New-age censors 'flag' Web posts

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By Matthew Sheffield

One of the hottest Internet videos during the mortgage and banking crisis has been a YouTube clip titled "Burning Down the House," which outlines the untold story of how liberal Democrats pressured banks and lenders to throw standards out the window and give money to people who couldn't pay it back.

Try watching it now, however, and you won't be able to, thanks to the growing problem of "flag spam," the practice of abusing online filter systems to squelch political speech with which one disagrees.

We've all seen spammers at work in our e-mail inboxes. Experts estimate that 90 percent of all e-mail messages nowadays are spam, or unsolicited commercial e-mail.

Luckily for most of us, the majority of it gets filtered out. That's caused the more sophisticated spammers to change course and target a more vulnerable part of the Internet - the hugely popular Web sites like YouTube, Digg and the blogosphere, where anyone can join the discussion by posting videos, essays, reviews and other content.

More and more people are flocking to these sites, a fact that makes them attractive to spammers. Seedy salespeople also love the interactive Web because it allows them to get their products ranked higher in search results, a 2-for-1 as it were.

Because of the proliferation of fake blogs, spam comments and phony videos, many interactive sites have added mechanisms to prevent a group discussion from being hijacked by allowing regular readers to "flag" things they come across that are offensive, obviously spam or violate copyright laws.

After enough complaints about a particular piece of content are raised, the "flagged" video or comment is removed from circulation and placed into a review system in which a pre-selected group of people review it and decide whether the reports are correct.

If the complaints are judged incorrect, the content is restored to the Internet. If not, it is kept out of public view.

It makes sense for Web sites to do this: They have the right to ensure that their sites aren't turned into free advertisements for unsavory companies, after all.

What is harder to support, however, is that many Web sites' flagging systems are themselves becoming targets of abuse - by malicious individuals intent on consigning the free speech of others behind the moderation firewall.