In the early Internet, it was impossible to find isolated references to people, places, and things. Many users navigated using directories like the original Yahoo, and early search tools like Gopher (structured documents) and Archie (FTP) were limited .
The search engines changed everything. Starting with Lycos and AltaVista, information was freed from obscurity. Suddenly, no matter where on the Internet your name might be mentioned, a search engine could find it.
On Monday, we discussed why the Internet is a new frontier. On Tuesday ,we questioned whether Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 still fits the Internet of 2010. Today, I’ll explain how the rise of search engines since 1996 has changed reputation and privacy, and why CDA 230 subsidizes libel by preventing speakers and facilitators from internalizing the costs of their actions.
Google Has Changed How Information is Consumed
I don’t think Google is evil.
But Google is far from perfect. Google creates the illusion that just ten search results reflect some meaningful judgment on a person’s life. For example, the top five Google search results for any search term get 88% of the clicks. The over-attention given to the first few Google results is partly user error, but it’s also a form of rational ignorance on the part of searchers: Google gives good enough results most of the time, so there is little incentive to look deeper.
The attention given to the first few Google results would be fine if Google always provided accurate, balanced, and relevant information. Unfortunately, it doesn’t. Google has no way to measure whether websites contain information that is true, fair, or proportionate. Instead, Google uses rough heuristics—most notably the number of links to a page—to try to calculate a page’s popularity. Popularity substitutes for relevancy, often with comical results (remember “miserable failure?”).
Online, Google search drops users onto a website with no context or history of the site. There’s no indication whether a site is a parody (witness Salon being fooled by Landover Baptist), populated by anonymous trolls, a personal rant, or anything else. Of course, it is possible for users to perform this research for each and every site they visit–but the evidence is that they simply don’t (witness the Times of London being fooled by anonymous postings on a soccer website).
Rational ignorance? Possibly. Through experience, I’ve learned with law-related sites are reliable, which are tabloid, and which are garbage—but I haven’t had reason or opportunity to do the same for medicine, sports, fashion, or any of hundreds of other areas, and it’s questionable whether we should subsidize it further.
Google has Leveled the Playing Field – For Better and Worse
Google has elevated the ramblings of a lone speaker to the same visibility as the New York Times. This is a wonderful development for politics and freedom. It is a frightening development for personal privacy.
In the old days, the major media (think New York Times) was very unlikely to write about you. Your privacy was generally at the mercy of your neighbors and acquaintances—who often had to stake their own reputations when they chose to attack yours. If something rose to the level of defamation, it was usually easy to find the defendant and fight it out in court.
But today, anybody with a blog can (and all too often does) smear you, defame you, or invade your privacy. Their motivations are many: politics (if you read VC, you might have strong opinions), envy (think job promotion), mischief (think 4chan), etc. If you don’t have a big presence in Google before being attacked, Google will inevitably find the smear and bring it to the top of your search results: and tabloid material often rises to the top of a Google search because it gets the most clicks and attention.
This mechanism takes place even if the same content offline would undoubtedly be considered libelous or invasive-of-privacy. (If you disagree with offline liability for libel and invasion of privacy, you probably won’t agree with this either.) In many cases, you can’t find the original poster (it would take a lawyer, two subpoenas, and months). The host shrugs and says “CDA 230, not my problem” and rationally declines to name the creator (his customer).
Further, online defamation and privacy invasions can outlive the original speaker. In the offline world, most libelers stop once they are found. Online, hosts need not remove libelous or privacy-invasive information even after it has been found to be liability-creating. “Zombie content” lives on even after the original creator wants it gone (much to privacy advocates’ chagrin, Facebook does not delete all content when you delete your account), or even if the original creator has passed away or gone offline.
This has real consequences for real people. Consider false-but-hard-to-disprove allegations. How do you respond if a political opponent, a personal enemy, or simply a random stranger creates a blog claiming that you harassed or had an affair with a subordinate? What do people think when they see that in the first three Google results? It’s true that more speech can help push the false information down in search results, but it is near-impossible to prove the negative. And once that seed of doubt is planted (“did Obama shake hands with the President of Iran?” “was Kerry at a rally with Jane Fonda?” ) your name is forever tarnished.
Or consider the case of true-but-private information. Some anti-libertarians may question the Fourth Amendment by asking “If you have nothing to hide, then why should you care if we search you?” But should we cede our privacy so easily? What if a “peeping tom” photo of you ends up at the top of a search for your name? Your daughter’s name? It may be clearly illegal offline, but that doesn’t stop it from being distributed online without recourse.
