MEDIA: HOME PAGES FOR HATE

ON THE INTERNET, WHEN PEOPLE want to chat about the bleaker side of life, they often find their way to alt.support.loneliness. The forum, a Usenet newsgroup, is open 24 hours a day for anyone who wants to post messages lamenting a breakup with a spouse, or how tough it is to meet people or find true love or even a true date. It's a moderately popular group. Or it was, before the Carolinian Lords of the Caucasus showed up.

The CLOC, an unabashedly white-supremacist organization based in Columbia, South Carolina, takes pride in running locals off certain innocuous parts of Usenet with its race baiting. Members claim to have emptied out half a dozen forums already, including, improbably, alt.fan.barry-manilow and alt.food.dennys. "If you want an organization which makes things happen, visit our victims and learn first-hand what kind of a group we are," they boast at their World Wide Web site, which features an image of a burning cross. "CLOC is clearly on the forefront of the great war for Aryan domination of the Internet."

This virtual hooliganism may sound absurd. For people who rely on the Internet to communicate, though, it's a real and growing problem. Like more conventional groups, racists have discovered that the Net is a marvelous way to get their message out to a huge audience at low cost. Last week the Simon Wiesenthal Center, the world's largest Jewish human rights organization, decided that enough is enough. Citing "the rapidly expanding presence of organized hate groups on the Internet," Rabbi Abraham Cooper, the center's associate dean, sent letters to hundreds of Internet access providers, asking them to help draft a code of ethics that would squelch Websites that promote bigotry and violence.

Predictably, civil libertarians are uneasy about the proposal, seeing it as yet another assault on free speech in cyberspace. Congress has already signaled its intent to enact legislation that would criminalize "indecent" speech online, rather than adopting the less onerous restriction against "obscene" speech that is the print standard.

Yet Cooper claims his letter is very much in keeping with the Constitution and traditional media practice. He argues that the First Amendment also protects publishers who choose not to disseminate materials they find offensive. Most mainstream newspapers and magazines, for example, won't run ads from racist or hate groups. The people who sell access to the Internet, he believes, should start behaving the same way. "In effect," says Cooper, "this is a recognition that the Internet has come of age. We're not looking for prior restraint or to keep these guys off the Internet. We're saying, Adopt the same approach to the First Amendment that your brothers have done in traditional media."

Among purists, though, the whole point of the Internet is that it isn't like traditional media. A wide spectrum of viewpoints is tolerated and even encouraged online, especially on the freewheeling, anarchistic Usenet. The notion is that for the first time in history, anyone can express his or her views to a mass audience. As a result, Cooper's proposal is stirring up opposition from cyberspace denizens on both the left and the right.