More bloggers in hot water

Bloggers are getting more attention from lawyers, these days. They're "starting to receive legal letters when they upset someone with enough money to hire a media lawyer," the Financial Times reports, and "defamation, offensive messages, incitement, compromising intellectual property, linking to illegal websites, and inaccurate reporting can all get you into hot water, regardless of whether you are a blogger, journalist, publisher or an e-mail user." This is an opportunity for all of us - parents and young people - to learn more about their free speech rights. "Just 5% of internet users are clear on their legal rights and responsibilities when posting comment online," the FT cites a law firm's research as showing. The study found that 77% of bloggers are "uncertain or unaware of where the law stands."

How to protect from defamation?

That's an unanswered question where the social Web's concerned. Social sites seem to have more protection from US law than their users have right now. A little-known section of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA) is what protects - rightfully, I think - Internet service providers and social-networking sites from liability for what's posted by users of their services, reports ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid in his column in the San Jose Mercury News. It's a little like the way the phone company is not held liable for the nasty things people sometimes say to each other when using its service. [What's different about the social Web, of course - and what makes it much harder for victims or parents not to blame the service provider - is that what users say to or post about each other is public, so the damage can be amplified, reposted, searched for, and perpetuated.]

Anyway, US law so far protects the service provider. The only thing that protects users from each other is the customer service departments of the more responsible social sites, or service providers. For example, MySpace takes down harassing imposter profiles, once it goes through its own internal process of proving that someone's being victimized by someone else who set up a profile impersonating the victim. (It's not always easy to prove what people claim is happening online - sometimes people will say they're being victimized to get someone else kicked off the site, or kids pose as parents to get other kids' profiles taken down.) Not even sites' Terms of Service really protect users, according to a researcher I spoke with recently, who said that sites' Terms are more guidelines than enforced rules. In any case, whether or not Terms of Use are enforced depends on the site.

There are sites like JuicyCampus.com, where victimized users are just out of luck. Larry writes that, when he visited JuicyCampus recently, "the second most prominent post [he found on the home page] read: "paul [his last name, deleted here, was in the post] is a _______ piece of ____ [expletives deleted] who is a closet gay that gets drunk and fools around with other guys secretly." As mean and possibly libelous as that is, Larry writes, the site "can't be touched.... In theory, 'paul' could try to take action against the person who wrote the statement," but JuicyCampus would have to help him find who made the statement. US federal privacy law (different from CDA) prevents any site from revealing the identity of one user to another without a subpoena or other court-issued document. JuicyCampus, though, actually helps people who make such statements stay anonymous, Larry reports, by advising them to use a search engine to find services "that offer free IP-cloaking" (hiding the IP number associated with their computers for anyone trying to find them). Besides, speech like that seen in JuicyCampus, may be hateful and defaming, but it isn't necessarily criminal - it's more along the lines of cyberbullying (not that this doesn't make it less damaging).

With no real recourse, what are victims and their advocates (e.g., parents) to do? This is a discussion that the industry, consumer advocates, and legal experts need to have (or continue!). But all that's at the macro, societal, level. Obviously, there's much that can be done at the micro – household – level, as well as at school. We all need to be helping young people with whom we have influence to think just as critically, alertly, and ethically about how they behave online as they do offline. Nothing should ever take ethics out of the mix. The relatively lawless social Web demands ethical behavior more than anywhere.

The message to our children is: Anonymity and disinhibition change nothing. Not being able to see the other person you're talking to or about is all the more reason to think of that person as a fellow human being. I've never liked the term "cyberspace" because "cyber" suggests robotics. The participatory Web is not alien territory populated by robots – it's another place where human beings hang out.

Your thoughts on this are most welcome – post them in our ConnectSafely.org forum or email them to me via anne(at)netfamilynews.org.

'Hate 2.0'

The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, recently testified before Congress that there has been a "stark rise in the number of hate and terror sites and Web postings," a New York Times blog reports. Its annual report says the Center has identified about 8,000 such sites in the past year, up 30% over last year, the blog adds. Contributing to the problem is the rise of the social Web on which people post hateful videos, comments, etc. The Center "attributes a third of the 30% spike to blogs and discussion groups that support terrorism. The rest is the material of age-old hatreds: 40% anti-Semitic, 20% anti-black, 15% anti-immigrant and the rest a hodge-podge of anti-religious, anti-government sentiment." To counteract all this, the Wiesenthal Center is asking Web users to participate in a sort of Web neighborhood watch program by emailing links to hate sites, videos, and groups to ireport@wiesental.com.

Defaming site: 3 teens accused

The profile, which was online for four days in February, impersonated the father of a classmate of one of its alleged creators and “featured a confederate flag and racial slurs,” the Carlisle (Penn.) Sentinel reports. The town police chief Alan Houck said he wasn’t sure why the kids created the MySpace page but thought they might’ve decided to “smear the family name” because of a disagreement with the son. He said he “intends to file identity theft and harassment charges against the teens unless the juveniles come forward to talk to him. In that case, Houck said, he may consider filing lesser charges.”

Canada's reax to Web 2.0...

...are just as largely ignorant as US ones, it's a little comforting to know. The latest response in Canada, in this case to Facebook, was an announcement from the Ontario government last week "that it was banning access to the site for thousands of bureaucrats and elected officials," law professor Michael Geist writes in the Toronto Star. "While the merits of Facebook are open to debate – some love it, others hate it, and many simply do not understand what the fuss is about – there should be no debating the fact that many of these policy responses are unnecessary, knee-jerk reactions to an emerging social phenomenon that is poorly understood." Since Facebook started allowing regional, not just college, university, and high school networks of users, it has grown from 8 million users last summer to about 21 million now, according to Professor Geist, with Toronto as the service's largest regional network in the world. Canada's recent "backlash," Geist says, seems to be centered around "derogatory" comments in Facebook profiles (often called "cyberbullying") and "workplace productivity." But mindless banning has its own negative impact, he suggests: "The attempts to block Facebook or punish users for stating their opinions fails to appreciate that social network sites are simply the Internet generation's equivalent of the town hall, the school cafeteria, or the workplace water cooler – the place where people come together to exchange both ideas and idle gossip." I wish I was seeing this view in more news reports around the world.