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Research: Online Service Provider Assessment Project: Methodology: Chat
Review the list of chat rooms to see if there are chat rooms where discussion of the
topic content and/or constituency issues is possible and appropriate. If not, determine
whether policy for creation of chat rooms permits creation of chat rooms dedicated to
that topic and/or constituency. Also, determine if access to chat rooms external to the
online service provider environment are accessible, such as those at
http://www.gay.com and
http://www.planetout.com
for the LGBT constituency.
In existing chat rooms, recruit and train a team of volunteers to monitor content for
messages that are affirmative or defamatory toward the constituency under consideration.
The volunteers should file incident reports by cutting and pasting chat logs and
emailing them to an email account created for that purpose at the online service
provider, for example to OnlinePolicy@familyclick.com (see the list of accounts already
made in the
Online Policy Email Accounts section). Have the
volunteers send the email to the online service provider account so as to preserve any
codes within the text, as used by AOL, and make sure to cc onlinepolicy@glaad.org in
case the account with that online service provider gets terminated. Incident reports
should include the date/time, chat room name, and as much of the context in the log as
possible. If any attempt is made to report the incident to the online service provider,
the volunteer should record all the attempts and any responses as well. If the volunteer
can make a screen snapshot of each part of the incident, that will be very helpful in
substantiating the incident report, so a procedure explaining how to create screen
snapshots on various platforms should be provided to the volunteers.
Determine which words from category G, category H, category I, and category J word
lists, from
Appendix D: Word Lists, are filtered in the chat room
or result in notices of a violation.
Revision 1.000 of July 28, 2000
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