AOL Censors Email Tax Opponents

April 19, 2006 D. H. McKee

Off

Wonâ..t Deliver Emails Mentioning www.DearAOL.com
UPDATE After this press release was sent out Thursday afternoon, AOL stopped blocking email with links to www.DearAOL.com. Officials at the company stated that problems of this nature generally take three to five working days to fix. However, this was fixed after 24 hours of undeliverability – and approximately twenty minutes after this press release was widely distributed. This incident only increases our worry about organizations who don’t have the ability to seek instant press attention. The next time AOL’s anti-spam filters fail for a small organization â.. or one without political muscle â.. will they move so quickly to fix them? Or will they push organizations to just sign up with Goodmail and pay to avoid the problem?
San Francisco – AOL is blocking delivery to AOL customers of all emails that include a link to www.DearAOL.com. Today, over 100 people who signed a petition to AOL tried sending messages to their AOL-using friends, and received a bounce-back message informing them that their email “failed permanently.”
“The fact is, ISPs like AOL commonly make these kinds of arbitrary decisions â.. silently banning huge swathes of legitimate mail on the flimsiest of reasons â.. every day, and no one hears about it,” said Danny O’Brien, Activism Coordinator of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “AOL’s planned CertifiedEmail system would let them profit from this power by offering to charge legitimate mailers to bypass these malfunctioning filters.”
After reports of undelivered email started rolling in to the DearAOL.com Coalition, MoveOn co-founder Wes Boyd decided to see for himself if it was true.
EFF: Breaking News

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As a guy who occasionally curates art shows and wrangles artists together, I often have to edit and post artist bios, profile pictures, and artwork images. This can be a problem, since many artists and writers aren’t used to selling themselves. Artists rarely know how to present their art for display in a brochure, and writers aren’t used to writing about themselves.

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Like blogs of old, this one is a personal document of the comings and goings of me. Articles I’ve written, links I’ve posted, videos I liked, etc. Here, a first-person perspective is the way to go, at least for now. So, this is my site. I’m D. H. McKee, a sometimes artist, sometimes writer. Mostly just a guy on the internet.