Delayed Outrage Over A Censored Site; What's a Better Way To Spread News?

Bennett Haselton is back with a thought provoking essay about not just an incident of Internet censorship on an American university campus, but a proposed method of propagating news, so that relevant stories aren't buried as easily by chance or time. Bennett writes: "The real scandal in the story of Arizona State University blocking students' access to the Change.org website, is not just that it happened, but that the block persisted for two months without being mentioned in the media. As a card-carrying member of the 'outrage grapevine,' I surely think we need a way to respond faster." Read on for the rest.

This is a tale of censorship. From about December 7th until February 3rd, Arizona State University was blocking all users of its network from accessing the Change.org website, where users can create petitions and circulate them for other users to sign. (The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website.) On February 3rd, after a furor of sudden media attention, the block was lifted.

But that's not the worst instance of censorship in this story. What's more disconcerting is that for the two months that the block was in place, the university's decision to block the website received no media coverage at all. This despite the fact that it was a political website being blocked, at a university with over 70,000 students — a publicly funded university, where a court would have almost certainly found that the blocking violated the First Amendment, had the case ever gone to trial.

I first heard about the original tumblr blog post describing the blocking situation, when someone posted the link on my Facebook wall. So as I went to my profile to read it, I was already predisposed to be pissed off, since almost every link that someone posts on my wall is either an outright scam, or a one-sided rant about an issue that is actually much more complicated than the author thinks it is. Well, it was a one-sided rant, all right, but it was about an issue where there was really only one side: ASU evidently got annoyed about a petition on change.org protesting tuition hikes, so they blocked the site. As I re-read the post, I kept thinking: How can this be true, if we haven't heard about it anywhere else? Perhaps an overzealous ASU network admin put the block in place, and it was reversed just a few hours later, but the tumblr post never got updated? I emailed the blog post's author, Eric Haywood, and the owners of change.org, asking how long the block had lasted before the site was un-blocked — I just assumed that the block couldn't possibly still be in place, two months later. But they confirmed that it was.

The link got blogged and re-blogged around tumblr a few times in December and January, and then, at about the same time as I was sending my emails, the issue suddenly "tipped" into public awareness as it was linked from a widely-read reddit post. Then the blocking received its first official "media" coverage in an article in the ASU student newspaper, the State Press. (Eric Haywood called the article "just ASU spreading it's own propaganda about this issue (they own, run and control the State Press)". I don't know about propaganda, but it did seem a little amateurish — the article says "The author of the original blog post is unknown", even though the guy's name, Eric Haywood, was listed in the post, along with his email address.) Then finally the story spilled over into the "real" media with an article in the Huffington Post, in which the author pointed out that the blocking likely violated the First Amendment. (A few hours after that article appeared, the university unblocked the site so that ASU students could access Change.org on their network again.)

None of the articles commented, however, on how the issue had remained buried for so long; the State Press article said only that the tumblr blog "began circulating the Internet Thursday." A reader could be forgiven for reading the articles and scratching their head and thinking: What is it that just happened? If the site has been blocked for two months, why is this only being written about now?

The answer, I think, is that most people don't realize how arbitrary the process is that determines what issues get news coverage and which ones don't. Before I got involved in a few issues that did receive media coverage (in my late teens, through Peacefire and in co-operative projects with others), I had just assumed that "the news" consisted of all stories that somebody in the media business considered to be "news-worthy." Some journalists just want to sell papers (or attract page-views), while other (better) journalists strive to tell the most important stories — but either way, surely their decision to cover something, or not, should depend on attributes of the story, right? Not on whatever else happened to be going on, or other random circumstances? But then, when I started to be involved in efforts to actually get media coverage for this or that issue, some issues ended up receiving far more coverage than even I thought they really deserved, and others received far less.

