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Law Student Web Forum: Free Speech Gone too Far?
The Xoxo Reader writes "Today's Washington Post carries a front-page article on the internet message board AutoAdmit (a.k.a. Xoxohth), which proclaims itself the "most prestigious law school discussion board in the world." The message board has recently come under fire for emphasizing a free speech policy that allows its users to discuss, criticize, and attack other law students and lawyers by name. Is this an example of free speech and anonymity gone too far, or is internet trolling just a necessary side effect of a policy that otherwise promotes insightful discussion of the legal community?"
There are laws that deal with free speech going too far - they're called 'libel' and 'slander'. You'd think law students would know about this.
[Insert pithy quote here]
Like any forum, if they let the trolls take over the forum stops being read by anyone who actually cares because it's too annoying to dig through the junk posts. They can either take care of their forum and protect their free speech, or they can let it spiral into a troll-fest. Either way, the trolls eventually loose since they get filtered or the forum becomes sub-par.
"The cure to bad speech is more speech,"
can anyone say 'flamewar' ?
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
If,
A) You're talking about an forum (electronic or otherwise) designed to promote freedom of expression, and holding that as one of your primary ideals,
and
B) You ask whether this is freedom of speech gone too far,
The answer is always, "no". Do not pass GO, do not collect $200.
Article = dumb. I RTFAs, but not in this case.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
> Is this an example of free speech and anonymity gone too far...
There is no such thing as "limits on free speech" or "Free speech going too far". It either is free speech or it is not.
If it is libel that's a different thing, there are laws that regulate that.
A: We are a free country, free speech
B: Lawyers are assholes
A: You are stepping bounds on your freedom of speech, offensive comments are not included in it
B:
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When I write letters to my local newspaper I have to provide a name and address, and they verify I am who I say I am before they publish my letter (and my name is attached). Another example can be found in the television/radio media where commercials have to specify who paid for them. Free speech is one thing, but anonymous free speech is a whole other matter. I believe that if someone is criticized (or praised for that matter) in a public forum, the name of the person doing the criticizing/praising should also be public.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
The inference in the article is that the protagonist got minimal call-backs and no offers as a result of what was said in postings (possibly anonymous) about her on the AutoAdmit law school admissions discussion board.
Goggling an applicant and finding pictures of them on their myspace site, smoking blunts and self-copulating is one thing.
If law firms reject otherwise stellar applicants on the basis of anonymous postings on a cheesy discussion forum, then they are stupid beyond words. Can you hear it?: "Oh she's top of her class at UPenn, just *blew* the doors off the interview, goddamn articulate, but I heard an anonymous rumour she cheated on her LSAT".
She best start looking for other employers, 'cause you don't want to work for people that have their heads so far up their ass that they'll pass up on the next Clarence Darrow because of what some anonymous shill said on the fscking Internet.
[17] Leary, T., White, C., Wood, P. R., Bhabha, W. D., and Wirth, N. Lambda calculus considered harmful. In Proceedings
That website is not about "free speech" in the slightest. It is about generating ad revenue for its owners: revenue which would decline if users who deliberately set out to act like cocks were not offered safe harbour.
Really, it just combines a few popular online subjects - law career discussion and outlandish bigotry/racism/general abuse. Go look at any extremist forum, for example. You'll see hundreds of thousands of posts, each one serving up Google adverts.
And the site owners aren't championing free speech in fear of what all those law students could do if they felt their rights were collectively infringed - they are worried about traffic leaving the site. Simple as that. Applying strict moderation isn't going to bring out Gary Bupkis from Moronica State University all aflame in anger about his constitutional right to call Sheila Labiastein from Jeronimo College a filthy cock-sucking kykecunt who couldn't get into a university as prestigious as his which he pretends is Harvard or something...he's going to toddle off to some other online forum and passively boost ad revenues there.
Don't attribute to nobility what is clearly just commercial greed.
