Last week I wrote a TechCrunch article about Section 230 of the Communications Disclosure Act, the U.S. law that many argue is responsible for the existence of “Web 2.0” in its current form.Simply put: I don’t like it.
It’s the law that states that no one who runs a website or online service of any kind counts as a “publisher” in the old-school sense of the term–no one who hosts content online is responsible for content other people create, even if the content is libelous, even if it’s harassment, even if it contains threats.
If you want to sue someone for something they say on the Internet, you have to find the original creator. Facebook, Twitter, Yik Yak, or whoever owns the site and profits from the content bears no responsibility–not even for helping you find the person. Court cases have decided over and over again that websites are free to host anonymously contributed content and bear no responsibility for making the anonymous contributors difficult to find.
That was a problem in 2007 when the first big modern Internet case about widespread harassment on an anonymous forum broke, the AutoAdmit case, where women who had vile rumors and smears spread about them couldn’t do anything against the site that spread them and had to laboriously track down each individual poster hiding behind pseudonyms.
It’s worse today, with the proliferation of imageboard-style services designed to maximize the anonymity and minimize the accountability of their users, hosting communities for the express purpose of spreading personal information, organizing targeted harassment and in some cases trying to get people killed.
We’ve created a dark, consequence-free place for libel, threats and harassment – and no one feels responsible
">The Internet is like this toilet: How Reddit and other Web 2.0 communities broke the Internet
Last week I wrote a TechCrunch article about Section 230 of the Communications Disclosure Act, the U.S. law that many argue is responsible for the existence of “Web 2.0” in its current form.
Simply put: I don’t like it.
It’s the law that states that no one who runs a website or online service of any kind counts as a “publisher” in the old-school sense of the term–no one who hosts content online is responsible for content other people create, even if the content is libelous, even if it’s harassment, even if it contains threats.
If you want to sue someone for something they say on the Internet, you have to find the original creator. Facebook, Twitter, Yik Yak, or whoever owns the site and profits from the content bears no responsibility–not even for helping you find the person. Court cases have decided over and over again that websites are free to host anonymously contributed content and bear no responsibility for making the anonymous contributors difficult to find.
That was a problem in 2007 when the first big modern Internet case about widespread harassment on an anonymous forum broke, the AutoAdmit case, where women who had vile rumors and smears spread about them couldn’t do anything against the site that spread them and had to laboriously track down each individual poster hiding behind pseudonyms.
It’s worse today, with the proliferation of imageboard-style services designed to maximize the anonymity and minimize the accountability of their users, hosting communities for the express purpose of spreading personal information, organizing targeted harassment and in some cases trying to get people killed.