

Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet - jgfoot
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/01/03/anonymity-and-the-dark-side-of-the-internet/

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sez_stuff
Anonymity is vitally important. The claim is that sunshine is a good
disinfectant, and that's generally true, but when it comes to communication,
sunshine (the scrutiny of others) can have the opposite effect, it can infect
your speech with false ideas. Our time is as bad as any other when it comes to
heresy.

There are groups out there who will persecute you for saying the truth. If you
don't believe this, try taking a public stand against the actions of a certain
new religion. Or try making any criticism at all of a certain old religion.
These groups and others like them have made it extraordinarily costly for an
individual to associate themselves with perfectly correct beliefs. And now the
same groups would like to strip others of their anonymity, ostensibly so they
can stamp out any dissent at all.

As someone who values the truth, I find this troubling.

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jdp23
'What is remarkable about this volume is that the legal academics who make the
arguments I have rehearsed are by and large strong free-speech advocates. Yet
faced with the problems posed by the Internet, they start talking about “low
value” speech (a concept strong first-amendment doctrine rejects) and saying
things like “autonomy resides not in free choice per se but in choosing
wisely” and “society needs not an absence of ‘chill,’ but an optimal
level.”(In short, let’s figure out which forms of speech we should
discourage.)'

Depressing.

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tptacek
What part of this depresses you?

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jdp23
That people I respect who used to be free speech advocates now are talking
about "low value" speech etc. Check out the quote from Daniel Solove: “the law
is hampered because it overprotects free speech.”

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tptacek
Do you really think there's no such thing as "low-value speech"? I'm not
asking whether you think it's OK to regulate it.

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jdp23
Different levels of speech get different protection (political speech,
commercial speech, etc.) but I don't like the term "low-value speech". Who
decides the value?

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tptacek
What about categorically low-value speech? Deliberately false and malicious
speech?

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jdp23
Defamatory speech isn't protected. But I still don't think "low-value" is a
helpful description.

For example take comments on Slashdot or wherever saying "first post" (or
"first comment" or whatever). Do they have value? Most would say no. Does that
mean they shouldn't be protected?

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rue
Defamatory speech is also protected to a degree because it isn't possible to
weed out beforehand, but carries consequences and could be censored after the
fact.

~~~
jdp23
I meant "protected" in the legal sense, but you're right.

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fingerprinter
I haven't given this too much thought but it strikes me that it is the medium
rather than the message or messenger that is troubling. It just might be
difficult for people to understand the internet.

Think about it this way- we have no idea if someone is writing an opinion
piece in the newspaper under a pseudonym. Sure, we could take it up with the
newpaper legally, but that doesn't really change anything, and that might be
the only difference between a newspaper and google in this case; google
couldn't find out exactly who it was, but a newspaper should know.

Or, someone in academia could be completely faking credentials, name, tenure,
experience and without diligence we wouldn't be aware. Again, it is more
verifiable than someone leaving anonymous responses on Yelp or Google, but is
that the main difference then? if we can reference check that person?

Another, maybe more naive way for me to think about this is that when I manage
a team I don't make rules to stop the edge case/corner case behavior...you
give guidelines and a high level overview of what acceptable behavior is.
Otherwise you end up with a really strict, really rigid environment with rules
that no one can comprehend or follow for some reason that no one can remember.
No one wants to live in that environment. If we enact legislature to stop
extremely low percentage behavior we end up in a similar spot politically. Not
sure it is a solid argument, but it seems to make sense, roughly.

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leot
I believe the author is taking issue with the notion that "the truth will out"
in the marketplace of ideas.

In this I sympathize with Fish. It is as though the truth's-being-out was some
final result, rather than merely an ephemeral change in constantly changing
cultural winds. This smacks of the happily-ever-after narrative to which
America so frequently retreats, having not as a culture experienced any
evidence to the contrary since the Civil War (perhaps none ever, since even
then, righteousness prevailed, no?).

Even if the inconvenient truth is for a period (we cannot say "finally")
adopted as the social consensus, what of the damage done in the meantime?

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bugsy
More barely concealed anti-wikileaks pro-facebook propaganda from the
establishment.