CDA 230 Removes the Internalization of the Cost of Libel
I agree with commenters who have pointed out that stopping free speech online is (1) impractical, (2) inconsistent with the First Amendment, and (3) a bad idea.
But, consider how CDA 230 is subsidizing libel. Speech liability (libel, slander, invasion of privacy, etc) exists to make sure that a speaker can’t impose certain forms of harm on others (unfairly ruining a reputation) without feeling some cost herself. In the offline world, this risk of speech liability is largely internalized by the speaker and knowing facilitators: would-be authors of libelous publications know that they will be found and sued, and newspapers stop running advertisements they know to be false in order to stay out of court.
But online, the speakers often disappear thanks to anonymity and the lack of effective record-keeping by hosts. And, thanks to CDA 230, hosts suffer no liability even if they know that users are using the platform to defame others, profit from the resulting tabloid attention. CDA 230 goes so far that, under current law, a site owner could knowingly create a site that expressly encourages users to create false and malicious information.
In these cases, CDA 230 acts as a subsidy by removing liability (cost internalization) away from the speaker and host. There’s no incentive for hosts to keep records about their users; in a race to attract users, hosts have rationally advertised their lack of record-keeping–even though the lack of records imposes an external cost on defamation and privacy victims. There’s no incentive for hosts to remove content; Google rewards them (with web traffic) for keeping libelous material online–even though the material imposes external costs on victims. And there’s no incentive for users to not create libelous materials; in many cases there’s little practical chance of being found—even though it can take a victim years to clean up the damage.
The result has been a high-speed race to the tabloid bottom online among many content hosts. In a race to stand out in Google’s search results, which deliver users without context or background, some sites have encouraged tabloid anonymity (think JuicyCampus) rather than thought-through content (think VC). Maybe the market will correct the imbalance, but so far it has responded to the subsidy for libelous speech by producing more of it.
Tomorrow: Fixing the CDA 230 subsidy
David Thompson is co-author of the leading Internet policy book of 2010, Wild West 2.0 (Amazon) and general counsel of ReputationDefender, Inc.. The standard disclaimer applies: the views represented here are his alone and not those of any current or former employer.
Stephen Lathrop says:
Disagree with:
The availability of unedited public access for cranks may be a plus for freedom in the abstract, although I am conservative enough to view it as more a cost than a benefit, but it is clearly bad for politics. Listeners’ needs have at least as much to do with the quality of politics as do speaker’s freedoms. For too many Americans, discovering a groundless charge in accord with their own political preference is simply too challenging.
Losing the editorial screen provided by traditional media turns public discourse into a minefield for listeners—and there are all too many cynics and opportunists willing to sow mines. One need not believe that traditional media perform the editorial task well, or even well enough, to understand that undertaking the task of vetting information for accuracy is a plus for politics.
If, as appears to be happening, the success of the internet destroys the business model which supports edited discourse, that will be a bad day for public understanding. The result will be far more disorienting, even for seasoned critical thinkers, than I believe many now suspect. The tools that a citizen brings to a critical evaluation of current information have largely been supplied by editors.
When someone asks the key critical question, “How do I know that?” the implicit answer is, “Because I own a store of reliable information against which to judge it.” Take the editors out of the picture and that store is going to diminish or disappear. Politics won’t be the better for it.
Your main points seem well made, but you would be better off without the subsidy angle. Most readers expect subsidy to mean payment, as opposed to reduction in cost, so using the term will prove confusing for some.
June 10, 2010, 3:23 amAbhishek says:
You are missing two important points here.
1) The reactions of people to an news/revelation partly depends on the source where it is found. I am far less likely to take seriously material posted by some anonymous commenter or blogger than I am to take by a professional journalist. Google may elevate NY Times and a random blog post to its front post, it won’t equalize their credibility in my eyes.
2) You focus on the privacy of those who are being written about. What about the privacy of those who are writing? CDA 230 promotes free speech by providing a safe harbor that helps protect the privacy and anonymity of those with opinions. This is especially relevant if you are criticising a powerful figure, something that previously was possible mainly for those with money and standing.
You are right that Google has changed privacy and reputation forever. Unlike you, I think that is mostly a good thing.
June 10, 2010, 8:13 amDaniel Golding says:
A couple important points. First, the author clearly does not understand how Hosting works, or the difference between hosting providers and content providers/sources. When a Hosting Provider has 50,000 direct customers and potentially 4 or 5 times that many customer-of-customers, the idea that a hosting provider can somehow have omniscient knowledge of their customers (and worse, customer-of-customer’s) businesses is absurd. When you get to the users-of-customer-of-customers level, you get into the millions for most hosting providers.
