In the late 1990s, most publicly traded companies were the subjects of Yahoo! Finance bulletin boards. Yahoo! allowed users to post message under pseudonyms, so its bulletin boards quickly became a virtual water cooler for rumors about companies nationwide.
Corporate executives and public relations departments routinely monitored the bulletin boards, keenly aware that one negative post could affect employee morale and, more importantly, stock prices. While companies were accustomed to handling negative press coverage, the pseudonymous criticism on Yahoo! Finance was an entirely different world. Executives knew to whom they could complain if a newspaper's business columnist wrote about inflated share prices or pending layoffs. Yahoo! Finance's commenters, on the other hand, typically were not easily identifiable.
Not surprisingly, the Yahoo! Finance bulletin boards soon became a major early battleground for the right to anonymous online speech. Companies' attempts to unmask Yahoo! Finance posters would set the stage for years of First Amendment battles over online anonymity.
