Deborah Fallows:
'There is a special place in Hell
for pornographic spam'

About nine out of ten reports received by ObscenityCrimes.org cite 'porn spam' as the source for their reports. So when the Pew Internet and American Life Project announced (22 October 2003) the release of their new white paper: "Spam: How it is hurting email and degrading life on the Internet," we were interested in what results were generated about 'porn spam.' And when Deborah Fallows used that sentence as a sub-heading in her report, we wanted to talk with her about the implications of the data. Morality in Media's Patrick McGrath spoke with Deborah Fallows (via telephone) on 14 November 2003. Following is an edited transcript of that interview:

MIM: Ms. Fallows, could you tell us a little about yourself, about the Pew Internet and American Life Project, and a general summary of your spam white paper?

DEBORAH FALLOWS: I started working for Pew about two years ago, having spent three years before that working for a dot-com. I have a Ph.D. in linguistics, which how I first started getting into the Internet business.

MIM: And your linguistics degree is from ...?

DF: That's from the University of Texas at Austin, in theoretical linguistics, which translated surprisingly well to working on search engines and content management systems on the Internet.

MIM: And the Pew Internet and American Life Project?

DF: The Pew Internet and American Life Project has been going on about four years. We do basic research about how the Internet is changing life in America, in areas for example, of education, health, civic life, relationships, the workplace. All of our original research is based on nationwide telephone surveys of Americans, and particularly Internet users.

Like everyone else we became very interested in this topic of spam from our experiences in the office and from our personal email as well. In addition, we were seeing reports of increasing numbers in the percentage of spam to email. So, we wanted to explore some of the issues of what it means to users to have so much spam in their email.

We undertook this report to look at user awareness of spam—how much they knew about it; user behavior—what they did to both avoid the spam that was coming in and to deal with the spam once it finally arrived in their in-boxes; user attitudes—how did they feel about spam and how it affected their lives on the Internet?

We were also trying to parse spam a little bit; what were the particular characteristics or attributes of spam that bothered users the most or that didn't bother them so much; what kinds of email messages did they consider to be spam; which were spammier spams than other spams.

MIM: Could you explain how the research was done for this particular study?

DF: We composed a poll, or survey, of all the questions we wanted to ask Internet users about spam. The Princeton Survey Research Associates, who administer our surveys, telephoned Americans and conducted the polling over a two-week period. The population of our respondents is weighted so that all of the demographics come out to represent the nation at large, age, gender, race, income, education levels and so forth.

MIM: And how many persons were surveyed for the research?

DF: For this study—which included both the spam study and some other general questions about the Internet—we surveyed about 2,200 people, 1,400 of whom were Internet users, and about 1,300 of whom were emailers. Typically, over 90 percent of people on the Internet use e-mail.

MIM: What were the general results of the spam research?

DF: Probably the most dramatic and important finding we got out of this research was the profound impact that spam was having on Internet users. About a quarter of the respondents said they actually used email less because of the spam they were getting. Over half of the respondents said they were losing their trust in email because of spam.

MIM: Page 29 of your report has this noticeable sub-hed: "There is a special place in Hell for pornographic spam." It's not very often that you see a fairly detached, scholarly white paper talk about a "special place in Hell" for anybody. It sounds like you touched a raw nerve there. Could you elaborate on that?

DF: I would say the most interesting data point in this entire report was about pornographic spam—email messages with adult content, or with obscene or offensive material. Any time we asked the question that pointed to that kind of spam, the response rates that we got just leapt off the charts. It was clear that we touched a raw nerve whenever we mentioned anything with adult content or obscene or offensive material. People reacted to that single issue more strongly than they reacted to anything else we asked about in this entire study.

I guess it surprised us. It certainly surprised me. You're right, these white papers can be pretty bland, and you try to go very strictly by the numbers. But this one just jumped out, and it seemed to me that it was a particularly apt way to draw attention to this particular item, because it does stop people in their tracks and make them take notice.

MIM: I noticed that anger at porn spam was really strong in the women's demographics, but it was still strong all over the demographic picture. Did that surprise you?

DF: It certainly didn't surprise me that women were more offended by this than men were. It did surprise me that the numbers were so strong across the board.

There were a number of different ways that we asked about pornographic spam. For example, just in probing the definition of "What is spam?"—most everybody can agree that spam is unsolicited commercial email, that comes from someone you either don't know or don't have any relationship with. That's kind of the general definition.

But then when we asked about the content of different types of spam, more people said they would consider email with adult content to be spam than email with any other content we asked about—content that was product/service related, investment-type content, money-making deals, content that might have political messages, or from charities.

Similarly, when we asked, "What kind of spam bothers you most?" more than half of the people pinpointed pornographic spam, or spam with adult content. That was nearly four times the number of respondents who named any other kind of spam.

When we asked about the frequencies of the types of spam that they received—this was very interesting, maybe it was one of the indicators why there was such a strong reaction—porn spam came in third behind product or service offers and investment or financial deals. That told us that there is a lot of offensive spam out there.

MIM: So people were saying that they were getting more spam about products, and "adult content" was down the list, but they noticed the "adult content" out of proportion to the volume they might get.

DF: I would say that they're bothered by it more than the volume they get of other types of content—not even just noticed it but are bothered by it, which is a stronger kind of indictment against spam with adult content.