Sometimes reporters would frankly admit that they thought something was a good story, but they couldn't cover it because their plate was full that day, and even if they had time later, by that time the issue would be too "cold." Some years ago, I wrote in Slashdot about an experiment in which I sued some spammers in Small Claims court, and filed the court briefs with some of the pages stuck together with a sliver of paper. When the judges rejected the motions (as I expected, since Small Claims judges have been near-uniformly hostile to spam suits), I went to the courthouse to look at the files and found the pages still attached, indicating that the judges had rejected the motions without reading them. What I didn't mention in the original article, was that I had planned at first to give the exclusive story to a Seattle Times reporter, who came down to the courthouse to see the files and interviewed me afterwards. The paper must have thought there was a real story there, since they later sent a photographer to come down and take pictures of the files as well. But then something else landed on the reporter's desk and pushed the story back a few days, and days became weeks, and then the beat switched to a different reporter. When I eventually called to ask if they were still interested, they replied, essentially, that without a current "hook", they couldn't write the story, because now it would look like they weren't doing their jobs for the long intervening period when they didn't write about it, so it was better now to drop it entirely.

Traditional media seems hamstrung by two limitations here: (1) an inefficiency at finding the most important stories that most "deserve" to be written about; and (2) a convention that you can't cover something that's more than a few days old, because then the story looks "dated." The Internet doesn't seem to suffer from limitation #2, as demonstrated by the fact that the blocking of change.org at ASU on December 7th was still able to ignite a controversy on February 3rd. But it does still suffer from limitation #1, as illustrated by the Internet's near-total silence on the issue from December 7th through February 2nd.

Many other people have a pet issue that they think is being "suppressed" by the "liberal media" or the "corporate-owned media" (depending on which side they're on), but the evidence suggests that no conspiracy is necessary to keep an important story from being written about. Sometimes arbitrariness and chance is enough.

My naive earlier assumption — that stories received media coverage because of some combination of attributes of those stories — seems to be a specific instance of a cognitive fallacy, where if you observe that some group of things achieved some end result Z, and all of those things started out possessing some attribute X, then you think that attribute X caused the achievement of result Z. In this case, because we observe that most stories which receive news coverage are important and interesting (with obvious exceptions), we assume that most interesting and important news stories will receive news coverage. Thus, it's frustrating and counterintuitive when we find out about an issue that cries out to be written about, but was ignored by the media. The truth is more likely to be that for every important and interesting story that gets coverage, there are likely to be many other equally important and interesting stories that never make it into the news.

(By the way, I've been unable to find a precise name for the cognitive fallacy wherein if you observe that all things which achieve goal Z have attribute X, then you come to think that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving goal Z. It's not the same as the "post hoc fallacy" or the mistaken belief that "correlation equals causation," because both of those are about the illusion of causation. I'm talking about the correlation being an illusion in the first place — where people come to believe that attribute X is a good predictor of achieving result Z, ignoring the fact that there may be enormous numbers of cases where attribute X is true, but which never go on to achieve result Z. If you know the exact name of that fallacy, shoot me an email and submit a comment below.)

In an earlier article, I proposed a system that would eliminate the arbitrariness in determining which pieces of content are selected to be "the best" and broadcast to a larger audience. I suggested using the algorithm to determine which songs could be pushed out to listeners of a streaming music system, but it could be modified to select which news stories would be considered "important" enough to push out to readers of a news site. (The gist of the idea is that you have each piece of content rated by a random sample of users chosen from the system, and if their average rating is high enough, it gets pushed out to everyone else. If the random sample size is large enough, their average rating will be non-arbitrary, and will be determined by the attributes of the content itself.)

Maybe that algorithm is flawed or maybe someone could find a better one, but the more important thing to realize is that we don't live in that world now, where the attention given to an event is determined by attributes of that event. In the world we actually live in, it's safe to assume that many events take place every day that would have been covered by the news, if it hadn't been for a reporter's missed phone call or some other random happenstance. I have no doubt that the blocking of Change.org on ASU's network could have been a front-page story on CNN, under the right circumstances. I just think that in an ideal world, it should have ended up as a front-page story on CNN regardless of the "circumstances" — but real life, no favorable circumstances means no CNN story.

That might seem like a lot to read into a single case of media silence about a political website being censored at a state university. But while Change.org is no longer blocked at ASU, the inefficient and arbitrary means by which news "events" are discovered and distributed to a wide audience will be with us for a long time.

Comments

Start a petition on change.org!

[Kenja]

Just start a petition on change.org to demand faster response to change.org being blocked!

"Censorship"

[theArtificial]

My workplace blocks websites, where is the media?

