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Illinois Bill Would Ban Social Networking Sites
AlexDV writes "Library blogger Michael Stephens is reporting that an Illinois state senator, Matt Murphy (R-27, Palatine), has filed a bill that 'Creates the Social Networking Web site Prohibition Act. Provides that each public library must prohibit access to social networking Web sites on all computers made available to the public in the library. Provides that each public school must prohibit access to social networking Web sites on all computers made available to students in the school.' Here is the bill's full text."
This local effort harks back to an attempt last May to get federal legislation banning school and library use of social networking sites (Wikipedia summary here). The DOPA bill passed the House but died in the Senate.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, ... oh nevermind.
Wizard Needs Food, Badly
Good for him. Have you been to the library lately? Just try to get some work done on a computer there during the first few hours after school lets out. Every computer is some punk 15 year old on MySpace. Let's get library computers doing what they should be doing: helping people with legitimate research. Not helping emo kids whine about their girlfriends.
By my reckoning, this leaves you with FTP sites that have no upload facility, the few remaining Gopher servers, and maybe the local taxi cab company.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
It's about controlling free speech and information dissemination. When there are vast networks of information distribution controlled by the people, that raises eyebrows.
okinawa japan
Seriously speaking, what percentage of parents are terrified of social networking sites these days? I remember back in the 90s when everybody thought the internet was out to seduce and corrupt their children, but this is 2007. You can find worse things in google than found on most social networking sites. So how many people are really still afraid of these mysterious-yet-elusive "internet predators"?
Most of the legislators at the state level are those who aren't even smart enough to make it into the US Congress (and considering some of the blithering idiots who have infested that institution, that's saying something.)
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Lets stop fooling around and do it right!
(Global proposition 999)
People are responsible for the most dangerous and irresponsible acts that can be committed against other people. I propose we ban "people" all together. Stop repeating a history of mistakes and destroy the worlds problems in one fell swoop. End people. They rape, torture, kill without regard for themselves or others. All over the world people are forced to jail people in order to protect themselves, yet the problems continue. They have children, abuse the children, who intern have more children with no end of abuse in site. Their is no way to ensure a person will never mistreat another person unless all people are banned from existence.
So in conclusion, the only way to provide a safe loving environment for the future of our world is... the immediate and complete removal of all people from the face of the earth. Please support proposition 999 for a people free planet. "Get rid of the people, get rid of the problems."
(Yes I've been drinking.)
So I can't use a social networking site at a library... even to network for a JOB?
What about people (for example some small bands) who maintain their websites through services such as MySpace, because they can't get, afford, or know how to do the coding to set up a website of their own?
Or users of services like Facebook, where a school organization or club may be hosted mostly or entirely on the service, because the tools are extremely convenient to use and FREE? All of a sudden, those tools become off limits - neither club officers nor the members can communicate until an alternate (and probably more expensive) method is set up.
Someone is being paid way too much money to come up with these ridiculous bills.
The bill goes on to define the key terminology it uses: administrative unit, computer, public library, school, and school board.
All well and good? Well, they never define what constitutes a "social networking website"! Which of these do you think would qualify: Slashdot? Reddit? Digg? Evite? Delicious? Blogger? We could debate this to death. (In fact, it probably is being debated at some Web 2.0 conference.) Without a clear definition of the most crucial term in the bill, how are schools supposed to know how to enforce it? How are the rest of us supposed to know what's allowed and what's not?
If a legislator took the effort to become knowledgable about the Internet, understand how it operates, and then proposed some carefully-crafted regulation, I wouldn't get so emotionally angry about it. Instead we get Ted Stevens' rant about tubes, and crap like this, because people don't take the time to understand what they're talking about. We should expect more out of our elected officials. They wield significant power, and it's ridiculous that they choose to use it without thinking.
Ryan
As the network administrator for an Illinois public library, I agree that this would indeed be a implementation nightmare (and that's not even taking into account the major ethical dilemma that such censorship presents for librarians). Exactly how does Senator Murphy propose that this be implemented if it becomes law? The bill doesn't even give a definition of what should be considered "social networking."
There's probably no sane way to detect "social networking" features based on a pages content, so the only possibly way to block them would be a gigantic black list. Any who exactly is going to maintain that? The state of Illinois? I don't think so. If they try it, I wish them much luck in compiling their list of every social networking site on "that intarweb thingy."
If their main concern is people hogging the computers using these sites, then there is a fix that doesn't require legislation. Give the librarians the power to boot people off of computers if others are waiting and they are doing something frivilous. That is what they did at the computer labs at my university. Seemed to work pretty well.
Monstar L
"Freedom of speech" implies the right to hold/express an opinion not "free computers for spending the whole day instant messaging while people who need to look something up on Google are standing fuming behind you".
If you desperately need to use MySpace then go across the street and pay $1 an hour in the cybercaf like everybody else.
No sig today...
Isn't the WWW by definition a social network? I mean, nearly if not everything I do on the WWW involves in some way content that was created by someone else and then disseminated to the Internet for consumption.
