meeting 'high ethical standards' to go away, nor is the group pushing that filtering MUST be made available in the browser or that everyone had to install a filter.

Instead, they want a way to rate sites (as rated by the site owner, not a third party) such that those that would *LIKE* to install filters have a more informed choice as to what the filters will block, instead of relying on closed filter lists made up by another company. And as I have read it, there will be both exclusionary filters (don't visit sites that have certain ratings), as well as inclusionary filters (visit sites that ONLY have certain ratings), and that these filters can be piggy-backed onto each other to give those that would want to use filters a selection to choose from.

But since *you* don't feel like using filters, then you'll still be able to go to any site you want, and they will still be able to deliver the content they have to you.

So where is the censorship???

Will libraries (already very opposed to closed-list filters) accept this? Maybe; but certainly making sure that their cliental understand filters are not perfect and that because it is self-rated, some sites might slip through. But this will give libraries better options to have filtered computers in the kids section, and unfiltered ones for adults to use.

In addition, the ratings are more detailed that than of TV (which in turn are more detailed than that of movies). Is a reference on a page to sexual reproduction in the context of health, or in the context of erotica? That will be covered by the ratings, so that those pages that felt they were unfairly on filters blacklists before know that they can specify their content more exactly.

There is no censorship here. Given that nearly every part of this plan is volentary with no force of law behind it, I cannot see any connection.

Re:"Lack of censorship" is a public good

[MxTxL]

The problem is that pr0n operators will ALL want these ratings. Don't believe me? There are two compelling reasons. First, the raunchier and nastier and worse rated the site is, the more traffic it will get, that's a fact. Second, and more importantly, the pr0n sites actually do want kids off of their sites. Why? Because kids don't have credit cards. If they don't have credit cards, they aren't paying to see their pr0n, they are just eating up bandwidth. Nobody wants their bandwidth eaten up. There would be no financial reason to mislabel their sites as kid friendly.

Now, the real problem with this is that it does open the door for government regulation. If site owners accept a voluntary rating system, and everything goes well, pretty soon there will be a mandated system, and not too long after that, the sites that are somewhat controversial, but speak about important issues are then censored.

RSAC

[istartedi]

The article says it's just a re-hashed version of something that's been around for a while, and by that I assume they are referring to RSAC.

I don't see anything wrong with this. It's NOT censorship. TV programs have to label their content. Sure it's cryptic (quick, what's TV MPVD got in it?), but it doesn't stop people who don't care from watching the program. If something like RSAC became the standard for rating, it wouldn't stop people from viewing porn either. It would be the internet equivalent of labeling.

We already expect labeling for TV programs and food, why not on-line content? The only real problem I have with it is that it's a hassle for small web-sites, which is why I expect these systems haven't caught on too well. I mean, as a general rule I don't have "trash" on my site, but if I feel the need to post frontal nudity to make a point about something, or say "fuck" somwhere, I don't want to have to worry about losing my content rating.

So for me, the choice is "be on gaurd all the time" or "not care about content rating". So far, the former has been the more appealing choice and I expect it's like that for most people.

What they need is a category for sites where the content is "not for children" but on the other hand is "not catering strictly to the prurient interest". In other words, simple categories like G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17, X, XX, XXX and XP (the P stands for Puke). RSAC is just too complicated; it tries to do "fine grained" content filtering.

Of course another big problem with all this is that there is simply too much content on the net. It's one thing for volunteers to rate movies and TV; there are only so many hours of it per year. Rating the net would just take way too long. So, we are left either with people rating their own stuff, or companies trying to rate it. Everybody has their own opinion about where the cut-off for a particular rating is, so there is no way to trust the rating. Even if there were, you can't put any legal teeth to it because content providers would have to open themselves up for a law suit. So, the content provider is still going to choose "not rated" as their rating.

The bottom line? Teach your children well; and let them live in fear of the librarian seeing something over their shoulder, just like we lived in fear of the teacher finding our stash.