Re:"Censorship"

[thomasa]

Are you a state university paid for by taxes? Private corporations can do what they want - unfortunately.

Re:"Censorship"

[bky1701]

Because a place of higher education blocking sites for political reasons is identical to McDonalds blocking your twitter, right?

Re:"Censorship"

[theArtificial]

They're paying me more than that. I also have the concept of an acceptable use policy which I signed at employment much like what the students do and understand the internet is a series of private networks with various terms and conditions. You're not one of those silly people who thinks you have a right to use private property are you? Granted I guess you could consider this "government" censorship since it's the school system, but my comment is from the employment slide of things.

Re:"Censorship"

[Hognoxious]

I sometimes fee like I'm paying $15-$40k a year to educate them.

(Of course, that's the equivalent in Roubles)

Re:"Censorship"

[ohnocitizen]

No, they can't. Maybe legally they can do what they want, but we as a society can hold them to a high standard of ethical behavior in a number of legal ways. We can pass laws regulating them - prohibiting blatant censorship. We can start a campaign to damage their brand and their uptake of new students by casting light on their censorship and its implications. We can work to cut off the corporate and community partnerships they form to drive and maintain their business. A corporation misbehaving does not render us powerless or without the right to respond. We have power (even in situations where they have far far more), and we have the right to fight.

Re:"Censorship"

[spire3661]

Here is the crux of the issue.: Publicly funded (i.e. they take taxpayer money) universities dont have the luxury of interfering in this manner. Either stop taking taxpayer funds or stop blocking political websites. Period, full stop.

Re:"Censorship"

[tbannist]

I doubt the network usage policy includes a clause "you agree not to discuss or complain about arbitrary tuition increases online". It looks like the "spam" was a notification that someone sent out about a petition against the University raising tuition, and being the good business people that they are, they figured the simplest solution was to prevent anyone on campus from being able to see the petition (and the site it was hosted on).

That goes well beyond "according to the network usage policy".

Re:"Censorship"

[Obfuscant]

If he

Who is "he"? This is a university you're talking about.

legitimate normal amounts of mail

Define "legitimate". "a significant number of ASU email addresses, which he used to send unsolicited, unwanted email, which is the definition of spam".

but because of their content,

"a significant number of ASU email addresses, which he used to send unsolicited, unwanted email, which is the definition of spam". No content was mentioned.

If hes blocking spam, thats something else entirely.

Ok.

Change.org was politically censored, not blocked for technical reasons.

According to you. According to the Uni, you're wrong.

"However, we must reserve the right to protect the use of our limited and valuable network resources for legitimate academic, research and administrative uses." The Uni provides nerwork access for academic, research, and administrative purposes. They can't be a generic ISP to every student. Students have no reason to expect a taxpayer funded ISP at their beck and call for any purpose they desire.

Claiming this is a violation of someone's first amendment rights would mean that I could walk onto any public university and demand Internet access, otherwise they would be interfering with my first amendment rights. Since that's obviously ridiculous, there must be some failure in the argument that this is an infringement of first amendment rights.

Re:"Censorship"

[Obfuscant]

It was politically motivated, not technologically.

And your proof is what? The rant of someone who admits he was ready to be outraged about something? "So as I went to my profile to read it, I was already predisposed to be pissed off, ...".

That is not their function

Their function is to provide network services for academic and research uses. They aren't a general purpose ISP. You want unlimited bandwidth for unlimited purposes, find an ISP and pay them for it. Get a smartphone or a modem.

and to allow them to operate in such a manner should be incompatible with the taking of taxpayer money.

To demand they provide open-ended unlimited service to anyone who wants it would be a violation of the taxpayer trust and an unwarranted intrusion into the private commercial sector. (I've lived through an "open access" computer service being thrown off campus because of exactly that reason.) Their job is to support the functions of the University, not free Internet for all comers. The employees of the University have to live with that, and so do the students.

Re:"Censorship"

[xeno314]

Disclaimer: I am a lawyer, and I am also in IT administration at a public university.

ASU may or may not have such rights. Public universities occupy a broad role, in that they are generally considered agents of the government, and as such are subject to all of the legal issues that entails, including 1st amendment issues.

