Washington – Last week AT&T admitted muting Pearl Jam’s political lyrics during its exclusive webcast of the band’s Lollapalooza show on Aug. 5. AT&T rightly apologized, said the silencing was a mistake by a content monitor, and claimed that the company “does not censor or edit performances.” AT&T spokeswoman Tiffany Nels also told the Los Angeles Times that it uses the content monitors to block “excessive profanity.”

After being pressed by fans and reporters, AT&T admitted on Friday it had muted political lyrics during the webcasts of other bands on its “Blue Room” site. AT&T said in a statement: “It’s not our intent to edit political comments in webcasts on attblueroom.com. Unfortunately, it has happened in the past in a handful of cases. We have taken steps to ensure that it won’t happen again.” Today, Wired News reported a “Blue Room” crewmember said censoring political speech was a policy for the webcasts.

AT&T’s story now has bigger gaps than the performances it silenced. One instance of muting a band’s political comments might be chalked up as a mistake, but multiple instances point toward something much more sinister: a policy of silencing political speech.

The silencing is especially troubling because it appears the content monitor AT&T hired to watch the Pearl Jam webcast did not do what AT&T claimed he was there to do: monitor inappropriate speech. FMC counted 20 instances of curse words during the Pearl Jam webcast that were not censored by the content monitor, yet Eddie Vedder’s anti-Bush lyrics were muted.

“It’s clear AT&T has not made a mistake – they or the companies they’ve hired to monitor webcasts have engaged in a clear and consistent pattern of silencing free speech,” said Jenny Toomey, executive director of the Future of Music Coalition. “This censorship speaks to the heart of plans by AT&T and other big telecoms to set themselves up as gatekeepers of Internet content. If AT&T can’t be trusted to webcast the political stage banter of a few rock bands, why would we turn the keys to the Internet over to them? Their promises to not block Internet content now ring hollow.”

These are the questions journalists should be asking AT&T: Which performances has it censored and on what occasions? What content did it censor? And most importantly, did the company have a deliberate policy of censoring political speech during its Blue Room webcasts?

For more information about the incident, see: http://www.pearljam.com/news/

About the Future of Music Coalition

Future of Music Coalition is a national non-profit education, research and advocacy organization that identifies, examines, interprets and translates the challenging issues at the intersection of music, law, technology and policy. FMC achieves this through continuous interaction with its primary constituency — musicians — and in collaboration with other creator/citizen groups.