Second, there are many folks who feel that Reputation Defender is a scam. I have no personal knowledge of their business practices, but there are many who disagree.
{The host shrugs and says “CDA 230, not my problem” and rationally declines to name the creator (his customer).}
The Hosting Provider is normally contractually prevented from naming their customer, as Mr. Thompson well knows. Its not rational choice – its business and contracts.
{There’s no incentive for hosts to keep records about their users; in a race to attract users, hosts have rationally advertised their lack of record-keeping–even though the lack of records imposes an external cost on defamation and privacy victims. }
All Hosting Providers keep extensive records on their users, because their users PAY THEM. Does Mr. Thompson have some other meaning for “host”? In the most generic sense, it can mean any Internet-connected computer system. That’s a dangerous point-of-view. Should all Internet users be forced to keep logs of connections?
{And, thanks to CDA 230, hosts suffer no liability even if they know that users are using the platform to defame others, profit from the resulting tabloid attention. }
Hosting Providers, after a disastrous period in the early 2000s are now mostly profitable. Perhaps some lawyers see this as an opportunity to extract those profits and provide them to those being “defamed”?
—-
I would never buy this book. I would never utilize the services of a company represented by a person who would write this. I have left my full name to show I’m not an anonymous Internet Troll. Needless to say, I’m actually concerned Mr. Thompson will sue me – that’s where is will all lead, squashing dissent and reasonable disagreement because of fear. Shame on the VC bloggers for giving Mr. Thompson, clearly not a friend of free expression, a bully pulpit.
June 10, 2010, 8:25 amIR Student says:
I’m curious how getting rid of or modifying CDA 230 would overcome privacy concerns. Sure, collecting more information about various site visitors would help with defamatory information posted on message board lets say. But this information would also be used for marketing and could be sold to third parties. Perhaps I misunderstand what information would be collected, and maybe the trade-off is worth it. But from the reaction to Facebook privacy concerns, I think most would disagree with the later point.
I think the best way to combat defamation of private individuals on the internet is to focus on redefining what is a “public statement” on the internet. Surely not everything that is written on the internet is defamatory. If I were to write a blog post about a personal enemy falsely accusing them of murder but the site only had 10 hits after one year, it would be hard to say I’ve really damaged their reputation because almost no one has read what I’ve said. But if a VC blogger were to falsely accuse someone of murder that would be defamatory because VC clocks in hundreds of thousands viewers daily. What’s worse with the latter scenario is that the story will be blogged and re-blogged about for several days by multiple sources (think of the Harvard E-Mail Controversy) and make it virtually impossible to erase the defamatory accusations.
The real problem with internet defamation is not tracking who is defaming an individual, it is ensuring that private individuals have the platform to respond to the charges. The USSC has held that public individuals are held to different defamation standards because they have such a platform. But the internet has resulted in private individuals being defamed more often without a more robust protection of a private individual’s ability to respond to such defamation. Given the knowledge a website (via tools from google-analytics) has on its web traffic, “public websites” can be held liable for defamatory content of private individuals. Obviously how one defines a “public website” (how many hits do you need to be considered public, etc.) would be highly controversial. Nor am I necessarily sure if this is a good idea. But it gets at the heart of the problem.
Like Stephen, I’m also dubious of the equality of the lone speaker and NYT. The NYT has much more credibility than a no-name author. Perhaps in the early days of the internet we are more likely to believe anything we read. But as the internet progresses and more people get used to the internet, I think we’ll adjust to the internet, and learn to be more skeptical of those lone speakers.
June 10, 2010, 8:32 amJP says:
I think you are missing an important aspect of Google’s libel. Google actually pushes libel at you through the search suggestion feature. Type in “is #” where #= any letter and one of the top 10 suggestions is probably libel. They do this completely anonymously with no sources whatsoever.
“is ob” is a fun one.
June 10, 2010, 8:34 amSuperSkeptic says:
Hear hear!
And I disagree with this:
a) Who says that “google creates the illusion that just ten search results reflect some meaningful judgment on a person’s life”? Maybe to you. Otherwise, this is unpersuasive hyperbole (I should know).
b) Does google really change how information is consumed? Isn’t your complaint: that ignorant people hear libelous or defamatory things and, in their rational ignorance, blindly accept them – but in the real world there is a remedy. There’s no change due to google here in the sense that people are acting online in the same manner. Your search for an online remedy thus refutes this premise. Increased anonymity and permanence hardly change that consumption pattern either.
