Posted: May 2, 2007

As long as there has been expression, there has been censorship. It is inevitable that someone will be offended by or perceive some sort of threat from certain thoughts being put on public display. There is a reciprocal relationship between the reach of media, its potential to offend, and the opportunity to censor which has reached an unprecedented level with the advent of the ultimate equalizer of expression; the internet. Now, anyone with access to the web can say whatever they want, whenever they want, and post it for the entire world to see.

Yet, the internet has also heightened our awareness of how the airing of our thoughts can have a powerful effect on other people, even when it was never our intention to make anyone feel threatened or uncomfortable. It is no coincidence that the rise of “political correctness” and the proliferation of cheap or no-cost internet access have mirrored each other. While I whole-heartedly support all attempts to curb discrimination, and truly believe that we should err on the side of being too sensitive, it seems as though our ability to be offended can sometimes outweigh our ability to recognize true prejudice. A recent story illustrates this imbalance.

A woman’s email to Telecom New Zealand’s help-desk, to see if certain cell phone services were available in her area, was rejected because of the inclusion of her name, Gay, in her query. Telecom’s automated reply to her email said the message “was identified by our content filtering processes as containing language that may be considered inappropriate for business-like communication.” It confirmed that the offending word was “gay”. The woman, who happens to be gay, was surprised that the word had garnered such attention.
Public relations spokesman Lenska Papich said the response was triggered by Telecom’s internal email monitoring system, which exists to “prevent misuse of email technologies in the workplace and act as a deterrent to harassment. Our systems internally detect a number of words, including both the words gay and heterosexual, that could be deemed as inappropriate for use at work,” she said.

Telecom claimed the telling-off was never intended for Hamilton, as the warning system that threatens “disciplinary action” is intended to reprimand employees, not clients. Papich apologized to Hamilton last week and the two sides parted amicably.

Now to me, this seems like a simple case of misunderstanding, where a company is trying to protect itself and its employees from harassment by restricting office communications to work-related topics. Nothing in the exchange suggests that the company has anything against gay people, just that they feel any discussions of sexual orientation do not belong in inter-office emails. If her name had been “heterosexual”, the same thing would have occurred; but would the media scrutiny have been as voracious?

Here are some of the headlines for this story in various publications:

1) Telecom New Zealand bounces gay email - sounds both aggressive and bigoted
2) A Gay by any other name - obviously meant to provoke an immediate emotional response

3) ‘Gay’ filtered in Telecom emails - this makes it sound like any mention of homosexuality specifically, but not sexual orientation in general, will not be tolerated

4) Gay too gay for NZ Telecom - this makes the company seem horribly discriminatory by removing all context

And the worst by far, which coincidentally was the most used:

5) Telecom New Zealand tells woman her name Gay is ‘innappropriate’ - makes it seem as though the company hates anyone named Gay, and gives the full name of the company, but not the context, so your righteous anger can be directed appropriately
Gay Hamilton, the woman who contacted the help-desk, hasn’t sought any legal action or made any attempt to incriminate New Zealand Telecom, yet even she couldn’t resist joining in on the witch-hunt. Ms Hamilton has said that she is worried about the amount of time and effort Telecom must have put into deciding that gay was an inappropriate word in e-mail communication. “If they do have to put content filters on, then maybe they should ensure that it only gets genuinely abusive words.”

Again, Telecom never said that the word gay was “abusive”, only that any discussion of any sexual orientation is not appropriate for office communications. There is no evidence that the company labored over this decision, wasting huge amounts of “time and effort”, and any programmer would tell you that the amount of time it takes to apply a content filter is miniscule. Ironically, the time and effort the media and Ms. Gay herself wasted trying to make this story into something it isn’t, combined with the time and effort they forced New Zealand Telecom to waste defending itself vastly outweighed the energy put into the original decision.
While all of these points may seem subtle, the typical viewer of news is bombarded with so many different types of media, that their relationship to any one source is quite often casual and certainly not exhaustive. Therefore, they rely on headlines and sound bites to create their view of a certain event. Using these tools in this case could lead even a reasonable person to assume that Gay Hamilton was discriminated against, and this obvious prejudice stemmed from New Zealand Telecom’s bigotry towards homosexuals. This gets the media more viewers and more ad revenue, but does New Zealand Telecom deserve the inevitable backlash because of a simple mix-up?

In another story, Iran’s state television station announced this weekend that the Telecommunications Ministry will start filtering “immoral” messages sent via mobile phones. According to the report, the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution instructed the Ministry to buy the necessary equipment to monitor and intercept inappropriate messages sent via MMS. The station did not say when the filtering would begin or how the Ministry would define immoral.

This story sent up all kinds of red flags when I read it. This level of censorship is shocking in any part of the world, and such actions seem ripe for concern and outrage. Here are the headlines for this story:

1) Iran to Filter Immoral Messages 

2) Iran to Filter Immoral Messages Sent on Phones

3) Iran to Filter Immoral Messages on MMS

4) Iran to Filter Immoral mobile Messages

5) Iran to Filter Immoral Cell Phone Messages 

And the most controversial:

6) Iran to Filter Racy Messages

All of these headlines say the same thing, and outside of the word racy and a few sarcastic quotes around the word “immoral”, they are factual and wothout judgment. Apparently, this information has not caused the media any concern, and cannot hold a candle to a wireless company accidentally offending someone because they are trying to keep their workers on task.
This strange dichotomy shows how backwards our priorities can become when we start looking for reasons to be offended while ignoring the more sinister attempts to censor and discriminate around the world that might not affect us directly. It is the difference between thoughtful vigilance and selfish paranoia; and if anyone is in a position to understand the high cost of real censorship, it is the media.

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