Re:RSAC

[istartedi]

Slashdot is the perfect example of why ratings systems don't work. You can't really rate Slashdot. You'd have to rate individual posts. After all, each post is under the editorial control of the poster, not Slashdot. In a sense, Slashdot is a tiny little internet, and it already has its own form of filtering--moderation.

Of course unlike with a filter, Slashdot does not provide any way for the "parent" to keep the "child" from reading posts that have been moderated down. Many would argue that filters don't either. :)

However, if you backed me into a corner and forced me to rate Slashdot, I'd give it a PG. That's because it's not a "kiddy" site. It sometimes displays or links to material that ought to be in a more restricted category, but such material is almost always moderated down. In fact, Slashdot may actually teach a valuable lesson in that regard. The young reader probably develops some sense of what the community at large considers acceptable. Of course you can *link* to anything and presumeably rating on the other site would take care of it.

I guess, now that I think about it, the analogy to use is walking through the neighborhood. You don't keep your kid from going to the store because he might hear a stranger use dirty words. So, if the express purpose of the mailing list, newsgroup, or weblog is PG in nature, then it should be rated PG even though people sometimes abuse it.

And yes, that doesn't keep kids from using the group to exchange porn, just as they couldn't keep us from accessing some parent's stash "back in the day". So, to reiterate... ratings are just not very practical, which is why I don't like them... but they help us to maintain a certain fiction... which in strict logical terms is useless, but it probably serves a social function. After all, wasn't part of the thrill knowing you were doing something bad?

Re:Porn sites? No way!

[MxTxL]

Actually, pr0n sites want as many paying customers as humanly possible, since this is the only way to earn money. Even with banner ads and through refferrals and all that, someone somewhere has to have a credit card and pay to get his pr0n. Kids have no credit cards and thus are not the people that the pr0n sites are after. If they are not paying, all they are doing is eating up bandwidth which, for pr0n sites, is really expensive since they pay a premium for pr0n bandwidth.

Besides, the worse rating they have, the better they can say their content is. Look we have a XXX rating, the nastiest stuff on the net!

Well...

[UserChrisCanter4]

I can see your point, but as we all know, the web is very different.

I, for one, have seen plenty of Unrated films at theaters. It's just not at AMC-type super mega-plexes (think Yahoo, Go.com, etc.). It's always been at the local "arthouse" cinema (think the small-time website that earns maybe 1,000 to 5,000 hits in a month). Sure, those small-time film makers rarely earn Lucas or Michael Bay make, but their stuff DOES get shown.

And really, haven't all the major websites pretty much dumped "adult" material altogether (with the exception of maybe pulling them up in a search)?

The Net != Corporate Entertainment

[dcollins]

The examples where self-ratings have previously worked are basically the fairly centralized entertainment media of movies, music, comic books and to an extent, TV (suddenly I can't remember seeing those ratings for TV shows in a while).

I can see very large differences which distinguish these projects from something like an internet website, namely, (1) they're all done by a limited set of corporations, (2) they're all done expressly for profit, (3) they're basically all done in some class of retail outlets that can apply pressure on the manufacturers to comply or be ostracized.

Publishing on the web doesn't resemble these kinds of things, I think, even in the majority of cases to date. Anyone can publish a web site nowadays, and desire for as huge a customer base as possible is not a compelling motivation in a lot of cases.

I may be reaching, but I tend to think that the act of publishing on the web is more akin to sending a piece of postal mail, or using a photocopier to make some cheap posters or pamphlets. It's just too widespread, accessible, and low-impact for a lot of the practicioners to be concerned about being compliant with some categorization system for their website. There's no "website industry" as such to reach an agreement and take universal action in this regard, as there has been for the other self-rating programs which have to date succeeded.

"Adult content"

[Animats]

I'm tempted to mark one of my math-filled theory papers as "adult content" and see if the hit count goes up.