The San Francisco Chronicle has a hard-hitting piece by Debra J. Saunders that takes the college gossip site Juicycampus.com to task for engendering an environment full of anonymous, damaging speech. Juicycampus has come under fire recently by blogs and the MSM who find nothing redeemable in a site that regularly features “crude language, ethnic slurs and graphic descriptions of probably fictitious sexual encounters.”
The site, which was started by a Duke graduate last August, has spread to over 50 college campuses and has been described by some as encouraging users to anonymously dish digital dirt about their classmates and professors. Some colleges have requested the site be banned and other campuses have issued letters and articles urging the student body to ignore the site altogether.
With tones ranging from silly to nasty, the site takes advantage of an outdated piece of legislation to keep the gossip flowing. The Communications Decency Act, crafted in the early days of the internet, made a gaping hole in digital case law and leaves no one accountable for libelous or defamatory online language. With no one responsible for the incendiary posts, the anonymous culture of internet hate has grown unabated over the past decade. Not the site owners nor the anonymous posters have any claim to the libelous and reputation damaging content on a given URL. Juicycampus prominently proclaims the anonymous nature of their forums and Saunders calls out their faulty reasoning. Quoting from the piece:
“There is no way for someone using the site to find out who you are,” the site assures users. You can smear others falsely without fear that your true identity will be known . . . Bloggers can point to America’s history of anonymous political pamphleteering as precedent for the free speech rights of anonymous words. But Thomas Paine risked execution or jail if his authorship of “Common Sense” had been known - and he did so for principles in which he believed. Not for trash.
ReputationDefender supports free and anonymous speech and responsible online discourse. It should be noted that neither defamation or libel are covered by the First Amendment and never have been. Spreading lies or rumors does real harm to real people and character assassination is one of the unintended consequences of the digital revolution. Educating students about the negative effects of their online behavior is the first step to stemming the tide of online hate speech. ReputationDefender strongly supports the First Amendment and stands opposed, along with our Constitution, to false and intentionally malicious speech.
1 comment so far ↓
I think that plaintiff attorneys for libel / defamation make it sound like people are out there damaging other’s reputations with false information, like the world is full of mean spirited people spouting meaningless untruths designed to injure.
Defamation is very unethical, and I think people are relatively good. Really, I think people of means, doctors, lawyers, and large corporations, create defamation lawsuits to overpower people that really have the right to talk responsibly, and just don’t know defamation law because the internet is so new. Often the victims of these lawsuits are women, or college students, or bloggers; people that are “weaker” and don’t necessarily have the wherewithal to fight these suits and win at a trial that costs $75,000 to $150,000.
What you might talk about with equal regard is how many frivolous and trivial libel / defamation suits there are, from overly vain people with means, as a means of bullying their way to a better public profile online, when most times they don’t deserve it.
Judge Judy recently told someone suing for defamation that his reputation “went down the sewer” when he didn’t pay his clients on time, and she didn’t care if they talked about it on Google and Youtube and wherever.
Let’s get real. People say less than flattering things online when they are hurt by someone, usually someone more powerful. You never hear a free speech debate about flattering speech. People have the right to say the truth, and say it responsibly, and if they didn’t know defamation law in the first place, there should be a right to retraction. Not everyone’s reputation is perfect, sorry.
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