Digital Dawn · 1995
Internet (Early World Wide Web)
Online Pornography and Obscenity
In July 1995, Time magazine turned its cover into a moral-panic classic: an undergraduate's flawed study, a lurid illustration, and the word CYBERPORN in 72-point type. The message: the new World Wide Web was drowning in obscene material, and children were in its path. The "study" came from Martin Rimm, a Carnegie Mellon undergraduate, and appeared in the non-peer-reviewed Georgetown Law Journal under a deal that barred outside scrutiny before publication. (Peer review is the process by which other experts check a paper before it sees daylight. Rimm's paper skipped that.)
Within weeks, a small group of researchers tore it apart: Vanderbilt's Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, Georgetown law professor David Post, and Mike Godwin of the digital rights group EFF. The fatal problem was that Rimm had measured the wrong thing. He'd sampled adult Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes, the dial-up computer clubhouses that predated the web, where users logged in one at a time over a phone line), then passed the results off as a picture of the Web (the open, browser-based network most people were just starting to use). His headline figure — "83.5% pornographic" — came from 17 hand-picked Usenet image groups, whereas actual pornography made up closer to 0.5% of total internet traffic. Carnegie Mellon opened a misconduct investigation.
None of that mattered to the politics. Senator James Exon, author of the Communications Decency Act (CDA, a 1996 law that made it a crime to transmit "indecent" material online to minors), walked onto the Senate floor with a "blue book" binder of hardcore images and warned colleagues that the "information superhighway" risked becoming a "red-light district." The CDA passed inside the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and was promptly struck down 7–2 by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997) on First Amendment free-speech grounds. The episode set a template for every internet-child-safety panic since: one bad data point, amplified by a credulous cover story, becomes the evidence base for sweeping legislation before the debunking catches up.
Within weeks, a small group of researchers tore it apart: Vanderbilt's Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak, Georgetown law professor David Post, and Mike Godwin of the digital rights group EFF. The fatal problem was that Rimm had measured the wrong thing. He'd sampled adult Bulletin Board Systems (BBSes, the dial-up computer clubhouses that predated the web, where users logged in one at a time over a phone line), then passed the results off as a picture of the Web (the open, browser-based network most people were just starting to use). His headline figure — "83.5% pornographic" — came from 17 hand-picked Usenet image groups, whereas actual pornography made up closer to 0.5% of total internet traffic. Carnegie Mellon opened a misconduct investigation.
None of that mattered to the politics. Senator James Exon, author of the Communications Decency Act (CDA, a 1996 law that made it a crime to transmit "indecent" material online to minors), walked onto the Senate floor with a "blue book" binder of hardcore images and warned colleagues that the "information superhighway" risked becoming a "red-light district." The CDA passed inside the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and was promptly struck down 7–2 by the Supreme Court in Reno v. ACLU (1997) on First Amendment free-speech grounds. The episode set a template for every internet-child-safety panic since: one bad data point, amplified by a credulous cover story, becomes the evidence base for sweeping legislation before the debunking catches up.
Useful links:
- Mike Godwin – *Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age* (MIT Press, 2003)
- Metz – “Misunderstanding Cyberculture: Martin Rimm and the Cyberporn Study” (scholarly summary of the Hoffman/Novak 1995 rebuttal, which is no longer online)
- *Reno v. ACLU*, 521 U.S. 844 (1997)
- Brock Meeks – "Cyberporn Turns 20" (Medium, 2015)