Slashdot Mirror
EFF Takes On Online Harassment
Gamoid writes: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has identified online harassment as a major challenge facing free speech on the Internet, and lays out its plan to fix it. They say, "Online harassment is a digital rights issue. At its worst, it causes real and lasting harms to its targets, a fact that must be central to any discussion of harassment. Unfortunately, it's not easy to craft laws or policies that will address those harms without inviting government or corporate censorship and invasions of privacy—including the privacy and free speech of targets of harassment. ... Just because the law sometimes allows a person to be a jerk (or worse) doesn’t mean that others in the community are required to be silent or to just stand by and let people be harassed. We can and should stand up against harassment. Doing so is not censorship—it’s being part of the fight for an inclusive and speech-supporting Internet."
Freedom of speech is not freedom to be an asshole to anyone at any time.
Yes, it is, in fact, exactly that. Freedom of speech is utterly useless if it only applies to speech "everyone (or, more likely, "you and people who agree with you") approves of."
Harassment is somewhere in between physical threats and being a general arsehole. It's a sustained campaign of asshattery towards an individual, with threats but not necessarily physical harm.
The law says you can't do it. Things like stalking are illegal, even if the purpertraitor doesn't lay a finger on the victim.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC