Prodigy’s advertiser-driven censorship prefigured today’s state-controlled internet

Evidence

It would prove part of a pattern of misapprehension. Later, when its chat rooms took off, Prodigy became concerned that the wild, unpoliced forums might discourage advertisers and damage the company’s “family friendly” image. They therefore decided to ban profanity and other offensive speech, as well as any chats that reflected negatively on Prodigy’s owners or advertisers. Later, it banned flame wars (those extended bouts of troll against troll) among members. Eventually, postings even mentioning another member by name were forbidden. By then, every message was being examined for potential infractions. And so Prodigy wound up creating something more akin to the Camel News Caravan of the 1950s or today’s Chinese Internet than anything we would recognize as the free and open web. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 721

Categorization

• XREF: Directly connects to the reader’s surveillance/platform thread: advertiser pressure as an early driver of content moderation, a pre-echo of modern platform governance. — connects to: AOL overtook both rivals by rejecting censorship and the ad-based model — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 722
• SEED: An essay angle: ‘the advertiser as censor’ — how commercial sponsors, not governments, pioneered internet content policing decades before the platform era.