When FTM Wrote About the Advertising Campaign of A British Apparel Store And Joked That Its Raunchy Advertising Was Not Yet Banned In Boston (Where It Has Two Stores), Little Did We Realize That Would Get FTM Banned in AOL Land!

What we didn’t realize was that apparently one reader of our newsletter thought that FTM had overstepped the mark by writing about this and what happened then is something with which defenders of freedom of the press should have a field day.

Michael Hedges, ftm’s hacker-in-chief (ed note:"I control the vertical. I control the horizontal. Ha! Ha!"), noted on Monday afternoon that the ftm newsletter was being bounced from all AOL addresses. So Michael called the AOL hot-line, a UK telephone number but could be anywhere, to find out what was happening and here is what he was told.

It seems that one reader of the newsletter found something offensive and complained to AOL. And so AOL, without reading the newsletter, without any further investigation other than having one subscriber complaint in their hands, blacklisted ftm from the AOL system.

“If we don’t have any other complaints then we’ll lift the blacklist in 24 hours,” the AOL person told Hedges.

Based on what Hedges was told, it appears Time-Warner, owner of AOL and the world’s second largest media business behind Google, is also a censor – judge, jury and executioner – cutting off news flow without even a second glance.

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We understand an ISP doesn’t want nasty material running around its system, but how do you know its nasty without looking at it? Just on the basis of what one subscriber says?

We wanted to know exactly who complained and what the complaint was, but we were told that was a no-go area for us. We’ll assume, although we hate to assume because it usually makes an ASS out of U and ME, that someone saw FCUK and either misread it or were offended by anything that looked like “that” forbidden word.

But for AOL (Time-Warner – publisher of Time, Fortune, People and other such media) to censor in such a way based on one complaint without even looking at the material is disturbing.

We appreciate that AOL probably wants to protect people from pornography, foul language and the like, but if it takes just one complaint without investigation to be cut off, well, there is a great example of freedom of speech being trampled in the dust, and, of course, such a system can be easily abused.

Our newsletter is very tame written about various media activities, but what if we were a political newsletter and had thoughts in there that some people didn’t like. Does that mean just one reader can complain to AOL and from then on no reader gets to read those thoughts again – especially if there are two complaints and not just one.

The ISP we use for our newsletter distribution has very strict rules to ensure spam is not distributed and that there are at least two opportunities within the mailing for the recipient to unsubscribe. It would be interesting to know why the complainant wrote AOL rather than hitting unsubscribe (and we have received no unsubscribes this week).

We wondered to ourselves whether the FCUK initials were just too much for an international audience, but then we did a search on Yahoo and Google and found that media around the world have written about the store’s new advertising campaign – mostly with great distaste – and mentioning the store’s name without even a smirk.

And our audience is made up of global professionals – financial analysts, journalists, publishers, senior executives, government officials, Parliamentary bodies etc. – one would think they could handle those initials!

And goodness, there are two such stores right there in Boston and apparently their initials – written in large letters to identify the stores -- don’t cause any problems.

It used to be a mark of great success for an author if his book was “banned in Boston”. But it would seem Boston has nothing on AOL Land.

When ftm Wrote About the Advertising Campaign of A British Apparel Store And Joked That Its Raunchy Advertising Was Not Yet Banned In Boston (Where It Has Two Stores), Little Did We Realize That Would Get ftm Banned in AOL Land!