On January 30, 1989, an article appeared in the student-run Stanford Daily under the headline “Racial slurs cause University to shut down bulletin board.” The bulletin board in question, rec.humor.funny, was one of hundreds of so-called newsgroups—glorified mass e-mails organized around specific interests—that streamed onto the school’s computer terminals via Usenet, an early precursor to today’s Internet forums. Rec.humor.funny was conceived as a place to share jokes, many of them crude and off-color, and one in particular, the Daily explained, had caught the eye of Stanford’s nascent I.T. department. Though decidedly stale and not nearly as offensive as some of the other material in the newsgroup, it relied on ethnic stereotypes: “A Jew and a Scotsman have dinner. At the end of the dinner the Scotsman is heard to say, ‘I’ll pay.’ The newspaper headline next morning says, ‘Jewish ventriloquist found dead in alley.’ ” Upon reading those words, a student at M.I.T. had complained, and the attention had led a Canadian university to stop hosting rec.humor.funny. Eventually—most likely thanks to Usenet—word reached Stanford.
I.T. administrators soon decided to block the group. “Jokes based on such stereotypes perpetuate racism, sexism, and intolerance,” they wrote in a note that appeared on terminals campus-wide. “They undermine an important University purpose: our collective search for a better way, for a truly pluralistic community in which every person is acknowledged an individual, not a caricature.” Carefully stressing the value of freedom of expression, the note nevertheless concluded that “our respect for the dignity and rights of every individual” was more important. This was a notably early attempt to clean up the Internet—occurring at Stanford, no less, the epicenter of Silicon Valley—and the reactions to it established a pattern of toxic rhetoric and hypocritical argumentation that, nearly three decades later, remains discouragingly familiar.