Slashdot Mirror
Proposed UK Online Libel Rules Would Restrict Anonymous Posting
judgecorp writes "A Parliamentary Committee in the UK has suggested that sites should be protected against libel claims against contributors — as long as those contributors are identified. Anonymous postings should be taken down if someone complains of libel in them, in a set of proposals which online community groups have described as 'chilling.'"
It was only a matter of time before the absurdly loose libel laws and near total lack of privacy law in the UK combined in some manner even more horrifying than either of them were individually.
Synergy at its darkest.
The internet was for a long time, a "wild west". This bought a magnification of human nature. It brought astounding good, people communicating instantly with others all around the world about their interests, collaborations to accomplish amazing things, freedom of communication, cross cultural contacts. It brought also trolls, idiots, collections of self reinforcing stupidity, harassment, greed.
But above all, it brought something the authorities couldn't control. And that scared them - it made them vulnerable to their own version of the Arab Spring, even if peacefully so, by shining a big light on their actions. It meant people couldn't be protected "for their own good". It meant there was communication they couldn't control. That couldn't be allowed to stand. The good that anonymity does will be lost, because of the bad it allows.
So: it's inevitable that it becomes much harder to be anonymous online, not just in the UK, but in the USA and elsewhere. Sure, those in the know will post through anonymous proxies and VPNs and so on, at least until such encrypted traffic is blocked. And then there is steganography, but at each of these steps, the number of people knowledgeable enough to do it becomes 3, maybe 4 orders of magnitude smaller.
It's only a matter of time until the internet becomes the most powerful panopticon the world has ever known. There aren't enough people who care, to stop it from happening.
No, the UK can't force anything on a site hosted outside the UK. They can block the traffic inside the UK, with varying degrees of effectiveness (see China, Egypt).
It's important to understand that in the UK (and Australia... and Canada... and many other places) there are much, much stronger legal principles surrounding defamation than you are used to in the US. The idea is that you are free to say anything - but not free to cause harm to others without compensating them. So if you publish something which alleges that a particular individual is a child molester (and they aren't), they are entitled to come after you to recover in dollars the harm you have caused to their reputation.
There are scenarios in which both the US and common law systems seem perverse. In the common law world, defamation often becomes the tool of the rich and powerful to silence criticism or discussion about them. A country like Singapore demonstrates what happens when common law defamation is abused to the fullest extent. But in the US, people at times appear to have liberty to destroy reputations without consequence under the guise of "free" speech.
So to consider this, you have to start from the proposition that if someone publishes something which is defamatory of someone else, that person has a prima facie right to sue and recover damages. Another principle of common law defamation is that anyone involved in the publication process, or republication, is potentially liable along with the person making the defamatory statement. Including, for example, the operator of a website.
Right now, without any reform, it is already the case in many common law countries that a person who has been defamed on-line may pursue the website operator for disclosure of information about the original poster of the defamatory publication. In the context of anonymous publications, it already makes sense for the website to collect as much info as they can get away with about their users in order to protect them in this scenario. Where I live (Australia) this happens almost by default - anonymous posting is rare, and most sites make at least a token attempt to get your name and email address. I can also guarantee that any Australian website hit with a threat about a defamatory third party comment they are carrying will pull the comment instantly.
So the real question is, should defamatory anonymous on-line posting be regarded as similar to defamatory graffiti on a toilet door, where although someone is strictly speaking liable for it, there is general acceptance that to find them would be impossible? Or should it be regarded as something closer to a newspaper or television station which republishes someone's defamatory comments? In that scenario, the newspaper/TV station along with the person who made the comments would all be potentially liable.
Personally, I favour the "Wild West" view of the net. The almost absolute freedom of speech it provides in a practical sense also results in a corresponding decrease in the credibility accorded to any one posting on-line. Not too many people are dumb enough to read user comments on a website and take them with anything less than a shovel full of salt. However, I suspect our parliamentary and judicial overlords will see it rather differently, and this type of proposal will eventually make it into law...
End rant... if anyone's still reading.
Read Pynchon.
The members of this parliamentary committee are pedophiles.
Sincerely,
-Anonymous
P.S.: Oops, sorry. I meant "pædophiles."
The way I see it, there is no way for the UK government to control UK or foreign citizens posting on foreign sites.