MIM: Do you believe that part of the anger against porn spam is a function of the receivers' feeling that they can't do anything about it, that they can't fight back?

DF: That's an interesting question. Three-quarters of the people in this survey said that they were very bothered that they couldn't do anything to stop spam in general, no matter what filters they used, no matter what precautions they used. They just couldn't stop this stuff from coming. People didn't necessarily say that about pornographic spam—they said this about spam in general.

But to explain a little more about the pornographic spam, let me illustrate: We had access to an archive of stories that people wrote in about their experiences with spam, from a group called [the Telecommunications Research and Action Center]. They had posted a request on their web site for people to send in their stories about spam. More than four thousand stories were submitted, and I read every single one.

I was extremely struck by the reactions that people had to the pornographic spam. It seemed to me that well over fifty percent of these stories were about spam with adult content. My sense from reading these stories was that what really bothered people was not so much that they couldn't control it—that was true of all spam—but that this stuff popped up on their screens in such inappropriate times and situations—whether they were doing their email in public, whether it was in school classrooms, teachers with kids around; whether it was in their offices, where they were in semi-private situations but where people could walk by and see things on their screen; whether it was at home with kids on their laps, trying to scroll through their email, finding some things from Grandma.

In all of these personal-life, everyday experiences, this spam with adult content would inject itself, unannounced, and cause such an emotional disruption in the normal course of their day. That seems to me the thing about the pornographic spam that completely undid people. Every time it came, it was a shock to them—and it affected not only them personally but the whole situation around them.

The whole experience of doing email and being on the Internet changed from being a rather pleasant experience, one that you're looking forward to, to instead sitting down to your computer and finding this unannounced artillery attack of the pornographic spam coming at them, that they have no control over, have very strong reactions to, and that affects not only them but anyone who might be around them.

MIM: You've partially answered this just now, but could you elaborate on your remark on p. 41 that "eliminating porn spam alone, among all unsolicited email, would go a long way toward softening spam's negative impact on Internet users"?

DF: My sense, both from reading the numbers and the responses, and from the resonance that we got from the stories that people wrote in about their experiences with pornographic spam, was that, in general, people would have a certain tolerance level for how much "background noise" they could accept in being on the Internet. There were pop-up ads, there was spam that was going to come in, and they knew that it wasn't going to be possible to eliminate all of this in general.

But it seemed that if you could eliminate the pornographic spam, you would eliminate the most offensive part of spam, and the spam that remained would be much more tolerable to people. It is, I think, both the volume and the nature of the pornographic spam that pushes people over the edge.

MIM: Based both on your research and your experiences, do you believe that people understand that porn spam essentially is an advertising vehicle to promote pornographic Web sites?

DF: I don't know the answer to that, and I don't think most people think about it deeply. I think they see this stuff pop up on their screens, and they just try to get away from it. I think those who have some kind of interest in going to the Web sites certainly think about that more, but most people don't spend that much time thinking, "Why is this there?" and "What do they want me to do about this?"; it's just "Get this thing out of my life!"

MIM: Given the level of raw emotion, does the Pew Internet consider 'Net pornography as something that should be researched further?

DF: I would say yes. It's not our job to take positions on things like this, but it's our job to understand what's going on out there, and to pursue things that warrant interest. Certainly this issue is something that we have been trying to figure out how to pursue. Around the office, we refer to it as "the dark side of the Internet." But it is a particularly difficult aspect of the Internet to research, in the methodology that we normally use, which is to go to broad-based user surveys. I think you have to worry a little more about the truthfulness of how people are talking about their experience with pornography, than you do with some other things.

Aside from asking these kinds of basic questions of your exposure to it, it's hard to know where to take the next step. How do you find the people who are looking at pornography on the Web and survey them? It's a difficult issue for us to attack. We've been trying to figure out how to approach this for some time now.

MIM: Well, you've brought me neatly to my next question—the methodological one. What would be another way of researching it that, besides going to the general public?

DF: Well I would come back to you for that question. Certainly academics, people who do research about the Internet, and on the Internet itself, that's a different thing, and it's easy enough to roam around on the Internet and try to figure out what's going on. But when you're actually talking to users, that's the stopper, figuring out how to do it. I think one direction we're thinking about going in is trying to find smaller populations of people who would have more experience in one way or another with the pornographic content on the Web.

MIM: Suppose that there was a such a population of users that would be willing to do that survey. How would you going about doing a survey among that group?

DF: It depends on how you can contact them. We have done Web-based polling. If we could post on every porn site that was out there, "Want to take a poll about porn? Go to this Web site and take this poll." That is probably how we'd do it—we're not going to be able to contact them randomly by telephone, which is the usual method of doing this.

MIM: Of course, with that kind of self-selection you have bias problems.

DF: It's huge. You have to do what you can and disclose everything about how you did this, so that all of the caveats are out there.

MIM: Have they considered the idea of not doing a user-based survey, but more of a content review of what's out there?

DF: I'm sure there are people who are doing that in academia or in other research groups. It's just not what we [at the Pew Internet project] are set up to do. I don't disagree that that's a good thing to do, it's just not the way we work and approach things. It doesn't fit into our program.

MIM: So you're trying to keep your focus not on the Internet as such but people's reaction [to] and use of the Internet.

DF: Right.