AOL & Slavery: What Goes Around Comes Around...

An older AOL logo...

A little over a decade ago AOL found itself in some trouble.  My wife, among many thousands or perhaps tens of thousands, of volunteers known as "Community Leaders" monitored chatrooms.   There were also sorts of chatrooms that covered virtually every topic.  The chatrooms ran 24 x 7 and all were all monitored by a human beings.

In the chat rooms there was no swearing, no personal attacks, no this, and no that.

A violation of this protocol, or "Terms of Services", was grounds to have your AOL account censored or shut off.  AOL was a lucrative pay for profit service that was, prior to its purchase by Time Warner, an independent company.

At the time I marveled at the amount of work my wife put into this Community Leadership thing.

Just like a job you had a boss, you had hours of work, you had to log what you did, e.g., removing offensive posts or members, and so on.  It was a lot of work and time.

As it turned out I was not the only one marveling at this process.  So was the US Justice Department.

In 1999 a class action suit (documented here under "Community Leaders") ultimately resulted in 7,000 "Community Leaders" receiving a portion of $15 million USD as compensation for the work they did.  My wife never received any of this compensation for her time and effort and never sought to be part of the class action.

However, I do believe that her good intentions were exploited by AOL in this regard.

Fast forward to 2011 - a mere year after this settlement is reached.

AOL has just purchased the Huffington Post - a liberal blogger aggregation site posting thousands of stories on all matters of liberal, media and general interests.  This is a large, well run site with lots of content from all sorts of sources: writes, doctors, journalists, and so on. 

The price?  $150 million USD.  Paid to Arianna Huffington.

I myself as author of this blog marveled at the site and its content stream: lots of diverse authors, lots of content, all kinds of stuff to link to stories, etc.  I always wondered how Arianna managed to put such a site together and to garner such a large and diverse collection authors and content.

Well I need wonder no more.

According to this lawsuit, author Jonathan Tasini, and other news reports the Huffington Post did it the old fashioned way:

Slavery.

Yes, apparently the Huffington Post never paid any of the authors of the tens of thousands of blog articles posted there.  No, they told the authors they were doing work for the Huffington Post for free for their own personal exposure and advancement.

And that apparently worked right up until Arianna Huffington sold the Post to AOL for $150 million USD.

Now certainly it seems that AOL should have known better considering their wallets were just lightened by the $15 million USD settlement I mentioned above.  (Smells like a share holder lawsuit to me...)

One also imagines that someone along the way at the AOL legal department might have thought to ask old Arianna what the business relationship was between her and her writers.  But no, given its history as a slave master, AOL probably figured they could go right on cracking the whip over the writers backs and duck out years later with a tiny settlement.

After all, you can get a lot done with an unlimited supply of slaves.

Just look at the Pyramids or a southern US Plantation.

What's most troubling to me is that the Huffington Post brands itself as a liberal "go to" place for stories on all things liberal.

Foolish me always imagined that the liberal political position on slavery was that it was a bad thing.

But I guess in the case of AOL and the Huffington Post business and financial expediency trumps morality.

Experience tells me that this lawsuit will be only the first.  Any emails from the HuffPost asking anyone to do anything will quickly be converted by lawyers into "contracts" and "compensation claims".

My take:

At the end of the day Arrianna and AOL will have to pay the writers and there will still be money left over for Arianna...

That is until the lawyers like Kurzon Strauss LLP take their cut.

Oh well, it must have been fun while it lasted...