I reject the apparent premise. The point here is that House Bills 1277 and 1278 are bad legislation that should be killed in committee (tomorrow, Monday, 7:45 a.m.). The absence of a plan does not justify carrying out a destructive plan.
Nonetheless, I took up Rep. Hamiel's challenge. If you really think anonymous online libel is a problem (and I'm still waiting for examples of online speech of any sort that has done actual damage in South Dakota or libel cases in South Dakota that have been stymied by comment anonymity), here are five counterplans to challenge anonymous libel:
- Use current law to subpoena the service providers (Google, Midco, etc.) for identifying information in investigations of illegal activity. Those companies are the real experts in tracing online traffic, not the hobby bloggers who may not even know what an IP is. Those companies are also better equipped to check frivolous lawsuits and protect legitimate anonymous speech with their experienced legal departments.
- Let the Internet police itself. Bloggers are citizens and neighbors like everyone else. We can craft our own policies to prevent anonymous cowards from spreading rumors. Our readers can talk with us. If we see wrong has been done, we can try pointing aggrieved parties toward libellers, and they may be able to resolve their differences face to face, with no cops, no courts, no lasting harm done.
- Accept a cultural, not legislative solution. The Web is new. We've never had this much free speech power, especially not free speech so dissociated from our identity. People need time to develop the "media literacy" necessary to properly filter, interpret, and respond to all this online speech. They're doing that: they're already recognizing that anonymous claims aren't as substantive as claims with names. That's what I teach kids in my speech classes. That's what the high school debaters I judge every weekend practice with their evidence. People are already learning that there's a difference between the speech of people like Pat Powers, Todd Epp, and me who speak by name and the cowardly rabble who fling unsupported insults. Let the culture continue its evolution toward healthy, responsible speech.
- Support a media literacy campaign: make available funding and materials to encourage K-12 and university teachers to cover Internet etiquette, legal issues, and other relevant topics in their language arts and communications classes.
- Support an anti-anonymous defamation campaign: run ads telling people to be neighborly online and reminding them libel is libel, even online, with severe penalties. (Maybe even throw in Jesse Jackson, exhorting people to "Be Somebody!" and use their names online.)
Further counterplans are welcome. But doing nothing is still better than imposing the active harm of the Blog Control Acts.
Feel free to share the above with the members of the House State Affairs Committee, including U.S. House candidate Kristi Noem, who get the first chance to kill HB 1277 and 1278 tomorrow morning at the 7:45 a.m. hearing.
Corey - that question is a sucker's bet. The same question was asked by the British, and those people opposed to the American Constiution a few hundred years ago. Here is something I posted on your buddy Pat's blog th
ReplyDeleteIt occurred to me this morning that many of our founding fathers “posted” anonymously (or with pseudonyms) in their writings during the time of the Second Continental Congress. The public debate over the Bill of Rights was carried on in newspapers and in published articles under names other than the names of the founding fathers that were writing the articles. Thomas Jefferson waged nearly his entire campaign for president against John Adams with anonymous newspaper articles.
Maybe these people were bums, rogues and scallywags — but they were inspired to dream up the First Amendment, they wrote the First Amendment, and they displayed their understanding of it (and its value) in the political arena by their own public acts.
If it’s a coin flip on this bill – I would go with the Founding Fathers and table it.
PS FOR THOSE WHO SUPPORT THIS BILL — AND MAY BE A LITTLE WEAK ON AMERICAN HISTORY — THINK OF SOMETHING CALLED THE FEDERALIST PAPERS (Google info below) — WRITTEN ANNONYMOUSLY BY SUCH SCALLYWAG BLOGGER TYPES AS JAMES MADISON, JOHN JAY, AND ALEXANDER HAMILTON. EXTRA CREDIT FOR ANY BILL SPONSOR THAT CAN IDENTIFY WHICH OF THESE WAS THE FIRST CHIEF JUSTICE OF THE US SUPREME COURT AND WHICH ONE IS CONSIDERED THE FATHER OF THE CONSTITUITON.
from Google –
The Federalist remains a primary source for interpretation of the U.S. Constitution, as the essays outline a lucid and compelling version of the philosophy and motivation of the proposed system of government.[2] The authors of The Federalist wanted both to influence the vote in favor of ratification and to shape future interpretations of the Constitution. According to historian Richard B. Morris, they are an “incomparable exposition of the Constitution, a classic in political science unsurpassed in both breadth and depth by the product of any later American writer.”[3]
At the time of publication, the authorship of the articles was a closely-guarded secret, though astute observers guessed that Hamilton, Madison, and Jay were the likely authors. Following Hamilton’s death in 1804, a list that he drew up became public; it claimed fully two-thirds of the essays for Hamilton, including some that seemed more likely the work of Madison (Nos. 49-58, 62, and 63). The scholarly detective work of Douglass Adair in 1944 postulated the following assignments of authorship, confirmed in 1964 by a computer analysis of the text:
Alexander Hamilton (51 articles: nos. 1, 6–9, 11–13, 15–17, 21–36, 59–61, and 65–85)
James Madison (29 articles: nos. 10, 14, 37–58 and 62–63)
John Jay (5 articles: 2–5 and 64).
is AM:
--Lee Schoenbeck
I too am still waiting for examples of terrible slander and libel on SD blogs and forums that require legislation.
ReplyDeleteBUT, I am also not at all convinced that I have ever read an anonymous post that added anything significant to any SD blog discussions or forum.
So far, this appears to be legislation in search of a problem or it is a lawyer's stimulus bill.w
My preference: Options 1 and 4 combined.
ReplyDeleteWhile I have read some pretty vicious things about myself on the Internet, some posted by anonymous people and a few posted by people who revealed their identities, I have yet to see a rant that crosses the line into libel.
One rather humorous thing has happened. Apparently I am not the only "Stan Gibilisco" out there. Someone writing for a publication called SurReview, several years ago, called himself "Stan Gibilisco" and went off about how one can get high from the venom of sea anemones. My mother almost died when she read it; it horrified her. I almost died laughing. I think it's still there on the Web, somewhere, languishing in a white hole in cyberspace.
HB 1277 and 1278 both represent attempts to control the uncontrollable. Maybe next, they can try to get people in Romania to stop pirating e-copies of my electronics books. Lotsa luck.
Ironic too that Steve Sibson who for years posted inflammatory comment attacks in other blogs and forums did not allow comments on his own blog.
ReplyDeleteI haven't looked at Steve's searchings for truth recently, but did notice some time ago that he was allowing some comments and at least as far as I know, he did use his real name when he did post.
Has anybody heard of any blog and forum post in SD that amounted to slander and libel yet?
A legislator (Greenfield?) was grousing that some Democratic blogger had claimed he tossed somebody with a Democratic sweatshirt or teeshirt out of his business and had refused to retract that. Somehow that does not seem to me to rise to the level of a kind of slander and libel which requires legislation.