Sticky Web: Threats On ACLU Site Pose Free-Speech Dilemma

By Paul Farhi Washington Post Staff Writer Saturday, September 8, 2001; Page C01

Someone, somewhere in cyberspace, doesn't like Edward Donato, a Florida public relations man. For nearly nine months, in dozens of obscenity-laden postings on an Internet message board, Donato's anonymous antagonist has let his or her feelings be known unambiguously, usually to Donato's dismay and distress.

"Your [sic] going to die soon," reads a typical posting, mentioning Donato by name. Sometimes the threats are aimed at him, sometimes at his teenage son. They've falsely accused Donato of being a child molester, a drug abuser, a promiscuous homosexual. His street address, Social Security number and elderly father's name have been posted. His tormentor occasionally posts under Donato's son's name, or under that of his deceased mother.

Donato has pleaded with the operator of the board to scrub the messages and banish the offending party. But he's made halting progress, and he thinks he knows why: The message board is operated by the American Civil Liberties Union, an organization that has long championed the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech.

Donato believes the ACLU has protected a miscreant, partly out of indifference, but primarily because the organization is reluctant to put itself in the ironic -- and perhaps embarrassing -- position of curtailing someone's free speech rights on its own Web site. "I don't believe that death threats should be protected speech," he says. "I've written to [ACLU officials] and said that this person is doing the equivalent of yelling 'fire' in a crowded theater."

ACLU officials acknowledge that some of the messages Donato has complained about violated the Web site's policies. At the same time, however, the organization is sensitive about being placed in the hypocritical role of censor of the Internet's unbridled give-and-take.

"It's not our judgment to decide what's harassment," says Gabe Rottman, an ACLU spokesman in Washington. "There's a legal definition for that, and a legal recourse for it. . . . This [message board] is supposed to be our gift to free speech on the Internet. Speech that might be considered personally offensive might get pulled on other boards, but not ours."

Indeed, companies and organizations that maintain message boards and chat rooms, such as America Online and washingtonpost.com, generally prohibit the posting of vulgarities, threats and "hate speech," admittedly a loosely defined class of speech.

AOL, for instance, practices "zero tolerance" toward hate messages and physical threats made in its chat rooms and on its message boards, and removes such messages "promptly after we are notified," says spokesman Nicholas Graham. Graham defined hate speech as language that degrades another based on "age, disability, ethnicity, gender, race, religion or sexual orientation."

The ACLU also has a lengthy series of posting guidelines, but it makes no specific provision for vulgar or threatening messages. Its two main prohibitions are against "spamming" -- sending identical messages, usually ads, to all members of a group -- and posting personal information about another member "which they have not made public online."

It also explicitly encourages more active and vigorous exchanges than are permissible elsewhere. "This is a free speech forum," reads its message board policy. "It is not without rules and regulations or supervision, but it is considerably less regulated than most message boards. If you find that disturbing you may want to find a more regulated environment."

Donato's exasperation with the messages posted about him and his family have been poured into a long-running campaign. For months, he has peppered the Web site's administrators with complaints, attaching a list of specific postings. He has written and called ACLU officials in New York, Florida and Washington, including ACLU President Nadine Strossen. He has contacted law enforcement officials and turned the material over to an attorney.

And still the messages keep coming.

"You are one dead [expletive]," read a note posted on Tuesday. It was signed "Your son," followed by Donato's son's full name. In June, someone used Donato's son's name to send this message: "I think you gave me aids daddy."

Although the ACLU did remove some posts last December saying they revealed personal details, others were left untouched for months. A threat to decapitate Donato's son, for example, came down two months after Donato alerted the ACLU to it. As for other messages, the ACLU told Donato that it wouldn't act against many of them because they didn't reveal personal information about Donato, other than his name. "We're the ACLU," says Phil Gutis, the organization's director of legislative communications, "We're not in the business of yanking posts."

ACLU officials won't say so publicly, but there is concern that Donato is not all that he seems. In an e-mail correspondence with Donato, an ACLU employee who has since left the organization, said ACLU officials were uneasy about taking action because "they are worried you are trying to cause trouble. . . . The concern is that you are doing this for fun so that you can go around bragging that you got the ACLU to abridge the free speech rights of someone on the internet."

Donato replied that he "resents" the notion that he would make up threats against himself and his family, and repeatedly denied in interviews that he did so. ACLU officials could offer no evidence that Donato himself is posting the messages.

But Donato does have an idea about who might be. For some time, he said, he maintained an e-mail correspondence with a California woman he met online. The two became friendly and made arrangements to meet. But before that happened, Donato discovered that the woman had misrepresented certain facts about herself, and he broke off the relationship. He thinks the woman, or a male friend of hers, is now paying him back, using personal information he had once shared with her.

Yesterday, after several conversations with a Washington Post reporter, ACLU officials said all of the messages Donato found objectionable have been removed, with the exception of several that did not identify him. "He complained and we dealt with it," says Gutis.

Except Donato says that isn't so. Clicking on his computer, he was easily able to find offensive postings identifying him by name from June and even last December, when his "nightmare" began. "When I saw them, I called, e-mailed, cried, complained, yelled, threatened and begged the ACLU to do something," he says. "They did nothing."

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2001

Answers

You're right, this one is an oboyoboy. And involving the ACLU. Sometimes I support what the ACLU is doing. Other times it's like looking at some convoluted liberal creature that is willing to kill the patient in order to control the disease. Or support the negative behavior of some group in order to maintain the positive freedoms. Maybe I just don't understand. Maybe I just need to live longer in order to comprehend the "wisdom" of the ACLU. And maybe they are just commonly, humanly, *nuts* sometimes. So wrapped up in their own idealism that they willing sacrifice some of us to their god.

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2001

first and foremost is the right of anyone to be an idiot.

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2001

But the description of the wacko woman!!! Last I heard, LL had moved to California. . .

-- Anonymous, September 08, 2001