Yes, we have the right to freedom of Speach. What’s even more interesting is that when one party is held by hippa laws and can’t dispute what is written. Now that is a sad day.

http://www.bnet.com/2422-13731_23-241106.html

If you read the complaint carefully, Marion, you will notice that many (or most) of the allegations would be factually insufficient to withstand at 12(b)(6) motion to dismiss defense on the claim of libel.

Many of the allegations are, very literally, “I want to have sex with Doe 1.”

This is not libel.

Unfortunately, Ken, the internet is not an office place. The obligations that anonymous posters owe to Doe 1 and 2 are considerably different than the obligations a co-worker or supervisor owe to a co-worker of the opposite sex.

Furthermore, we are completely ignoring the fact that Does 1 and 2 chose to maintain their own public websites (e.g., myspace, facebook, youtube). This is an invitation for public scrutiny. The internet is not a cocoon. If you don’t want people making fun of you, don’t go out of your way to share private information about yourself.

No, it isn’t. I don’t know who that fool is.

but seriously, if I were to same something defamatory, and a judge agrees that it’s defamatory, the website could be required to turn over my name under the court’s subpoena power. so there are few legal implications as long as posters stay within the boundaries of civil, lawful written discourse. on the other hand, there’s no rational benefit of revealing one’s real name to a group of online strangers involved in a passionate debate. i would be opening myself to viewpoint discrimination and harassment from the general public, clients, prospective employers, admissions counselors, and hot chicks who disagree with me. who wants to sign up to be a martyr for free speech? also, as you will learn at Mr. Randazza’s blog, some will invoke your identity – being a female for instance – as evidence against the objectiveness of your perspective. although that form of argumentation is pretty lame, it often persuades as it perpetuates stereotypes. in sum, Disappointed and i advise that you don’t use your real name on the internet; just keep going by Ellen.

since that time, message boards have moved from moderated to merely hosted. the advent of Proxies (IP masks) has permitted trolls to attain anonymity that was unavailable under the seminal message board formats that are now obsolete. anonymity prevents common sense censorship by removing the troll’s virtual footprint and thereby promoting him to a ghost of sorts – a poltergeist. add that to the fact that moderating a site entails time (costs) that could be used promoting the site (benefit), and you have the perfect storm wherein trolls flourish due to anonymity and apathetic hosts.

look, we can have a civil conversation here about the policy implications (largely economic) of requiring moderators to assume traditional moderator duties. likewise, we can have a productive discussion about whether anonymity has some value in virtual spaces like the internet. but we have to get past the defeatist and insensate view that trolls must be suffered in order to protect free speech. your hypothesis is disprovable and the evidence that free speech flourished in America prior to the advent on online anonymity is sufficient to refute it. hell, even Mr. Ciolli’s cost-shifting analysis allows for the uncontroversial, common-sense conclusion that trolls should not be countenanced in a society that touts the free exchange of ideas. See http://katzjustice.com/underdog/archives/1575-Bloggers-and-listserv-hosts-can-escape-liability-for-libelous-third-party-comments..html

Threads like this make me embarrassed to be a left-winger. As an earlier poster rightly mentioned, the right wants to attack free speech in the same of “security”, and some of us on the left want to eliminate free speech so no one gets offended. Both those angles are harmful, but the right can at least make the case that they’re fighting for something important. We just sound like the wishy-washy caricature the right constantly attacks.

Anonymous speech on the Internet is very important. Whistleblowers, political dissidents, victims of sexual abuse (as an earlier poster mentioned), and many other groups need to be able to tell their stories without fear of reprisal. Having an online forum that allows anonymous speech guarantees that there will be some jerks behaving badly. But those jerks are a small enough portion of the online population, and the consequences of their attacks so minor, that their presence does not outweigh the benefits of anonymous speech.

If forums are required to identify and track participants, someone will circumvent the tracking in about 10 minutes. Who would want to get into an unwinnable technological arms race with global nerddom?

If you have, then you should have avoided writing this article. I believe the word is hypocrite for such behavior. I also see that you wish to terminate this line of questioning now that it has become uncomfortable for you.

I believe my point about “mental gymnastics” of people who have dabbled in a behavior for which they must give commentary is a reasonable question and the disclosure of such would allow the audience to determine how much weight they should give to an author’s writings. One would not give a great deal of credence to a person writing about the problems between Israel and the Palestinians, if that person was say, a white supremacists. For a person to write an article on cyber attacks, who has actually engaged in such an attack or even made sexual comments on a board about a woman, disclosure should be required.

For instance, I recall Chris Matthews commenting many times on how there was nothing to the whole firing of the Valerie Plame affair, for it to only subsequently be revealed that he was steeped up to his eyeballs in the affair. So, his every statement preceeding that event was now viewed as hypocritcal, self-serving and highly dubious.

Nothing ever really goes away in cyber space, Sir.

On the other hand, have I used anonymous postings to post untrue statements about others? No. Not my style.

Nevertheless, the question is patently absurd.

Now that I’ve satisfied your thirst for a denial, I think that this conversation has descended into an inverse-AutoAdmit type discussion, and I’ll spend my time elsewhere.

Feel free to email me with any more questions.

You make some great points that I wish I had made myself.

I don’t think you understood my point at all. I don’t think that they should have let it go because they were not “pure” enough to seek redress for any actual harm that may have come to them. That is everyone’s right. Of course, it may very well have served their interests better to do so, but that’s their call to make.

My criticism of them is for filing suit against parties where there was clearly no legal or factual basis for doing so. My criticism also falls on them for refusing to admit error when it came to those who were wrongly sued.

If you want to make this a rape anology, (something I find somewhat inappropriate) this is more like a sexual assault victim pressing charges against the actual assailant (justified) and also filing suit against the person who had a beer with the assailant earlier that day, the person who served the assailant his lunch, and the person who sold the assailant his shoes. It turns a justified action against a truly bad person into an absurd exercise that trivializes the assault, and which stops being a quest for justice. It transforms it into a temper tantrum and a lashing-out, which creates more innocent victims. When you want to fire a gun at someone, use a rifle with a scope. You don’t just chuck a grenade at a crowd where the bad guy is standing.

To the non-tech-savvy listeners out there, here’s a rule to live by: “Don’t feed the trolls.” Some people on the internet are serious dicks. They enjoy harassing people for the sheer joy of harassing them. Of course that’s awful, and they shouldn’t do it, but without going farther toward a surveillance state than we already have, and incurring all the disastrous consequences involved with that, there’s nothing to be done about it. Except one thing: ignore the trolls. In real life, ignoring bullies is completely ineffective; online, it’s the best and only way. Fortunately it doesn’t take too many minutes to outlast the average troll’s attention span.

Finally, if you’re worried about bad things coming up when people google your name, this is the only way:

1. Don’t post personal information online that could be misused or stolen.
2. Put good information about yourself online and make sure it gets to the top of the google list. No one clicks past the first page of results anyway.

Lawsuits will go nowhere in the long run.

To those of you who want to end anonymity and mean (read: free) speech on the internet, good luck. The collective intellectual might of nerdkind will oppose you, and we will win.