AdultContentPolicyBackground

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Background Information

Provides background information for the AdultContent policy.

Definitions

Legal

See AdultWebLaw.com for explanations of the legalities.

Recent Case Strikes Down 1998 law

US Code on Obscenity

ACLU on Free Speech and COPA

COPA- Child Online Protection Act

from Wikipedia:

Some critics of obscenity law argue that the existence of Miller proves that federal obscenity laws are in fact not defined, and thus unenforceable and legally dubious.

Miller Test

The current definition of obscenity requires the application of a three-part test put forth in Miller v. :California, 413 U.S. 15 (1973). Under "Miller Test," a jury from the jurisdiction where an obscenity charge is brought will decide whether content is obscene by asking:

whether the average person, applying contemporary community standards, would find that the work, taken as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest,
whether the work depicts or describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by :the applicable state law, and
whether the work, taken as a whole, lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value."

About the Miller Test

Community standards (and how are these defined?) vs. Nation standards

notion of - laws that punish vs, laws that protect

Policies on other sites

Craigslist
Google - [1] [2]
City Search/Yellow Pages
Ebay
YouTube [3], [4]
MySpace [5] paragraph 5 and section 8
Facebook [6], [7]
MSN, AOL, etc
Wikipedia [8], [9]
Blogs [10], [11], [12] bottom of page, [13] section 2, [14] member conduct]
Flickr/Yahoo [15]

Theories

Broken Glass theory

From Rudy Giuliani ... What promotes the behaviors we are seeking? Or, what environment would promote behaviors that we’d like to see in terms of community.

Read About Broken Glass theory and struggles

Effects of Adult Content

Emmers-Sommer, T. M., & Burns, R. J. (2005). The relationship between exposure to Internet pornography and sexual attitudes toward women. Journal of Online Behavior, 1 (4). Retrieved from the World Wide Web: Journal of Online Behavior

Wolak et al. , Unwanted and Wanted Exposure to Online Pornography in a National Sample of Youth..., Pediatrics.2007; 119: 247-257. Pediatrics Journal

Journals & Sites

Policy Options

NO

Status Quo

YES

Filter/Walled Garden/Opt In
Remove info
1. Dump
2. Sell
Separate onto another site (e.g. adultaboutus.org and we run it)

tag the porn pages as {{*****}} similar to the action we take on ParkingLot

Removing adult content altogether doesn't honor BeABuilder and Inclusivity for those who would like to build valuable information about adult content sites.

catalog ... the website of websites
versus the entire web on a wiki, but censored?

If we choose to keep, we need to embrace the adult content "community"; encourage them to become active builders.

Walled Garden

Goals

Separate Adult Content to allow
- Readers to turn it off
- Advertisers to decide if they want their ads on adult page
- Possibly to separate the content into a different wiki altogether at some point in the future

Possible Methods

Algorithmic
- Find a utility that allows us to determine if a given domain name has adult content
- Write a bot that take known categories and re-tags them to something consistent
Social
- Tag adult sites or use a separate namespace

Considerations

Revenue Science, for example, prohibits placement of ads on websites that contain, promote, reference or link to adult content. I don't think any tagging or namespace scheme will satisfy them. I think a separate wiki may be the only answer. John Stanton 12:49, 6 March 2007 (PST)
- Couldn't we adjust code such that their ad only shows up on a page that isn't designated as Adult? Ray
- Well this is a problem for separate wiki as well. If you found an adult page on AboutUs, the page would still be listed, with a generic note like "This article contains Adult Content and has been moved to AdultAboutUs.org (or whatever)," with links to that wiki (after some sort of adult check system). In this case, we'd still be providing a "Reference" to adult content, and depending on how it's done the link in the name might still be live as well. -- TakKendrick
  - I don't think its about pages, it looks to me like they don't want their ads on any website that contains adult material anywhere. See page 3, para 2.(c).(ii) John Stanton 13:39, 6 March 2007 (PST)
    - I just talked to my rep at RS and they said its trying to get rid of adult only sites, if there ads weren't displayed on adult pages and the main content was not adult content they would be okay with it. Its not like they wouldn't accept Wikipedia into their program. --Simon | talk 13:51, 6 March 2007 (PST)

Who/what defines "adult content"? Personal perceptions will always play a role in that. ICRA.org has a labeling system that addresses that issue, explained here, but I don't know that we can apply such a system here. Drew

