[sudo-discuss] Friday Filosophy, 2/1; Sex, Lies, & Broadband

Dear Sudo folk. At Friday Filosophy today at noon, we will have Borekas from Grand Bakery again - this time more potato ones for vegans and the vegan-curious. All suggestions for topics will be considered. I propose we talk about the AutoAdmit online defamation case from several years back. See Citizen Media Law Project page for overview - http://www.citmedialaw.org/threats/autoadmit; the Justia page with the full legal docket - http://dockets.justia.com/docket/connecticut/ctdce/3:2007cv00909/78132/; and the original complaint at http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/connecticut/ctdce/3:20…. In brief summary, an anonymous bulletin board with informal law school related chatter had some anonymously posted horrible threads about fellow female law students, even for those of us not easily shocked. Three first-year Yale law students were particularly targeted, one of whom allegedly lost her summer job because her employers came across the posts on searches (the defamers had intentionally Google bombed the search results.) Two of these students brought a lawsuit against the website and anonymous individuals who had posted the stuff. The case was eventually settled out of court. The third woman - Caitlin Hall, who happened to be a student of mine at the time - was deeply affected by the whole thing but chose not to join her classmates in the lawsuit. She wrote this provocative Op-Ed in the Univ. of Arizona newspaper where she was a journalist while in college called "Sex, Lies, and Broadband" (http://www.wildcat.arizona.edu/article/2008/05/sex_lies_and_broadband - May 21, 2008). Below is an excerpt from it. I don't presume to know what I would have done in her situation, but I do know that when people search for Caitlin and AutoAdmit now, this is what usually comes up first. We can't stop malice on the Internet. Malice finds a way. We can try to shore up the banks of the ""real world"" with legal and digital sandbags, but online hate speech has the slow inevitability of a tsunami. When the avenues of publication and distribution are limitless, it becomes exceedingly difficult to control people's behavior (a concept our Constitution's framers not only accepted, but banked on). Nor can we stop college students on the Internet. Advisers invariably warn that the only way to keep unsavory information from bleeding into the professional world is to decline to put it on the Internet in the first place. To a college student, that solution has all the persuasive power of telling a high schooler the only surefire way to avoid pregnancy is to forego sex. But even if we can't stop the lambs and we can't stop the wolves, we can still stop the slaughter. The best way to do that, counterintuitively, is to overwhelm the market with bad information by allowing online verbal abuse to run unchecked, so that all such speech becomes valueless, unreliable and irrelevant. That's the best solution in that it's the most efficient, because it enlists the boundless energy of the depraved in their own undoing. Moreover, it's the only way to bypass the question of how to keep employers from using social software to inform hiring decisions (the answer, by the way, is that we can't). To state the obvious, for the first generation to be libeled on the Internet, this solution sucks. It's no treat overhearing a stranger say he read you ""fucked your way into Yale."" It's infinitely more unpleasant knowing your friends, parents and boss have all read the same thing. But that's the way it has to be, in the fatalistic sense that that's the way it's going to be. All we can control is how quickly it's over. And that, despite what some will say, is a real choice.