You rightly acknowledge that those of us opposed to libel in the real world will likely feel the same way about your proposals. Also, your (repeated) mentioning of the release of the “peeping tom” photo does give me pause, but that’s about it. The costs of people-saying-mean-things websites is simply far, far outweighed by the opening of discourse. (And I’m not crying a river that any “traditional media” isn’t filtering my sources for me.)
June 10, 2010, 8:41 amMattC says:
On the subject of privacy/contractual agreements for online hosting/forum accounts etc., an interesting topic here is the recent controversy over the “anonymous” blog comments of a Cuyahoga County (Ohio) Common Pleas judge, Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold. A Cleveland.com (the online portal for The Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper) user named “lawmiss” had been making nasty comments about lawyers and defendants who had appeared in Saffold’s court, racist/sexist comments about society in general, and other comments unbecoming of a judge since at least May 2007.
Eventually, Cleveland.com/The PD ran a story that public records request revealed “lawmiss” had posted from Saffold’s county computer in the courthouse. The judge and her 23-year-old law school dropout daughter then humorously attempted to shift the blame to the daughter. But, alas, unfortunately for the judge, IP addresses don’t lie. Neither do the dated cultural references and colloqualisms “lawmiss” occasionally employed ["Amos and Andy" etc.] Here, the IP was linked to the courthouse computer. Commenters’ reactions were widely split, with some favoring the outing of the judge making the comments and others decrying the invasion of privacy.
There’s an interesting, nebulous clause in the Cleveland.com user agreement that you must agree to before registering for a commenter’s account regarding when they may use your personal data. That clause will surely be at the heart of the lawsuit the judge has now filed.
You can get a nutshell account of the story here: http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2010/03/post_258.html
A Google search for “Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold” should turn up more stories for the interested.
Wherever you happen to fall on this matter, it’s an interesting case study in the debate being raised in these articles this week.
June 10, 2010, 8:41 amChris Travers says:
So, suppose someone goes around putting libelous flyers on telephone poles. Is the utility company to be financially responsible?
It seems to me that this is really the proper analogy rather than the newspaper. Newspapers typically review content before publishing it and making it available for others to see. I notice that on this blog, David Thompson does not require every comment to be approved by him before it shows up.
I could live with a model which would find contributory liability for taking affirmative actions to publish libelous content. I could live with a model extending the same sort of rationale in Grokster (regarding copyright infringement and contributory liability of businesses promoting infringing uses) to libel. But when you look at generally anonymous content published to the internet by anonymous individuals without any direct oversight by other parties, that really should not be enough in any world to allow liability. Otherwise, we might as well hold laser printers liable when their printers are used to print up such defamatory content….
June 10, 2010, 9:24 amDaniel Golding says:
{So, suppose someone goes around putting libelous flyers on telephone poles. Is the utility company to be financially responsible?}
Not only that, but the utility company must post staff at the poles to log the identities of posters, then maintain that data until Mr. Thompson asks for it. Then, the utility must produce the data at their own cost. After all, it would be unreasonable for Mr. Thompson’s venture backed startup to have to foot the bill, right?
June 10, 2010, 9:42 ambebopkid says:
i agree with Abhishek’s assertion:
Truth is already fragile, easily buried and difficult to retrieve without Google. If the right to be wrong has strong benefits offline I don’t see how it has any less benefit online — especially when it’s an anonymous commenter versus a VC article.
June 10, 2010, 9:47 amStephen Lathrop says:
Does unintended irony get any better than that?
June 10, 2010, 9:48 amBill says:
This is a perfect example of Abhishek’s point. Although I hold stuff I read on VC in very high regard, the second I saw something written by someone affiliated with Reputation Defender, it went in one ear and out the other. It really looks like me like his job at Reputation Defender has colored his perspective.
If I say something that I’m legally allowed to say, but the person I’m speaking about doesn’t like it, very often they’re going to claim it’s a lie/libel etc based on some really minor pedantic technicality. Anytime someone has something said about them online that they don’t like, it’s always “It’s a LIE!”
The whole perspective of this post seems to be that everything negative written about someone else is defamatory and libel and that no one is thin skinned or dishonest.
I don’t know why I even wasted a few seconds of my life reading something from someone associated with Reputation Defender (I don’t think they are a scam as much as scumbags) Oh well.
