Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf Did Not "Willingly Block LGBT Internet Sites"

I just finished a very cordial conference call with Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and discussed what has now become the hot topic of their complimentary wi-fi service blocking some LGBT news blogs, such as Towleroad and Pam's House Blend.

In a statement to Unite the Fight, Coffee Bean said:

First and foremost I want to thank you for bringing the issue of the two blocked LGBT websites to our attention. Let me be 100% clear from the onset. It is not, and has never been, the policy of Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf to willingly block or prevent access to LGBT Internet sites.

After you brought this to our attention yesterday we took immediate steps to resolve the issue and investigate exactly what happened. We found the OpenDNS Web content filtering system had miscategorized these two web sites as having sexual content, and thus prevented customers from accessing those sites. With the help of OpenDNS, we were able to override the filter immediately when it was brought to our attention.

No web content filter is perfect, but we are able to change misclassifications when they are brought to our attention. To be clear, the words “gay” or “lesbian” are not flagged in the OpenDNS Filter. We believe that censorship of any site that offers news and opinions is wrong and goes against everything we stand for as a company and a member of the communities in which we operate.

To those who came to Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's defense - you were spot on. And I want to thank the coffee and tea chain for their fast action on correcting the situation.

I personally want to state that my frustration wasn't with Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, but with OpenDNS' flagging method, the content filter provider for Coffee Bean's wi-fi. As I've stated already, these faulty but many times purposeful flagging methods usually lead to "technical discrimination," which we LGBT face at work, libraries and other public places offering internet services. And in the case of OpenDNS, it took just a view homophobic viewers to flag these LGBT sites and effectively block them for all.

When OpenDNS responded to my first email claiming it was Coffee Bean who was responsible, it immediately stirred a lot of people up against Coffee Bean, but inaccurately. I then wrote Coffee Bean. They responded immediately to me.

In the interim, the Founder of OpenDNS' clarified his company's original statement, stating that all of this was a "technical mistake" on their end.

In this case, it was a mistake. But in other cases, it isn't. Under Towleroad's story on this issue, many commentators have mentioned all the other places where they found the site to have been blocked. Other's have mentioned the same for Pam's House Blend, a site purely news and editorial.

What this boils down to is our continued need to change hearts and minds about the LGBT population. What needs to change is the automatic correlation between who we are and what is deemed offensive, hence the need for many to block any site that deals with our issues and, unfortunately, our labels.

And it was this frustration that I experienced which launched all of this in the first place. Hopefully, the good that will come out of this isn't just a stronger relationship between Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf and the LGBT population. What can come out of it is a message, first to us, that if we speak up, things can change. But secondly, a message to the public that we simply will not, cannot take, not only "technical discrimination," but all discrimination.

Unite the Fight Is to Talk with Coffee Bean - Statement Issued From Content Filter Co. Founder

I just talked to Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf's PR firm and I will be having a conversation with Coffee Bean later this afternoon.

I want to say right now though, that the PR firm has stated that they too are aghast at how the coffee shop's wi-fi system works and reiterated that these sites should not be blocked. They mentioned Coffee Bean feels the same. I'll know more about what they have to say this afternoon.

Furthermore, Pam's House Blend, a blocked site, is also aware of the issue. David Ulevitch, the founder of OpenDNS, the company that filters content for Coffee Bean's wi-fi, issued this statement in Pam's comments section (which someone was also kind enough to post under our comments here as well):

I don't want to jump in front of my staff who are going to respond to this better than I can, but this was just a mistake on OpenDNS's part in two ways: 1) blocking your site and 2) having a support response that was a bit more biased than it should have been.

I love our support department because our team is not outsourced to some far off country and is made up of real human beings in San Francisco with real opinions and who really care about giving our customers and users high-quality support. 99.99% of the time, that's awesome. Every once in a while (this might be the first time) I look at an answer and scratch my head wondering what they were thinking. I think you'll find this all gets cleared up in a couple of hours as folks roll into work and we'll send responses to UniteTheFight and the other sites.

Also, in case anyone wonders... no "heads are going to roll" as a result of this, it was just a technical mistake and a slightly blunt support response from a well-meaning person on my team. I'm confident neither will happen again. :-)

Thanks,
David Ulevitch
Founder, OpenDNS

ps, the irony is that I can say with a very high degree of confidence that nobody at OpenDNS, least of all our support department, has any issue with LGBT sites. If you ever see our blocked page again in error just flag it for review.

This is developing very well. My issue, from the beginning, was "technical discrimination." Unless someone, an actual person, other than users who are homophobic, are causing these sites to be flagged, then it's a technical issue. (Which is why I wrote my email to OpenDNS.) But behind this issue is the association of "gay", "lesbian" and "homosexual" to smut, thus causing their systems to block essential, clean and legitimate LGBT sites.

The beautiful result of all of us speaking up about this is that Coffee Bean and OpenDNS are wanting to work with us on solving this issue. They think it's wrong, too. But if we don't ever speak up, what offends us will never be fixed.