A Charlottesville Internet forum for freedom of expression is making waves among advocates and opponents of free speech alike.
The virtual community chalkboard at chalkboard.tjcenter.org is an online version of the future Charlottesville community chalkboard, slated to debut across from City Hall in summer 2003. In the spirit of the future monument, any person may post written material of any kind on the virtual chalkboard.
Virtual chalkboard readers now can edit comments by others or erase entire posts. Although the chalkboard can handle 65,000 postings, messages rarely last more than a few minutes before getting deleted.
Critics of the chalkboard cite the ease of erasing messages as a potential impediment to free speech.
"It seems to me that by citizens having the ability to erase what other people have written ... that's a kind of censorship," said Andrew Borchini, president of the University Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. "Even though the government's not doing it ... the false ideas that are conveyed on the blackboard are legitimate ideas and when other people erase them it negates the idea."
Joshua Waller, associate director of the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Protection of Free Expression, emphasizes that the erasure function is not designed to promote censorship.
"We feel the erase feature accurately reflects the choice between tolerance and censorship that we as private citizens have to make over and over again in our daily lives," Waller said. "The chalkboard does not create that choice."
Because the chalkboard is an unregulated forum, critics question its accessibility to children, but the monument's advocates emphasize that the experience could be a positive one for children.
"I think those incidents of objectionable expression are going to be so far outnumbered by examples of expression that I want my children to see that it's a price I'm willing to pay as a parent," Waller said.
Charlottesville officials and Thomas Jefferson Center representatives also stress that the real chalkboard likely will be a very different experience from the virtual chalkboard.
"With the real chalkboard, a real person is going to have to go into a public space in a public realm and will be observed and therefore anonymity will still be there," said Charlottesville Mayor Blake Caravati, who reads the virtual chalkboard several times each week. "You might not know that person's name, but people are going to be watching and then maybe even responding"
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