When anonymous attackers went after two Yale law students, they struck back
portfolio.com
portfolio.com
Historically information in publicly broadcast mediums has been trustworthy, but that's simply not true anymore. We need, as a society, to realize that the signal to noise ratio has dropped precipitously in the last decade, and that this trend will only continue.
That being said, it's astonishingly stupid to spend your free time making fun of the most litigious group of people on the face of the planet. The members of the forums pretty much deserve whatever they get.
If a person isn't willing to put their name behind a statement, then we shouldn't lend it any credence. As lurid as the statements were, I don't think its any different from what went on behind closed doors fifty years ago. Barring wishful thinking, people didn't really believe third-hand rumors, so why should it be any different now?
I wonder, though, if this story would even be a blip on the radar if the two girls' names were replaced by some pop star. Maybe it's just that the bar for celebrity has been lowered to the point that all it takes is to be an attractive girl at a prestigious law school.
This has always been a problem for human society, but the ease with which information spreads on the internet has heavily increased the amount of damage that it can do.
But it's just plain dumb to give self-important law students a chance to flex their legal muscles. I don't think the fallout was warranted, but it was obviously coming.
I don't really think that most of what they said is anything special, no--you're right, it's bullshit. But I think you're underestimating how many people take this kind of bullshit seriously, and I think that's a problem in and of itself.
This is what confused me most about the whole case. As the article says: "Many other websites control extremely salacious material either by using special coding to keep it to themselves (so that Google doesn’t pick it up)..."
The major issue wasn't merely that there were false statements being issued, but that they were high on the Google results for the laywers' names. Why didn't the website merely turn off Google indexing for the problem forums?
These two girls were not posters on the board, and the things that were said about them were beyond repugnant. Although there are some good discussions and some really, really smart people on XO, the board's generally a cesspool. An educated cesspool, but a cesspool nonetheless.
I think both sides went too far. I don't have any sympathy for the trolls, and "Pauliewalnuts" I know offline and he's a sociopath. But ruining Ciolli's career, because he was one of the few "outed" targets, was out of line. They hit him hard to pressure him into outing the real offenders, who were anonymous. Hence the countersuit.
Six months later, you're sorting through a pile of 50 resumes and find 18 seriouly negative results. What do you do?
I think we need a thoughtful discussion on how to deal with this or congress will do it for us.
Heck, I don't even want people I don't know to find my Facebook or Twitter page; all it can takes is someone to post a potentially inappropriate photo, or an inappropriately tagged photo of you for your reputation to be destroyed in some circles. Which is why I keep a professional identity on LinkedIn, and obfuscate my other personal online identities (friend's can find me pretty easily).
It used to be that "public figures" could be scrutinized harshly, in print media, while private citizens had a certain degree of protection. It would be considered harassment for the paper to write an op-ed about John Q. Doe, store manager at the local Drug-Fix, being bad at his job.
Now, it's worse to be a private citizen, because it's much easier to destroy a private person's "Google resume". I could talk shit about a prominent politician for days and wouldn't have much of an effect on his Google presence, but if I (or anyone) decided to go into "digital hit man" mode on Joe Q. Bloggs, it wouldn't take more than half an hour. Because there's so little content about him, it would be easy to make over 90% of web content about him be negative.
However, I'm very happy that those individuals who were identified have faced social repercussions for their behavior. I would not want anything to do with any of those posters. If I were hiring, I wouldn't hire any of them. I would probably boycott any businesses that work with them. If they're free to be jerks, I'm free take my business elsewhere.
Therein lies the more interesting issue. Anonymity. It's hard to exert social pressure on bad behavior if you can't identify the people involved. Do we have a right to be anonymous online? Do the pros outweigh the cons?
I really don't know...
No. Not a right, especially when performing constitutionally-protected actions. I don't believe people should be required to identify themselves online, but I do believe that people who post anonymously should expect to be exposed eventually.
A better question would be whether legal channels should be used in the exposure of an anonymous person.
I believe so only if all other option are exhausted.
"Do the pros outweigh the cons?"
Yes, but only in place where free speech is not protected by the state.
There's an argument for removing the ability to be anonymous, but I think it's pretty much superior to allow people to hide their identity, but take their statements with all of the doubt that you would an anonymous, gossipy rumor. Trolls will be trolls, and the best thing to do is ignore them, not try to out them and ruin their professional lives.
On the other hand, posters like Pauliewalnuts, lonelyvirgin, and :D bordered on being sociopathic and I feel like those guys are getting what was coming to them. I also think there's an enormous difference between, for example, expressing desire to have sex with someone (locker-room banter) and making jokes about becoming forceful with that person, which most women would take as a threat.
The article only acknowledges this at the very end: "But many other posts, however cruel, might not be seen as extreme or outrageous enough to lose their First Amendment protection. As for defamation, the overwhelming majority of the comments could be construed as opinions, which are protected."
These women are going way overboard, and abusing the court system (and the fact that they have sufficient resources to legally harass posters) to get what they want. Frankly, because of their litigious behavior, I don't think I would ever hire either of them.
I can imagine some people's thought processes: Because supposed some of it might be true, right? People wouldn't write that stuff if it was false, would they?
A lot of this is because of good search and indexing techniques by Google and their ilk (and people wanting advertising revenue and opening up their sites to the spiders), because even a few years this stuff that wouldn't have been found at all, and would be a hurricane in a taecup. But, today I think it is a problem as this kind of crap has the possibility to seriously harm people's reputation.
But, there is a world of difference between what I morally shouldn't do, and what I legally can't do.
I think the Ku Klux Klan is horrible for spouting its bigoted hate speach about minorities - but I don't think we should make it illegal for them to do so.
I (and the law) are in agreement that straight up libel, slander, obscenity, and calls to violence are not protected by free speech, but pretty much everything else is.
By definition, an opinion can't be false (it's my opinion) - and you really don't want a court legislating which opinions someone should be allowed to express. You can be sued for outright lying (slander/libel), but you can not (and should not) be sued for stating an opinion. No matter how ill conceived or malicious that opinion is.
From a technical point of view if AutoAdmit had blocked search spiders from indexing their forums (or at least the scandalous ones) none of this would have happened in the first place.
Flaming is ok, but calling for these women to be raped and so on is just disturbing and weird and anyone doing it is a bit far from a decent person in any context.
Decent people get caught up in (bad) events all the time. There's the Stanford prison experiment, where students were separated into guards & prisoners with horrifying results. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_prison_experiment
This probably isn't a good comparison, but it's an example of decent people doing bad things and following a crowd or mob mentality. There's probably some sociology term for it, where "normal" people act in un-normal vile ways.
In this case, many of the commentors appear to be male and got caught up in cussing out women (or were acting like bullies). Someone started it, and it snowballed into vile and derogatory language. I'm not condoning their actions, but things like can and do happen all the time, and without intervention escalate.
Why yes. Yes they do.
One, the women were far from litigious (depends on your definition of course but to me taking a year and using everything from humor to begging in an attempt to resolve the case without going to litigation is the opposite of litigious).
Two, they did not have the resources to sue the posters - unless I misunderstood the article, Google's legal firm is representing them for free because Google wants to have control over any legal precedents that affect their ability to index non-moderated online forums.
There is nothing funny about being accused of all kinds of stuff by anonymous individuals, it can do very real harm.
If the perps had been identified, do you think they would have even written all that stuff ? And if they had not then they would not have been pursued.
To claim that they are going overboard is to take away from them the one defense that they have, which is to sue the site owners to get to the data they need to be able to go after those that actually 'did it'.
Sure, they set out to make an example of the people that committed these acts, but that's fine by me.