Chalmer
It's most likely not intended to universally block all access to social networking sites. There are, after all, internet cafes and home internet access available.
It's most likely intended to give the librarian the authority to tell someone who is using the library computers to surf myspace.com to get off the computer and let someone waiting to do their homework have it.
We are talking about libraries, after all...
-1 Uncomfortable Truth
Many a /.er treats /. as a social nw site where you might try to build karma, bitch about MS etc etc.
You've just nailed (accidentally or not) what I see as the second biggest problem here (after the blatant unconstitutionality of the proposed legislation)...
What does count as a "social networking" site? Would SlashDot count? Would most blogs that allow comment posting? Would USENET, for that matter? The full text of the bill basically sounds like it violates Free (online) Assembly rather than Free Speech.
The concept of "social networking", as used here, really has no meaning except by example. When you outlaw meaningless ideas, you open the door for overly aggressive AGs and DAs to start creatively interpreting the law to apply in areas not even the most paranoid of the beanie-wearing crowd could have predicted. Case in point, the DOJ (in)famously held a series of lectures on how to apply the patriot act and subsequent antiterrorism legislation to your friendly neighborhood weed dealer. Riiiiiiiight, protection from Osama.
But, but, but... Think of the children!
Library computers shouldn't be used for myspace, but nevertheless this is no place for the law. Have it be library policy, and give the library tools to enforce it, i.e. throwing people out, then banning them, and then trespassing carries hefty enough penalties that I'm sure it will be fine. The desire to fine people or (worse) criminalize them for things that annoy you when far less severe measures are available and effective is just plain wrong. We don't need anymore criminals in this country, and we don't need anymore people thinking that it's ok to fine them a couple hundred dollars for browsing a website when they're not supposed to. It's just a site.
And to the extent that, in good slashdot tradition, I didn't read the article, this statement should be intrepeted as broader than this specific instance. I.e. I don't know what the actual suggested "consequence" of violation would be, so MMMV here.
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Umm what about adults? Dont we as an adult have a right to view what we want ( that is legal, not talking about kiddy porn or something like that here )?
We can debate all day long about letting children have access to this stuff when a parent isnt around, but removing it from adults as well, who pay for the library with their taxes? Ummm something is a miss here.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Not only is this law insane, it's horribly written. They define something like "school board", a fairly common concept that the common person should be able to understand and yet fail to define what a "social networking site" actually is. All laws, whether the intention is perceived as being good or bad need to be written in a clear and unambiguous way. Under this lack of a definition a person could interpret social networking sites to mean everything from MySpace and Facebook to CareerBuilder, Slashdot, or Blogger.
Get more PCs for the libraries. Seems like money well-spent even if students spend their time on MySpace.
Not helping emo kids whine about their girlfriends.
Emo kids, whining, and girl friends is mostly what literature (i.e., the stuff that belongs in libraries) is mostly all about. Think of MySpace as interactive, participatory fiction.
It sounds like the intent of these types of legislation is to simply ban MySpace.com from public access in schools and libraries. Unfortunately, they can't target a specific site, so they have to generalize the legislation which has the side effect of affecting countless other "legit" sites.
I'm not going to judge the social or moral "worth" of a site like MySpace.com, but I will give the opinion that there is a place for access to such sites, and schools or libraries may not be that place. Providing free access to the Internet doesn't necessarily imply unrestricted access.
My mom always said, "Jim, you're 1 in a million." Given the current population, there are 7000 of me. God help us all!
IANAL, but I fail to see how this could possibly be free speech issue. You're not prohibiting anyone's speech - it's the equivalent of book-banning, which IS legal, not suppression of publication, which wouldn't be. Even if there was a right to free (online) assembly, this wouldn't violate it - it's not limiting who interacts with who.
:)
That said, in my opinion the librarians do a pretty darned good job balancing such issues, and I hate to take any control out of their hands. Furthermore, there is no "save the children" aspect to blocking social networking for adults, which seems decisively included. (Unless you're taking the "no anonymous internet access" route, which isn't realistic)
On the other hand, MySpace has traditionally shown a pretty flagrant disregard for keeping people safe from predators, and the age where you can type is definitely younger than the age where you can really have an adult understanding of someone lying repeatedly and systematically to scam you into a predation situation that you don't understand, especially if all the adults you have met have been relatively friendly. So I WANT my child's school to block MySpace, at least at younger ages. Or I want them to send me home a transcript of my student's messages there. (Frankly, I think there's definitely a whitelist age, followed by a blacklist age, followed by relatively open access. I'm not going to get into the argument about what these ages are, though - which I'm sure would vary wildly from person to person.
Obviously this legislation is nothing but lawsuit fodder if it doesn't carefully define a social networking site. So it's terrible legislation until it does that. And once it does, you'll have a devilish problem of policing the smaller ones. Actually maybe a harder problem than just monitoring all the communications on MySpace, because at least then you'd know where it was.
So I guess overall I'm in favor of this legislation if substantially watered down to something like:
The librarians are required to either provide guardians with transcripts or block access by minors to sites where the users can privately message each other and which have been shown to have a strong disregard for the protection of minors.
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