First Amendment Ruling Protects Internet Trolls

I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "A recent ruling by the Court of Appeal of the State of California (PDF) in Krinsky v. Doe H030767 overturned a lower court ruling and decided that the First Amendment right to anonymous speech protects internet trolls, too. Specifically, the ruling said that 'this juvenile name-calling cannot reasonably be read as stating actual facts.' And, even though some of the statements were crudely sexual and accused Ms. Krinsky of being among 'boobs, liars and crooks,' the statements were held to 'fall into the category of crude, satirical hyperbole which, while reflecting the immaturity of the speaker, constitute protected opinion under the First Amendment.'"

Comments

USENET had it right...

[palegray.net]

Don't Feed The Trolls

It only empowers them to wield attack lawyers.

Words=Noise, Writing=Squiggles

[milsoRgen]

I've always felt that one should be able to say or write anything that suits their fancy. Short of something that could put someone in immediate harm (i.e. shouting, "Fire!" in a crowded place).

It's like when people put parts of Scientology's texts in public forums. To a true believer, those words are putting them in actual danger or at the very least greatly offending them. But no one cares about that, their a bunch of not jobs.

But in my own experiance, trying to get a t-shirt made that simply says F*** Jesus, has been very hard. And I can't wait to get one made to wear to Wal-Mart... Granted that will probably put me in physical danger, but that's part of the fun of it all.

The point is, the world is a dirty grubby place. And if you can't use your intellect to help you see beyond it all. That's you're problem, people talk shit. Always have always will. IMHO.

How long does it take?

[Phat_Tony]

Oh come on, why are there 18 comments and no one's done this yet? Do I have to do everything myself? Let's get it out of the way:

_____________________________

That idiotic dumb-ass judge wouldn't know a good judicial decision if it bit him in his lame-ass ass. Where did he go to judge-school anyway, The Universduhity of Dumbasia?

I see it came from California. Everyone knows everybody in California is a stupid liberal anyway with their stupid activist liberal judges who just do whatever their retarded Governator tells them to do. Retards. Someone should shoot them all, wouldn't that be ironic? Here they all go crying "free speech, free speech," and then they get shot? Well, if you don't see the irony, then you're even dumber than that retarted freakin judge.

_____________________________

OK, now mod it + funny, - troll and we can be done with it.

Re:Greatest Hits

[Anonymous Coward]

The last few months I have been doing some research into the trolling phenomenon on slashdot.org. In order to do this as thoroughly as possible, I have written both normal and troll posts, 1st posts, etc., both logged in and anonymously, and I have found these rather shocking results:

• More moderator points are being used to mod posts down than up. Furthermore, when modding a post up, every moderator seems to follow previous moderators in their choices, even when it's not a particularly interesting or clever post slashdot.org. There are a LOT more +5 posts than +3 or +4.
• Logged in people are modded down faster than anonymous cowards. Presumably these Nazi Moderators think it's more important to burn a user's existing karma, to silence that individual for the future, than to use the moderation system for what it's meant for : identifying "good" and "bad" posts (Notice how nearly all oppressive governments in the past and present do the same thing : marking individuals as bad and untrustworthy because they have conflicting opinions, instead of engaging in a public discussion about these opinions)
• Once you have a karma of -4 or -5, your posts have a score of -1 by default. When this is the case, no-one bothers to mod you down anymore. This means a logged in user can keep on trolling as much as he (or she) likes, without risking a ban to post on slashdot. When trolling as an anonymous user, every post starts at score 0, and you will be modded down to -1 ON EVERY POST. When you are modded down a certain number of times in 24 hour, you cannot post anymore from your current IP for a day or so. So, for successful trolling, ALWAYS log in.
• A lot of the modded down posts are actually quite clever, funny, etc., and they are only modded down because they are offtopic. Now, on a news site like slashdot, where the number of different topics of discussion can be counted on 1 hand, I must say I quite like the distraction these posts offer. But no, when the topic is yet another minor version change of the Linux kernel, they only expect ooohs and aaahs about this great feat of engineering. Look at the moderation done in this thread to see what I mean.
• Digging deep into the history of slashdot, I found this poll, which clearly indicates the vast majority does NOT want the moderation we have here today. 'nuff said.

Feel free to use this information to your advantage. I thank you for your time.

Anonymous cowards are... well, cowards.

Anonymous posting likely to be gone in Norway

[Anonymous Coward]

There are extremely strong pressures for anonymous posting to be removed from all national newspaper and discussion sites, pretty much every site "run by a company", which is all of them. The social pressure on companies to conform to this could be compared with the Chinese social pressure on companies not to allow 'socially objectionable material' to filter into the public consciousness.

Additionally, every Norway-based social networking site requires a mobile phone for registration, and mobile phones are required by law to be registered to a valid address with SSN-equivalent. You can't buy one without ID.

define "obnoxious" post

[CarpetShark]

One person's obnoxious poster is another's modern day Mark Twain. It's time people realised that calling someone a "troll" is just a stereotyping, dismissive way of dealing with things you can't be bothered to discuss. It would be much more mature to simply ignore them.

Re:Oh dear God...

[greylingrover]

Yeah, just look at my account... I've tried to make a couple admittedly feeble attempts at humor with good intent (there is a funny mod option, is there not?), only to be modded down (soul crushing as it was). So I just don't post, even when I have something useful to offer. I'm guessing I'll get hammered on this one also, and no, that's not bait, I'm just trying to point out this inherent flaw in community policing/rating/censorship?. Oh yeah, and free speech is good - see, that was totally on topic! ;)

Re:Darwinian M&M duels

[overkill1024]

Not off topic in the least, but coincidentally I just did this a few minutes ago upon obtaining a bag of m&ms and remembering this 'copypasta'. I used more of a tournament style bracket so that at the end the competitors would be equally worn. Though there's always an element of chance in natural selection, if m&ms had genetic traits and were bread in the proposed manner you would get the same result, just less efficiently. That aside, the green m&ms seem to be the strongest and won against every competing color with the exception of one yellow m&m which was subsequently destroyed by another green m&m. Coincidence?

No

[CarpetShark]

It would be much more mature to simply ignore them.

  Which is achieved by modding them down.

No, that's preventing everyone else from seeing their opinions too. That's censorship, not personally choosing to ignore something that doesn't interest you. Huge difference.