14
The Great Cyberporn Panic
Society’s concern about online pornography peaked in what many
in the media have dubbed the “great cyberporn panic of 1995.”
5
The panic was fueled by a controversial cover story titled “On a
Screen Near You: Cyberporn,” published by
Time
magazine. The
article cited a Carnegie Mellon University study that claimed that
83.5 percent of images on the Internet were pornographic and
that trading pornographic images was one of the most common
activities taking place over computer networks. The
Time
article
sparked fierce debate in the media and on Internet forums, in part
because the study—conducted by an undergraduate stu-
dent and published in a non-peer-reviewed journal—
was severely flawed. Vanderbilt University associate
professors Donna Hoffman and Thomas Novak claimed
that many of the author’s statistics were “misleading or
meaningless” and “that pornographic files represent less
than one-half of one percent of all messages on the In-
ternet.”
6
Other Internet experts insisted that most on-
line pornography was locked behind BBS pay walls and
difficult for children to access.
Despite this, public concern over the issue contin-
ued to grow. Steve Shapiro, National Legal Director of
the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), claimed,
“This whole [online pornography] scandal fed into an
already existing impulse to control the Internet. . . . The uncon-
trollability of the Internet is what makes it attractive but is also
what makes some people nervous.”
7
Congress Takes Action
In 1996 Congress passed the Child Pornography Prevention Act
(CPPA), which criminalized sharing and receiving child pornogra-
phy on the Internet. However, the panic over online pornography
also spurred an effort to regulate all indecent or obscene material
on the Internet. This led to the passage of another law in 1996, the
Communications Decency Act (CDA). The CDA was sponsored
by democratic senator James Exon and republican senator Slade
“The
uncontrollability
of the Internet
is what makes it
attractive but is
also what makes
some people
nervous.”
7
— Steve Shapiro, National Legal
Director of the American
Civil Liberties Union.
