Double Standards

Via Avedon Carol, we find this little tale:

"Bait and Switch" is an experiment to find out whether small, personal home pages and Web sites of large organizations get identical treatment from blocking software companies in deciding what to block.

Most censorware products attempt to block "hate speech", with "hate speech" usually defined to include derogatory statements based on sexual orientation. (The definitions used by the different companies are usually published on the company Web sites; current definitions at the time of the experiment are collected here)

We collected some of the anti-gay statements from the home pages of four well-known conservative sites: the Family Research Council, the Focus on the Family, the Official Dr. Laura web page and Concerned Women for America (none of these sites are currently blocked by any of the programs that we tested). We then created one different "bait" Web page for each of these organizations, with the "bait" page consisting of quotes taken from the organization's Web site, without telling the viewer where the quotes came from. The "bait" pages were submitted for review to each of the blocking companies (through anonymous HotMail accounts so that the companies wouldn't know the submissions were coming from Peacefire).

In all cases, the blocking companies agreed to block the pages we submitted in their "hate speech" categories. We then contacted the blocking companies to ask if they would block the organizations whose Web pages were the sources of our anti-gay quotes.

So far, all of the censorware companies in our experiment have been back-pedaling since then, saying that they will not block the pages which were the original sources for the anti-gay quotes. Naturally, Peacefire does not advocate censoring these pages, but only because we are against censorship in general. If blocking software claims to block sites which "denigrate people based on sexual orientation" -- as almost all censorware companies claim to do, in their published definitions of "hate speech" -- then the sites that we listed clearly meet those criteria.