Definitions are going to be hard. Generally, if a website has an Adult Content verification system (or even, "click here if under 18") then those are cooperating and should be semi-easy to suss out. It's those sites that don't follow that community norm that are going to be harder to define. TakKendrick
- Of course, we can see what some of the "content control" software like WebSense, NetNanny, BESS, CyberPatrol, SmartFilter or CyberSitter do, although the concerns/problems with these software is well noted by sites like PeaceFire.org. -- TakKendrick
  - The behavior of the software illustrates a problem we'll have to keep in mind -- if sites get placed in the wrong section, we'll need a way to manually switch them back. They can't be placed there with no way to get them out. Drew

Talking with Isabel this morning got me thinking that porn is at odds with wiki in a few findamental ways:

getting people to use their real names- this is hard enough with non- adult content domains/ users
increased workload (to move beyond bot scraoes) met with potentially less than enthused porn domain owners, who'd might prefer to remain remain an IP addresses. Kasey 10:34, 19 April 2007 (PDT)

For me, if something is illegal, it is removed from the category Adult Content and placed squarely in the Illegal Content category. Would it help to pull those things out from each other? MarkDilley

Thoughts on defining pornographic content

One idea is to create an adult verified wiki that pages on AboutUs.org get redirected to xx.AboutUs.org, MarkDilley

First concern = who determines what is "adult". Some things I'm sure we'll all agree on easily, but there will be some differences in opinion. Drew

Another concern we were discussing is that it has to be something that we can reverse. If a site gets categorized in the wrong area, we need to be able to easily move it. We'll see health sites being categorized as adult, or have people reporting sites one way or the other, and we'll want to be able to easily fix that with a simple edit. The process can't be automatic only. Drew

Echoing Drew: Not all porn is the same, some is violent, beyond bizarre. While some (porn) is literally sex on film- not what everyone wants to see, but not the end of the world. How do we decide?

How to identify porn or (content in general), remember that categories are a mess, that is illegal, or gray area and is gray area even valid? Kasey

How to deal with pages defined as Adult Content

1. Place all Adult Content pages in an Adult Namespace

Placing Adult Content pages in a separate namespace will clearly identify each page as Adult Content and allow AboutUs to restrict access to that namespace via permission settings. The following restrictions could be applied to the namespace:

Edit Restrictions - (options: no restriction, login to edit, no edit at all)
View Restrictions - (options: open view, login to view)
Search Engine Access - (options: allow access, deny access)
Ad display - (options: allow ads, no ads)

2. Remove Text, Images and links to the Adult Content Site

Removing text, images and links would remove the possibility of unwanted viewing and make wanted viewing a deliberate act. The viewer would have to type in the url to link to an Adult Content site with no visual cues of what the content was (other than the site name). Items that could be removed from an Adult Content page are:

Categories - This would help reduce unwanted cross linking with non-Adult Content Pages (options: categories, no categories)
Related Domains - Would help reduce unwanted cross linking with non-Adult Content Pages (options: related domains, no related domains)
Images and thumbnails - Would remove the possibility of unwanted viewing (options: images, no images)
Active links to the Adult Content site - Remove the possibility of navigation from an AboutUs Adult Content page to the Adult Content site itself (options: active linking, no active linking)
Contain the domain name in a Graphics Tag - Would make it impossible to cut and paste the domain name into the browser (options: contain domain name, open domain name)
Text replaced with an Adult Content notification - Would clearly identify the site as adult content and would remove any description of the site's content (options: replace text, keep text)

3. Disputed Adult Content classification

Provide a clear message on each AboutUs Adult Content page outlining the resolution policy with contact information

4. WalledGarden by way of CommunityFlagging

Community members are able to flag sites that contain adult content. Once a page has been flagged a warning page will come up saying the page has been flagged and may contain offensive material. A user can continue onto the page or go back.

Initially use a bot to auto flag the majority of sites containing adult content
Put a drop down menu on each page that lets community members (possibly only logged in users, or RealPeople?) flag pages into certain categories. (Adult Content, Spam, Parking Lot, etc?)
Flagged sites go to a special patrol page
- Unflag improperly flagged pages
- Bring properly flagged pages up to undetermined standard
  - Remove thumbnails that contain offensive material
  - Remove offensive page content