June 10, 2010, 9:50 amSeaDrive says:
No. Google ranks based on the sites that have linked to the information. This is effectively a measure of interest shown by internet users.
Besides, there may well little difference between the lone speaker (e.g. Andrew Sullivan) with the NY Times (e.g. David Brooks). Big institutions are aggregates of lone individuals.
The OP is saying Google ought to be something it never pretended to be.
June 10, 2010, 10:03 amPersonFromPorlock says:
Out of curiosity, how would the changes the author proposes play out against the revealers, and indeed the revelation, of Climategate? Or against a hypothetical ‘embittered ex-employee’ who wanted to warn the public about BP’s safety practices a year or two ago?
Of course one can discover that the President is a puppy-blender on any number of sites, and even have a choice of presidents. But all this tells us is that double-checking sensational claims is a good idea – and the means of doing that is through more searching. Just as ‘the cure for the problems of freedom is more freedom’, so the cure for the problems of information is more information.
The freedom to post on the Internet devalues the credibility of individual postings, which draws the teeth of libel at the source. The suggestion that the gullible will be misled with dire consequences may well be true, but the occasional rule of the gullible is preferable to the permanent rule of the censors.
June 10, 2010, 10:05 amStephen Lathrop says:
Several commenters have suggested reliance on the discernment of readers as a plausible defense against falsehood. The notion, as expressed by one, is that when you compare an anonymous post and something from the NYT, you don’t have much trouble distinguishing which is likely to be reliable.
Others have suggested that anonymity is a great help in getting out the truth, in a world where the powerful have the ability to retaliate.
Two problems:
1. Those are contradictory ideas. Your anonymous little-guy truth teller isn’t going to be heeded if everybody is using anonymity as a proxy for unreliability.
2. The situation looks entirely different if the default reliable sources of information (NYT, etc.) have all disappeared, and all you have to choose from are the assertions of people who either know something first hand, are willing to pretend that they do, or can’t tell the difference between something they know and something they heard.
June 10, 2010, 10:08 amFederal Farmer says:
I think someone misunderstands how effective google searches are performed. It might be me.
When I search, I find after clicking the first page or two of links that I need to refine my search terms and begin again. Rarely do I scroll past 2 pages of results.
June 10, 2010, 10:18 amSteve in Texas says:
Interesting.
I’ve been targeted in Google groups/usenet by an individual intent on google-bombing me with false allegations that approach libel, but really – there’s nothing you can do except wait for the individual to cross the line to legally actionable statements – which a skilled stalker/troll can avoid for years while still issuing constant defamatory statements.
Google couldn’t care less, abuse complaints probably go right to the trash.
June 10, 2010, 10:28 amSteve in Texas says:
Interesting.
I’ve been targeted in Google groups/usenet by an individual intent on google-bombing me with false allegations that approach libel, but really – there’s nothing you can do except wait for the individual to cross the line to legally actionable statements – which a skilled stalker/troll can avoid for years while still issuing constant defamatory statements.
Google couldn’t care less, abuse complaints probably go right to the trash.
June 10, 2010, 10:28 amgeokstr says:
I’m not sure which side of the political divide you come down on from your comment, but “is bush” comes up with nearly identical google suggestions as “is ob”. The only reason “is bu” doesn’t is probably that there are lots of other plausible, popular words that start with “bu”, not so many with “ob”, so you just have to narrow it down a bit by adding a couple letters.
June 10, 2010, 10:36 amStephen Lathrop says:
Anyone who wants to put the teeth back into online libel will have little trouble doing so. Dates, times, names, specific allegations of wrongdoing, references to other authorities (perhaps purpose-built to further the libel), can all be piled into a mountain of apparent corroboration. Before you know it, PersonFromPorlock can become the guy who fled Porlock one step ahead of the law.
June 10, 2010, 10:39 amAdam B. says:
The Internet has also lowered the barriers to the alleged victims of libel being able to address the same audience and rebut falsehoods.
June 10, 2010, 10:39 amAultimer says:
So CDA 230 is the reason there’s little chance of being found? Which provision is that, exactly?
June 10, 2010, 10:45 amBlue says:
I completely disagree with this. The traditional media is so hopelessly biased in favor of one party that they are unable to perform this function in any acceptable fashion. Vetting by the traditional media in our current environment is merely one page in the Democratic attacks book on Republicans.
June 10, 2010, 10:52 amDaniel Golding says:
{ Shame on the VC bloggers for giving Mr. Thompson, clearly not a friend of free expression, a bully pulpit.
