Voluntary Mandatory Self-Ratings and Limits on Speech

[Sampo Syreeni]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2001, Tim May wrote:

>The First was designed to stop this kind of intrusion into personal,
>political, religious, and commercial speech.

Mostly agreed, though I still tend to think that there is a gray area where
we might argue about the Framers' intent. Regardless of that, broad
interpretation of the First is a positive thing.

>> So how about the "prevailing community standard" part?
>
>More gnawing away at the First, of course.

Sure, but what I meant is that instead of limiting the concept of obscenity
to truly repulsive kinds of pornography, the Supreme Court has effectively
sidestepped the issue. Obscenity is not a very well defined concept, and
anti-porn crusaders are betting on stretching it to cover ordinary
pornography.

>Given the notion that a local community may ban certain items because
>they violate the "community standards" of the community, one is left
>with the inescapable conclusion that a local community could also ban
>Mormonism, or Catholicism, or any religious practice they deemed to be
>violative of their community standards.

Not really. Most of the anti-porn crusaders base their rhetoric on some
vague idea of harm caused by the material. With most religions, you cannot
easily draw the conclusion that they are harmful to the community. And where
some people think you can, as is the case with Satanism and the lot, one can
see that the public opinion already (mistakenly) sides with regulating them.

>We talk a lot here about the Constitution. Strange for two reasons:
>first, this is an international list, second, many of us are not exactly
>supporters of government in general.

I dunno. Constitutions are meant to legislate the state where the rest of
the law legislates the state's subjects. It seems just appropriate that
anti-government people would concentrate on constitutional issues.

>None of the proposals for "voluntary self-labelling" are actually about
>any kind of voluntarism except in the Orwellian meaning of the term.

Naturally, but why not embrace and extend? The fact is, one of the reasons a
good part of the CDA was struck down in the SC is the existence of
self-labelling technology. The next time around, it'll probably still be a
good idea to have true, voluntary self-labellers around, if not else, then
to show off that "self-labelling works".

>As we discussed several years ago when the CDA was being debated, there
>are profound problems with self-labelling. Some people will self-label
>"incorrectly" for various reasons. Much debated several years ago.

Yes, I've gone through the archives on that, and plenty of other sources as
well. Still, most of the critique is about why self-labelling will never be
perfect. It does not render the idea completely useless -- I think of labels
as metadata, some of which can be useful even if not perfect for any given
use, filtering or finding hardcore S&M.

As for misrating, that's a problem of reputation. If you can solve it in an
anonymous economy, you can certainly solve it in a non-anonymous rating
context.

Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy, mailto:decoy at iki.fi, gsm: +358-50-5756111
student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front