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Illinois Supreme Court: Comcast Must Identify Anonymous Internet Commenter
An anonymous reader writes: In 2011, an anonymous person on the internet posted a comment to the Freeport Journal Standard newspaper's website implying that a local political candidate was a pedophile. The candidate, Bill Hadley, took offense to this, and tried to get Comcast to tell him who the commenter was. Comcast refused, so Hadley took it to the courts. The Illinois Supreme Court has now ruled (PDF) that Comcast must divulge the commenter's identity. "Illinois' opinion was based in large part on a pair of earlier, lower-court decisions in the state, which held that the anonymity of someone who makes comments in response to online news stories isn't guaranteed if their opinions are potentially defamatory, according to Don Craven, an attorney for the Illinois Press Association."
So of course an anonymous comment is no reason to believe someone is a pedophile, unless corroborated by further evidence.
But still, when I hear of defamation lawsuits like this, I always think back to Oscar Wilde.
He sued for defamation when someone outed him as homosexual. He lost and legal fees bankrupted him. And because sodomy was a crime, he was thrown in jail.
Fine, but doesn't there have to be consequences when someone just makes shit up about someone else? Especially when it's something that is such a powderkeg in current climate? We don't consider it reasonable that people prove a negative, so you're already on the backfoot if someone decides to start a rumour. With Twitter and Wikipedia, it's very easy for a rumour to get repeated so much it feels like the truth.
I have faith in people's intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong, but I think most people will see through baseless accusations, and not simply react to them with revulsion. If I were accused anonymously of pedophilia, with no further details, I would simply ignore the accusation, and I think most people would.
If somebody makes something up about me there are consequences: he loses credibility. I think that's enough. Yes, if you say something loud enough, and often enough, people will start to believe it. However, the Internet cuts both ways. I can deny a baseless accusation in a blog post, and anyone who cares enough to check will find it.
A system which could somehow suppress false accusations runs the danger of being perverted into suppression of any criticism of the powerful. I would rather have no suppression at all than take that risk.
Let me introduce you to Dale Akiki. Patently false accusations, including that he had sacrificed a giraffe in a church classroom during Sunday services, landed him in an extended court trial. He was eventually exonerated, but for a long stretch of the 1990s, everyone in San Diego knew he was a satanic pedophile.
A society that gets rid of all its troublemakers goes downhill.
-- Robert A. Heinlein
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.