Does unintended irony get any better than that?}
Um, this is a private venue.
June 10, 2010, 10:57 amtfkw says:
I’m curious to see how David Thompson proposes to change things, because it seems like there are a lot of small changes that would promptly put a lot of websites out of business. The “subsidy” is real, but it’s enormous. Requiring any kind of affirmative policing would be spectacularly expensive for any website with a decent amount of user-generated content, and a take-down notice scheme akin to copyright might not be much better.
Free speech aside, this is terrifying from a business perspective. You can make an argument for it on ethical grounds, but you have to acknowledge how expensive it would be. Mr. Thompson might really be saying that all social media should be on the same terms as the New York Times, but if so I’d really like to hear his take on the magnitude of this change.
June 10, 2010, 11:06 amChris Travers says:
I am also interested in Mr Thompson’s views of The Internet Archive. The results may not show up on Google, but the Internet Archive generally provides a way to often retrieve previous information (no longer up) for later use. I have found it really handy in the past.
Is Mr Thompson expecting that The Internet Archive would be held liable if it archives libelous posts?
June 10, 2010, 11:13 amChris Travers says:
I personally think this site would be one of those which would be impossible to maintain under such a scheme…..
June 10, 2010, 11:15 amAdam B. says:
One proposal might be to only extend Section 230 protections to those sites which maintain a registry of email addresses and other legitimate contact information for all site commenters — but that proposal would require more thoughtfulness and insight than what we’ve seen from Thompson so far. (I’d oppose this change, but at least it’s something.)
June 10, 2010, 11:23 amgs says:
Let me guess: it’s necessary to destroy privacy in order to save it.
***********
Commenters on previous posts have stated that ‘closing of the frontier’ is a dubious analogy for attempts to further regulate the Internet. Particularly perceptive, IMHO, was someone’s allusion to the Enclosure Acts.
Today’s post draws my attention to a supposed ‘subsidy’ for libel. I’m no lawyer, but it seems to me that any policy, even inaction, benefits somebody more than it benefits somebody else. In that sense, any policy can be termed a subsidy.
Federal, state, and local legislatures are spewing out laws faster than the BP leak is spewing out oil. Special-interest lobbyists influence laws. When it suits their purposes, governmental and non-governmental players aggressively try to expand (or reduce) the scope of a law’s applicability, and precedents are set.
In that context, I wonder about the full range of interests and entities that will be subsidized (and damaged) by the fix that David Thompson will propose.
June 10, 2010, 11:37 amAbhishek says:
Stephen Lathrop said:
I think that is a little black and white. I envision a world where an anonymous little-guy truth teller has by default, far less credibility than a established journalist with a history of reliability. If little-guy comes out with damaging allegations, few will heed him unless there’s further evidence or proof. But if what he says is really true or worth taking note of, there will usually be someone else who does more research and unearths it. Gradually more people will catch on, including more established media. In short truth will often prevail, falsehood will usually die.
Granted, the above account is simplistic. The dynamics in any particular case may differ, things may not always turn out as rosy. But in general, the above account is what I think will roughly happen, and in the balance that is why I think:
June 10, 2010, 11:43 ama) The two ideas you mention are not really contradictory
b) A world where there is “availability of unedited public access for cranks” is a better world, for freedom and for truth.
Chris Travers says:
ReputationDefender will be among the biggest recipient of such subsidies ;-)
June 10, 2010, 11:46 amStephen Lathrop says:
Put that another way and you get right to the heart of the matter: It is far more expensive to produce reliable information than to make stuff up. The current business model for internet commentary is to let traditional media bear the cost of producing reliable information, then put that information on the web and basically talk about it for free. It’s exhilarating, but it can’t go on forever.
The traditional media are going out of business because of the web. On this course, there soon won’t be much reliable information to talk about. Then almost everything on the web will be stuff people make up. How could it be otherwise? Of the news you know about today, how much did you see for yourself?
Unless someone figures out a way to produce reliable information for free, there seems to be an unavoidable fork in the road ahead. Either the web is going to become less free and notably more expensive, or it is going to become far less useful as a forum for public discourse.
June 10, 2010, 11:47 amStephen Lathrop says:
I think that could work sometimes. But what will happen mostly? Reflect on how well that dynamic works if there aren’t ANY established information sources left. No acknowledged information authorities to validate the little-guy truth tellers and their discoveries. And how fast will your own critical faculties shrink when all you have to fuel them is a swarm of possibly-true assertions you found on the web?