Also, public universities *are* ISPs. They are not traditional commercial ISPs, but most provide network access for a large group of residents, and provide other network services for incredibly diverse groups at a level that puts most commercial ISPs to shame. That access is not always solely for school use. To pretend otherwise is to argue from a position of absurdity.

Universities certainly have the right and responsibility to ensure the security and stability of their networks. However, they also have the responsibility to do so in the least restrictive manner possible. In the public case, this is partially to ensure that protected rights are not infringed. However, it is crucial to remember that universities are places for growth, learning, and research. As any network blocking puts that mission in jeopardy (you can't possibly be aware of every research project, and you can't effectively guarantee that your block doesn't harm your core mission), the proper course here would have been for the firewall or mail admins to temporarily block messages from the offending servers in order to maintain service availability.

While I don't claim that my employer should be upheld as the great example for IT policy (far from it, in many ways), I do believe that the current firewall policy is in the best traditions of academia. For most VLANs, the firewall blocks only the most commonly exploitable ports (Windows file sharing is the only example I can recall off the top of my head.) If a particular machine on the network causes issues (primarily botnets, DMCA notices, other viruses/trojans), that port is shut down with an email notice to IT security staff across the University. Once the problem is remedied, the port can be reactivated by the IT personnel investigating the incident.

Floods to particular services, including spam, are handled at the service level, never by a blanket firewalling of an external IP. Our mail gateways/scanners are sufficient to handle this type of problem on their own, and our student population is about half of ASU's. If their systems can't handle a single spam source, they need to check their budget or their strategic planning.

Comparing this to an employer blocking a website for its employees is comparing apples and lead bricks. Most people on campus are not employees, and for many ASU is furnishing the only network connection they have. Moreover, as mentioned above, openness is core to the values of a University. Blocking twitter at my law firm was no big deal. Block it at my University and we've got problems, because there are people doing valuable research with that data.

Re:Dont like it?

[Microlith]

Universities should not be censoring arbitrary websites on the internet.

They have the right to filter the Internet - but

[na1led]

not for political reasons. Most schools or universities will filter Internet content, this is nothing new, and usually it's for security reasons. I would like to know if their Content Filter picked up “change.org” by accident, or was it intentional. I'm not sure if there is anything that can be done though, since the Internet on campus is a privilege. It's no different than a Cyber Cafe, or Motel blocking access to some websites, it's their decision how they want to control their Internet.

Is this censorship?

[qwertphobia]

I agree in general, change.org and sites like it should not be blocked for their content. If the site was being used maliciously, perhaps the block was appropriate. I don't know. If access is a privilege, perhaps the privilege was lost through bad behavior.

I'm more concerned (as I'm a college IT administrator myself) on the question of censorship. From what I understand censorship is only a First Amendment issue when the government is doing the censorship. Is this an appropriate viewpoint? At what point am I as an IT administrator, or the system I manage, infringing on the first amendment rights of a member of the college community? Does it only apply to state schools, or to any school which accepts government funding? Some college administrators are state employees. Does it only count as government censorship if a state employee (or a system managed by said employee) blocks a specific web site?

From a technical viewpoint, IT Administrators have an obligation to protect their infrastructure and their community members from threats, both perceived and actual. Consider for a moment the viewpoint that the messages from change.org were deceptive, harrassing, or threatening in some way, either politcally or technically. If so, was it correct to block change.org?

Re:Is this censorship?

[spire3661]

To answer your question, any school that receives public tax money should be held to the same standard. From a funding point of view, school IT administrators have an obligation to follow the law as well as secure IT policy. Here's a tip, there is no network without funding.....

Re:Dont like it?

[Osgeld]

"The technology fee funds technology initiatives including expanding ASU's wireless network on all of its campuses, increasing the number of technology-enabled classrooms, developing a system to allow students to access University-licensed software, reducing dependence on computing labs and expanding and improving online self-service environment."

I dont see internet in there...

A Wall of Text...

[Anonymous Coward]

... is the best method of censorship

tl;dr

[t4ng*]

If you want to get your message across, learn to edit yourself.