You can't really think that freedom of speech has gone too far. It can't go too far. It is either FREEDOM of speech or no freedom of speech at all there are no mid points.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
You know, apart from all the ads, and the excessive clicking needed to actually get to the post contents, which it shares with most modern forums, this is actually a very nice and readable layout. At least compared to phpbb and its ilk with a million useless stats printed all over the page, along with avatars and signatures and other usesless visual clutter that ends up leaving room for two or three actual sentences of user content per screen.
There is no such thing as "limits on free speech" or "Free speech going too far". It either is free speech or it is not.
Providing and guaranteeing it is one thing. It being something good and beneficial for society is something else. The latter requires a mature and well informed public. Otherwise, it becomes a brawl where whoever has the loudest voice wins.
as with everything freedom can go to far. your freedom ends, where the freedom of someone else begins. remember? there's only so much room for one person and there's billions of others too, that deserve some freedom.
does you definition of "freedom of speech" include the freedom to break laws/oaths too? like a doctor who's breaking his oath telling everyone of his funny patient stories, because he feels he can go as far as he wants with his freedom of speech? if it would harm another one's freedom you are not entitled to use your's. there's always compromise, even if some americans seem to be completely blinded by their constitution. remember, after all it's just a piece of paper with some words on it written by some other human, who lived ages ago (like the bible). just because it says so, you're not allowed to go rampage on others. that 's what common sense, ethics and morale is all about. think before you speak.
Trouble is, true free speech also requires intelligent listening.
If we could rely on people not to make important decisions without looking critically at the evidence, laws on defamation would not be necessary.
If your employer fires you because a.n. blogger accuses you of kitten huffing, then it is your employer who should be held accountable - not the teenage troll who doesn't know any better.
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Before you jump on the "obvious" answer, take a look at this thread (found only after 2 minutes of looking... I'm sure there's far worse on the site).
9
http://www.xoxohth.com/thread.php?thread_id=51069
Names, pictures, personal information, and enough sexist and racist comments to make my head hurt. Now tell me you'd be happy if that thread was the first thing that came up on Google for your name.
Free speech is one thing. To my untrained eyes, that looks like sexual harassment, and I'm sure there's some slander in there to be found. Even worse, from some of the comments I got the impression this type of thread is a popular "sport" on that forum...
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Ooooh! That's a good question.
I'm only going to dash off a quick response here because if I take the time to explore the topic fully I won't get any work done today. To be fair to the spirit of your inquiry, I'm not going to look at Wikipedia before I write this.
My working definition of trolling is "deliberate ignorance." To me, a troll isn't really a troll unless they (apparently) deliberately ignore obvious facts in evidence that contradict them. Admittedly, even this is a fluid definition. In an anti-gun-rights forum, saying "Guns kill people" isn't trolling because everyone agrees. In a pro-gun-rights forum, the same statement (out of any clarifying context) is a troll because, obviously, no gun can pull its own trigger.
For another example that moves beyond the realm of religion, I once had a discussion online about appropriate speed limits on the highway. I wanted to be open and genuinely communicative, so I tried to define terms and find common ground. I made a simple statement that two objects could never collide if they traveled the same speed and stayed on parallel courses and that traffic accidents could only happen if one of those two conditions was not met. This is so simple that it should be no more controversial than the notion that gravity makes things fall down. Yet the person I was talking to staunchly refused to agree to even this most basic statement and continued to wail emotionally about the human cost of traffic accidents. At that point, because he was unwilling to stipulate to obvious facts that would give us a common ground from which to proceed with discussion, I could only brand him a troll and abandon the conversation.
Trolls don't listen. They put their fingers in their ears and hum when presented with facts, as opposed to logically arguing their points by showing how my interpretation of those facts is flawed. That's deliberate ignorance and the hallmark of a troll.
Yeah, there's more to it, especially the part about how you're not really trolling unless you're trying to elicit a response. But I gotta go to work, now. Thanks for the good question.