Seems to me there is an urgent need to reproduce online the facilities for information creation and validation that have until now been supplied by traditional media. No sign of that yet. And no sign of a business model to support it.
June 10, 2010, 12:07 pmJason Orendorff says:
I had never heard of JuicyCampus until today. Turns out, it is out of business and the site has been taken down! So you should change this to, “The market has corrected the imbalance…” or else pick a better example.
June 10, 2010, 12:08 pmM. Gross says:
While Abhishek touched on the main objection I would have, which is anonymous libel without supporting evidence imposes little or no hardship, there’s a practical consideration:
The entire world’s internet is visible from the United States, yet our libel laws don’t apply to it. What effect would changing the libel laws have other than to force posters onto offshore sites? It’s also worth noting that running a website hosted offshore is anonymous (with any attention paid to detail) and easy to do.
June 10, 2010, 12:12 pmSigivald says:
It should be noted that “Google” isn’t the problem here.
Any search engine that could actually work in practice will have identical effects, and indeed all of Google’s competition does.
Unless you have human beings refereeing content (ala. the old Yahoo hierarchy they seem to have abandoned, quite reasonably), you can’t do anything else. And if you try to have humans checking everything, you can’t afford it, and you can’t keep current enough to get people to bother with your results.
The “problem” here is that there’s too much content for any centralized body to judge accuracy, fairness, or anything else.
(And I think the other issue is that this reads as a static analysis – comparing the new [and unfortunate] reality of people being able to be jerks with no reasonable way to stop them with old expectations. Remember, though, that in practice people also know that the internet is full of jerks who can defame and stalk – and this knowledge becomes more ingrained and widespread every year.
The top results for someone being full of crazy rants won’t mean anything, soon enough, other than to tell anyone that searches “You have a crazy internet stalker who needs to graduate from junior high”.)
(And contra Stephen, I don’t think the traditional media actually produce that much “reliable information” in the first place – and they never really have, we just didn’t have an easy way to check. Every time I see reporting on a topic I’m knowledgeable about, I see how wrong it is in detail and often in general. The mistake is thinking that’s not true of every topic.)
June 10, 2010, 12:32 pmDavid Thompson says:
First, thanks for the great comments. I can’t address them all, but I am really enthusiastic about the high-quality debate here. I’m going to try to address a few that struck my eye.
I absolutely agree that nobody takes 4chan as seriously as the New York Times. But they still take anonymous Internet content somewhat seriously. I linked to examples of the Times of London (a major newspaper) being fooled by anonymous comments on a message board, and by Salon being fooled by a parody site. The problem is that for private individuals, even the rumor can be damaging. They don’t have big PR teams to set the record straight, often don’t know how to push their side of the story to the top of a Google result, and often suffer personally as a result.
Anonymous speech is incredibly important to politics — I have no disagreement with you here. I would like to provide some solutions today that preserve the right of anonymous dissenters to stay anonymous, while helping to protect private individuals from harm. You and I see exactly eye-to-eye on the power of the Internet to bring down corrupt and abusive regimes–it’s not a coincidence that I linked to the Iran protests on Tuesday.
June 10, 2010, 1:10 pmDavid Thompson says:
There are at least two JuicyCampus imitators still in business today. I chose not to link them so as to not give them any free advertising. JuicyCampus is a useful example _because_ it is no longer in business.
I’ll disagree a bit with your analogy here. There, the telephone pole is being vandalized, and the power company will tend to remove the flyers of its own accord. Of course the company should have no liability if it has no knowledge that the content is libelous (and, in fact, actively discourages postings).
Imagine instead that the telephone company put up a sign that said “post your libelous materials here!” and then also sold advertising space on its poles. It would profit from the attention gathered by the libelous materials because they would draw attention to the advertising. And it would have actively encouraged the posting of libelous materials in order to attract more tabloid attention. That’s closer to the online reality.
June 10, 2010, 1:15 pmElliot says:
“Google creates the illusion that just ten search results reflect some meaningful judgment on a person’s life.”
Google creates nothing. Any judgement the ten results are meaningful is done by the reader, not Google.
I will be interested to see if the prescriptions offered tomorrow constitute a subsidy for tort lawyers.
June 10, 2010, 1:17 pmDavid Thompson says:
It’s hard to find attackers online because of the structure of the Internet itself, combined with what’s not in CDA 230.