Feel the same way as posts are often "herd" modded

[Anonymous Coward]

.. herd moderation up or down here on Slashdot. It's a property of memes working in chaotic crowds that some memes propagate more, some less, and if it passes a central node, it gets to more people. For every example of Streisand Effect, there are many unknown successful censorings happening all the time. Journalists are people with families and personal interests outside of their work and they are human.

Google News could be said to be partially a way around the complete dependence on human judgement and error, but even Google depends on how many connections of what type the story has with important nodes in the information network. Reddit is a fine example of a network where a lot of stuff gets read by and voted on at least a few people - but even there, the same rules apply if only to a varying extent depending on the audience demographic.

A global anti-censorship feed would be a good starting point for this, which already has a bunch of candidates - rawstory, reddit, digg used to be, fark, delicious(used to be). Facebook being a social network with tracking is not a pure news feed. Slashdot is rather slow for developing events and focus is on discussions rather than story visibility.

Re:Online Petitions are So Cute

[Skapare]

Bzzzzt! Wrong! Many actually do accomplish at least some things. See what Sallie Mae changed as a result here and here.

Re:Online Petitions are So Cute

[Pax681]

They never really accomplish anything.

They're actually worse than useless because they lead lazy people to believe all they need to do is go to a website, click an "I agree" button and they've fixed the world.

Its as pathetic as a "Facebook Group", if not worse.

Well that's where you are wrong. An online petition along with a facebook group and other pressures helped raise awareness and created enough stink to have The Wallace Letter returned to Scotland to be displayed in the National museum instead of sitting in a drawer in Kew archives in London.
the petition and the facebook group helped raise awareness of the issue to a point where Members of theSociety of William Wallace along with members of the Scottish government were able to negotiate it's return.
the only thing that's pathetic bud is you aloof apathy which just goes to shows your own feeling of impotence hiding behind a false assumption that you know better when there are instances which prove you wrong... this letter being one of them

Re:They have the right to filter the Internet - bu

[Archangel Michael]

It isn't just social conservatives, it is also liberal elites as well. ANYTIME someone says "for the children" it is probably NOT for the children.

I've seen plenty of sites blocked because of some liberal outrage of the week. Here are some choice topics: Big Pharma, Big Oil, Tobacco, Guns and Ammo, anything deemed "not green", almost anything "too Religious" (aka hate, no kidding), sites opposed to Abortion, etc.

So, no, you did not FTFY properly.

Also, there are often ties to funds to implement some filters, and filters don't work, and are broken by design. We all know this, but that doesn't stop the people who have the money from making the rules associated with receiving that money. If you want to fix the problem learn this phrase:

"Technology doesn't solve sociological problems, it can only mask them"

Re:Dont like it?

[CanHasDIY]

"The technology fee funds technology initiatives including expanding ASU's wireless network on all of its campuses, increasing the number of technology-enabled classrooms, developing a system to allow students to access University-licensed software, reducing dependence on computing labs and expanding and improving online self-service environment."

I dont see internet in there...

As a public university, the internet access is funded by either tuition, government grants, or both.

No matter how you slice it, the students (and the rest of AZ taxpayers) are funding ASU's internet service.

What that has to do with a public institution breaking the law and violating the civil liberties of their students, I don't know.

Re:Online Petitions are So Cute

[CanHasDIY]

They never really accomplish anything.

"In light of recent events, I have decided to postpone Tuesday's vote on the Protect IP Act," U.S. Senate majority leader Harry Reid said in a statement two days after a wave of online protests against the bill swept the Internet.

Nope, not a damn thing.

Philistine.

Re:There's this new thingy on the Internet ...

[CanHasDIY]

No student at ASU could figure out how to post to Twitter?

Well... it is ASU, after all.

First they'd have to put down the bong.

Re:Dont like it?

[afabbro]

...the part that says that full, free, unfettered, and unlimited access to the Internet is some kind of student right. It's not. The students are provided the Internet subject to the discretion of ASU. If ASU doesn't want them to see playboy.com, it has the right to not allow them to see it on its network, passing through its servers, on its campus, etc. ASU is not a general-purpose ISP. ASU is not required to provide any Internet access whatsoever.

Additionally, the University has responsibilities via the in loco parentis doctrine, though they may not apply in this case.