Right now, if I am in France and you are in Venezuela, and you post a highly defamatory article about me on a server in New York, and someone else in the UK reads it... I can sue you in the UK for defamation. The law focuses on the place of publication, which at the moment is treated as the place where the material is accessed and read (arguable I can sue you in multiple places... see here: http://www.law.ed.ac.uk/it&law/c10_main.htm). So long as I have some reputation in the UK and you cause harm to that reputation by publishing 'into' that jurisdiction, I can sue you there. This is a huge problem with internet defamation law at the moment.
There is no reason why the UK government can't make laws in relation to anything accessed from the UK, even if it's stored elsewhere.
Read Pynchon.
As long as you intend to only stay within your country, and as far as your own country doesn't extradite you for it. If you ever want to travel anywhere that has extradition treaty with UK (pretty much everywhere), they can get you. US has a long history of doing that, and afterwise enforcing their own laws to foreign nationals. Even with copyright infringers.
Free speech ends at libel and slander.
You have a human right to anonymously post true information. The problem is that this comes into conflict, not with libel laws, but with their enforcement: Someone whose identity is unknown cannot defend themselves against a charge of libel. So we have a problem: If we force the anonymous poster to reveal his identity in order to defend the truth of his statements, there is no longer the ability to have truthful anonymous speech -- anyone can make the accusation and force the poster to choose between the ability to be anonymous and the ability to communicate. But if we allow the post to stand because of that, you have something that is potentially libelous (but not proven to be in an adversary proceeding), which continues to be available.
Now if you throw in the fact that a post by someone anonymous will have extremely low credibility unless it can be independently verified, which mitigates the damage done by a potentially libelous statement, it weighs strongly in favor of protecting anonymous speech at the expense of people having to grow thicker skin.
"You're a pedophile and hurt small chidren!"
"Got any proof of that?"
"Ur, no. But you still are!"
"Okay then. No harm done. You just proved yourself to be an idiot, yes?"
"Uhh ..."
Random person on the street:
"tqk is a pedo who hurts small children".
Headline in the Daily Fail:
Mr tqk is a known Paedophile who has done great harm to a great number of children.
Both are lies to be sure but one has the potential to destroy your life the other will be dismissed as insane ramblings.
If your name connected to an accusation of paedophilia is published by a large publisher with readership in the millions would you not be upset. Further more would you not want the publisher punished for this? Libel laws grew to their woeful state because certain publishers began to lie in their headlines to influence the public. When an organisation has the ability to influence what a large number of people think, should they not be held responsible for what they say. It's the old "fire in a crowded theatre" argument, sure, you can yell fire in a crowded theatre but you'll be charged for it because you knew what you were doing was wrong yet did it deliberately.
Libel laws were created to add responsibility to speech, not to take away free speech. They are still needed for this purpose. Exactly how they should fulfil that purpose is a matter of some debate.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
The trouble with this issue is that there is genuine merit on boths of the argument. Anonymous posting does have advantages in some contexts and whistleblowing in the public interest is a time-honoured tradition. On the other hand, I'm a great believer that with freedom comes responsibility, and effective anonymity by definition removes all accountability for someone's actions. As others have amusingly noted, without any need to act responsibly, a significant number of people won't, which in everyday life spoils things for everyone else.
I'm not sure whether the proposals here strike exactly the right balance, but it seems to me that neither absolute free speech/total anonymity nor automatic public naming of everyone is a viable way forward.
The usual argument for the former is something about disproportionate powers to penalise an identifiable critic. In reality, the government/legal system should be protecting those people against unjust retribution in most cases. If the government is itself the target of the criticism and is sufficiently corrupt to try to silence justified criticism through dubious means then you need a lot more than free speech to fix your problem. Consider the events of the past year in Egypt, Libya, Syria and Iran.
The usual argument for the latter is something about taking responsibility, but neglects the important benefits of privacy to free and constructive discussions on difficult subjects, such as those mentioned by the Mumsnet reps in recent BBC coverage of this topic. There is no need to force someone to disclose their identity to the entire world unless they are actually doing something wrong, and there should be due process to discover that just like any other legal action.
If we accept that a middle ground is necessary to strike as fair a balance as possible between competing but incompatible legitimate positions here, then the big question becomes how to deal with actions that can potentially have an immediate impact and spread rapidly causing irreparable damage, but which may be doing so legitimately, before any court action can reach a useful conclusion. Some sort of safe harbour/temporary hold system seems to be working better than anything we had before in the broadly similar context of copyright infringement, so I don't think that's an absurd place to start.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.