Offline, it’s pretty easy to find most attackers (just call the newspaper, bookstore, or TV station). But CDA 230 doesn’t recognize that it’s substantially harder to find attackers online. If it were always easy to find the original attacker, I would have a much smaller problem with CDA 230. Attacks would be deterred simply because nobody would be foolish enough to libel or invade privacy if they knew they’d get caught. But CDA 230 was written with the assumptions of offline media in mind. The structure of the Internet makes it difficult to find the original attacker, and CDA 230 makes sure that hosts have no incentive to do make it easy.
June 10, 2010, 1:23 pmKamal says:
Sound’s great.. do you mean in a follow-up post?
June 10, 2010, 1:50 pmKamal says:
Without a massive restructuring of the internet hosts logging access still will not provide an accurate way to identify users. See TOR
June 10, 2010, 1:52 pmFub says:
Exactly.
To state it somewhat anthropomorphically, the internet interprets impedance to flow of any information as damage (whether true information or false information), and routes around the outage.
The notion that CDA 230 subsidizes libel is a hypothesis that requires proof stronger than the obvious fact that some libelers will remain anonymous and thus not be forced to internalize the costs of their libel. By that metric life itself subsidizes murder, because not all murderers will be deprived of it.
Moreover, this argument:
requires belief diametrically opposite to the conclusion that anointed offline arbiters of truth will not err because:
If The London Times in the offline world is sufficiently inept at fact finding that it can be fooled by false online statements, then how could any unitary regulator or arbiter of online truth value plausibly expect not to make the same error, regardless of incentive not to err?
Having long ago been subjected to legally cognizable defamation online (and having known others subjected to it), some of which is still available, I still have no problem with CDA 230 “subsidizing” it in the weak sense defined in this article. The far greater danger to everyone’s liberty and reputation, including my own, is the abusive application of laws effectively prohibiting anonymity.
One need only observe the abusive and draconian application of Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) takedown notices against non-infringers (as well as against technically arguable but near frivolously petty infringers) to understand the chilling effect on free speech that any effective prohibition on anonymity would bring.
June 10, 2010, 2:05 pmAultimer says:
So CDA 230 acts as a subsidy with respect to speakers by failing to change the architecture and nature of the internet? That stretches the concept of “subsidy” awfully far.
You might as well say (more correctly, IMHO) that RFC0791 and lack of progress in Artificial Intelligence are also subsidies.
June 10, 2010, 2:40 pmGoogle, privacy, reputation and anonymity « Muse Free says:
[...] 10, 2010 by Abhishek An interesting debate about anonymous speech on the internet, CDA 230, and the related issues of privacy, information [...]
June 10, 2010, 3:02 pmkarrde says:
I will only note that not only can this work sometimes, this has worked at least once, in a spectacularly succesful way.
To wit: a small number of little-known (outside of the blogosphere) people and a smaller number of professional document examiners were instrumental in showing documents broadcast by a professional news team at CBS to be false–or at least impossible to distinguish from very-poorly-executed forgeries.
June 10, 2010, 5:28 pmgs says:
karrde says:
I submit that powerful people consider this a bug, not a feature: a bug that they want to exterminate. The CBS episode might have unfolded differently if the CBS principals had had stronger legal standing to litigate against the bloggers and examiners.
I have no regrets that Edwards, Sanford, Spitzer and Gingrich are no longer serious prospects for the Oval Office.
It happened before the Internet era, but I’m glad to have had a reasonable suspicion of what we might be getting when I preferred Bill Clinton to George H.W. Bush.
I’m with Fub.
June 10, 2010, 7:06 pmChris Travers says:
In some places, it’s acceptable to tack notices onto utility poles. In that case I wouldn’t call it vandalism (and indeed in most places I have lived it’s a matter one way or the other of municipal administrative law rather than vandalism), and I’m interested in why in those cases there would be a difference between that and a large and unmoderated online forum (think “Slashdot,” “Blogspot” or similar).
June 10, 2010, 8:33 pmChris Travers says:
Correct. Removing CDA 230 would just mean that there’s someone to sue (the web host) for inadequate policing. It doesn’t necessarily allow one to get to the original poster.
June 10, 2010, 8:37 pmChris Travers says:
OTOH, sometimes it routes that outage around ;-)
June 10, 2010, 8:39 pmThe Soul of Twit « The New Print says:
[...] that says maybe you shouldn’t have something to hide. But, of course, that attitude of anti-anonymity can be abused significantly: But today, anybody with a blog can (and all too often does) smear you, defame you, or invade your [...]
June 14, 2010, 7:18 am