If ASU blocked this site - and I would need to be convinced this wasn't stupidity or a mistake before I'd believe it was some kind of sinister intentional plan - then they are within their rights. It may run counter to the generally accepted American anti-censorship idea of free inquiry in public universities, but let's not bleat about student rights because in this case, they have none.

Re:Dont like it?

[David Chappell]

Universities should not be censoring arbitrary websites on the internet.

Chances are ten to one that this isn't censorship at all. I work in a university IT department. We have constant problems with spam, worms, password guessers. We block IP addresses all the time. Generally these are the addresses of botnet members. Since nobody wants to connect to spam bots anyway, nobody ever complains about these blocks. I suspect that a system administrator in this case saw the flow of spam, mistook change.org's e-mail server for a spam bot, and just blocked the IP address.

I believe this is a common practice. That being so, it is unlikely that the person who blocked the address even knew about the Change.org website. And who consults the university administration before blocking a spammer?

Re:Dont like it?

[Hognoxious]

I'm guessing the University's free (with tuition) and fast as lightning network already blocks pr0n and most kinds of w4r3z, so the chances are that yes, they do.

And most students are so far in debt that dirt is actually one of their creditors. When it gets to that stage, there are two major mindsets that set in. One can be soundbit[1] as "waste not, want not", the other is "fuck it, what's a few hundred on top of 30 grand?"

[1] Yes it fucking is, I just invented it.

Re:Dont like it?

[David Chappell]

You didn't read the article:

  "The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website."

The so called spam was email sent to students from a petition not a spam bot. As the author indicated you can block it via email you don't have to block the actual site.

This does not refute my point. Yes, you _can_ block e-mail without blocking web traffic. No, it wasn't a spam bot. But network administrators do not generally waste a lot of time investigating the sources of things that look like spam. They just drop in a total block on the IP address and forget about it.

The article was written by someone who does not know this. He seems to be surprised that outbound traffic was blocked. Again, this is common practice. He also seems to be surprised that the university spokesman could not provide another example of a website that they had blocked. This is probably because they do not deliberately block websites.

The university spokesman is not making lame excuses. He is saying, "look, we were spammed and we blocked it. That is what we do in such cases."

Since we are second guessing the system adminstrator's decision and suggesting more limited blocks that he could have put in place, why not second-guess the decision of Change.org to send e-mail from their web server. If they stopped doing that, it is less likely that it would get blocked.

Yawn.

[superdude72]

From the submitter:
The lame excuse offered by the university was that a student had created a petition and was using the change.org site to "spam" other ASU accounts; of course, even if that had been the real reason, it would have easily been possible for ASU to block mail from the change.org servers, without blocking all students from accessing the website.

Actually this "lame" excuse is completely plausible. Perhaps there was a less ham-handed way to stop the spam, but that would have taken up an IT person's time, and there are 70-heptillion other sites on the Internet to be whacked when they start consuming too many IT resources.

Universities should be bastions of free speech, of course. But their IT Depts. have resources and a mission more in line with a medium-sized corporation that doesn't specialize in IT. And a lot of the time, their junior positions are staffed by undergraduates who work part-time, so there's that too. I guarantee you, if the IT Dept. at the company where you worked noticed a lot of resources being consumed by a site employees don't need to do their jobs, they'd block it too. Ideology has nothing to do with it.

This reminds me of a debate when I was in college, and the university decided to stop distributing alt.binaries.* Usenet groups (Get off my lawn!) "Censorship!" the (mostly male) undergraduates cried. Dude, nobody at the university cared whether you were looking at titties. Alt.binaries was sucking up like 90% of the school's bandwidth. The right to free porn is not without limits.

Re:They have the right to filter the Internet - bu

[GameboyRMH]

it's the hippie family across the street whose wifi he monitors for terrorist behavior.

Re:A Less Arbitrary Approach

[Zontar The Mindless]

Expecting one's Constitutional rights to be respected by a government-funded entity is in no wise evidence of an "entitlement complex".

I work for an organization whose mission it is to help enable social media freedom while still protecting companies from malware, lawsuits, personal misuse of company online resources, etc. If the university had our controls in place...

<sarcasm>Well, you've certainly relieved any fears I might have had that you weren't a completely disinterested 3rd party...</sarcasm>

I think we're done here.