SGA Online Discussion Page

The Student Government Association established an online discussion page in 1997 on a server hosted by the Office of Information Technology’s Innovative Technologies Center (ITC), as a forum for students to comment on campus issues. In March 1998 the SGA passed a bill requiring that anonymous posts on the forum be deleted. In March 1999 the SGA passed a bill ending the policy (of deleting anonymous posts in the interest of avoiding censorship) that had been in effect since the page was established. The operators of the page were required to post the reasons for any message removal. Later in 1999 the discussion page was shut down by ITC following a posting accusing a student of being a child molester. In August 1999 the page was removed—to avoid censorship and legal issues identified by the General Counsel’s Office, because the ITC software platform was outdated, and because maintaining it was too time-consuming. In September 1999 the Free University Cooperative of Knoxville, a student organization that supported civil liberties (but was not a recognized student organization), briefly offered an open discussion web page for the entire UT community.