Internet Filters - Libertarianism is Hate Speech?

John Deere asks: "Just went live with a libertarian web-based discussion site a few days ago and today one of our members posted that our news and political discussion site has been listed as a 'Hate Speech' site by SurfControl ("details) Needless to say, some of our slacker members are now unable to access the site, due to blocks at their places of employment. Now, I don't mind our site being blocked by employers who want to keep their employees working instead of arguing objectivism vs. utilitarianism. It does concern me, however, that it appears to be quite easy to be listed as a 'Hate Speech' site, and not have much recourse. My questions are, has anyone been successful in changing the categorization of their site by one of these filtering services, from negative to neutral or positive? How much pressure was required and how long did it take?" It would be interesting to note how many GOP and Democratic sites are also listed under the same tag at SurfControl. I have a hard time seeing political discourse being listed as hate speech, but maybe this is a case of a single comment or post getting the entire site banned. Has anyone been able to negotiate a change of status with the various filtering services out there? If not, is there any legal way such changes can be forced by some form of arbitration or legal action?

Comments

Re:Gee, I wonder...

[vipw]

the heading of the story that you speak of:

A columnist from the state-controlled Saudi newspaper Al-Jazirah recently re-asserted the claim that Jews use human blood in baked goods when preparing for holiday celebrations, according to a translation of the column by the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, an independent, nonprofit organization that analyzes the media of the Middle East.

The story was about a Saudi newspaper article. The opinion of jews held by the arabic countries is actually pretty important, as you may be aware, israel is mostly jewish and is locked in a cultural, economic, and sometimes military struggle with it's arabic and islamic neighbors.

Anyway, I read through the posts curious as to what the hell you were talking about, and the major discussion was about the importance of the newspaper and the validity of the translation. And then the discussion shifted to sausages and hot dogs. The mention of the allegation of jewish involvement in the 9/11 attacks was to highlight another case of xenophobia.

Maybe you should work on your reading comprehension and read whole sentances instead of just the smaller phrases.

Re:Gee, I wonder...

[BitGeek]

What do you expect from slashdot? /. is a collection of people who go on and on about "freedom" and "free" yet violently oppose the party that actually advocates liberty.

Thats why I call gnu "Free as in totalitarian"... in this crowd when they say "Free" they're talking about such bastions of "freedom" as stalin, marx and lenin.

Mention that someone made some money in the 90s and you get pages and pages about how they should be propping up dictatorships in east africa by sending them food to withhold from the starving in their country because "we all should care for each other, especially care for those nice brutal dictators that work so hard to keep people oppressed."

You'd think people running linux would be libertarian, or would at least understand libertarianism. But you'd be wrong.