The appropriate response, they say, to Cyber Violence is to censor the people who commit it. "No big deal, less death threats on the Internet. Cool." Except that the only way to enforce this is to end the idea that: he who posts the post, owns the post. Meaning, if you leave a comment on my website say "I am going to kill Christian Weston Chandler", it's your post and you are liable for it. Under the Anita Quinn Zoe Sarkeesian laws, I now own the post. Well guess what? On a website like this, I'm not going to carry all of your posts and be personally liable for it. The forum goes down. So does Encyclopedia Dramatica. So does 8chan. So does 4chan. Facebook, Google, and Twitter will immediately respond by cranking moderation up to 11 and deleting insensitive material.
You know why this won't happen in America?
No, not the First Amendment, although that really should be enough just by itself.
The Communications Decency Act.
What?
Most of the bad parts of the Communications Decency Act, the part about actual "decency," has actually been found unconstitutional and basically doesn't exist any more. However, there's a part called § 230 that goes like this:
"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider" (47 U.S.C. § 230).
Now, a little bit of a history lesson. Courts in the United States were, early on, pretty confused about the Internet. They didn't know how to deal with it. They still don't, but a fair amount of the bumpy stuff is out of the way now. They used to think that ISPs were publishers, and all kinds of silliness, and there was a case called
Stratton Oakmont, Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co.
This was back in the ancient days of 1995, around the time of
Religious Tech. Ctr. v. Netcom, which imposed vicarious liability on ISPs for copyright infringement (yes RTC is Scientology). Now, the DMCA immunized ISPs for copyright if they did a little dance in response to notifications of copyright infringement by people who claimed to own intellectual property. It's a hassle, but ISPs don't live in terror of being sued all the time over copyrights, and are only obligated to do anything in response to actual notice.
But that left us with defamation, and
Stratton Oakmont.
In
Stratton Oakmont, a bunch of dipshits nobody cares about any more sued Prodigy, which doesn't exist any more, over message board comments made by Prodigy users. Because Prodigy would occasionally, if we can believe that, actually moderate their message boards and delete comments, they were held to have editorial control over it, and effectively, to be publishing it for the purposes of whether or not they were liable for defamation.
Basically, if Prodigy did no moderation whatsoever, they would have been okay. It would have been someone else's content.
So if you followed this ruling, ISPs couldn't moderate their boards at all without ending up liable for defamation.
For once, Congress stepped in and did something sensible. This section was put into the ongoing Communications Decency Act, where it sat like a little time bomb for a while. It was basically meant just to shield "Good Samaritan" type moderation. In fact, some even called it the "anti-Stratton Oakmont provision" because that was just how unpopular that badly decided New York Supreme Court case was.
However, once courts got their hands on it, starting with another watershed case,
Zeran v. America On-Line, it basically turned into near absolute immunity for ISPs over the speech of their users. ISPs can be forced to turn over user information in response to subpoenas, but plaintiffs are pretty much limited to suing the actual user.
Every federal circuit and most if not all state courts have a § 230 case, or more likely several, and they have overwhelmingly decided in favor of defendant ISPs. And "ISPs" include almost anyone who has contact with other people's content and have forwarded it along in almost any way. In California, for instance, even another user reposting (pretty clearly defamatory) content from another user was held immune (
Barrett v. Rosenthal).
Internet corporations are vastly, overwhelmingly, resoundingly in favor of this state of affairs. There isn't a single such corporation, Google or otherwise, that would willingly do away with this.
So the rest of the world may be absolutely fucked on these issues. France is a bunch of pussies who constantly try to censor the global Internet. This UN bullshit is another such attempt. This Google Ideas shit is asspatting of utterly scummy people who deserve no attention.
But Google isn't going to pay more than lip service to this.
I'd still keep an eye on them, of course. But if they do anything like this, of their own volition, it will be for their own agenda, not because they're otherwise pimping some agenda that would get in the way of their profits, which anything attaching actual liability to ISPs would do.
So Quinn and Sarkeesian and other wannabe frivolous litigants may want this kind of shit, but they ain't getting it. Not in murrica.
Because freedom.
(Insert picture of eagle with tear rolling down.)
