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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."
The comment in question falls under political speech. The commenter is commenting on a political candidate, after all.
I don't think so. Politically motivated, perhaps, but implying someone is a paedophile isn't the same thing as disagreeing with his political views.
Calling a candidate a pedophile hardly differs from the bipartisan mudslinging that takes place in most elections anyway.
That's a poor argument. I'd sooner say everyone should stop with the senseless mudslinging and talk about political issues again. Then again, in 'murika it's all about entrenched "views" that merely serve to pick sides in the perpetual shouting match you call "politics" but everyone else has long since lost interest in, since both sides appear to want exactly the same thing: Shout at the other side some more.
That's hardly "political discourse". It's just shouting.
IMO, the Supreme Court has exceeded it's authority in this case.
And that's poor grammar.
On December 29, an individual using the name Fuboy posted the following comment: Hadley is a Sandusky waiting to be exposed. Check out the view he has of Empire [Elementary School in Freeport, Illinois] from his front door.
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.
Defamation, along with obscenity and inciting panic or violence, have never been free speech. Slander and libel are civil crimes that you can be sued for in court, and it's been that way since day one. To facilitate enforcement of defamation laws, the court has decided it's acceptable to try and de-anonymize the poster in question.
Just because the words are about a political candidate, does not make it political speech. This case is not the same as speaking unpopular political views and opinions - that WOULD be protected speech. It's the difference between supporting Nazi idealism (free speech) and accusing someone of being a Nazi (not free speech).
=Smidge=
I am a firm believer in free speech. The cure for bad speech (as the accusation apparently was) is not less bad speech but more good speech.
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.
For this kind of smear, in this kind of context? No, no "more speech" isn't the solution, it actually makes it worse to issue denials as it makes the original allegation more prominent, and makes a large percentage of the population think it might be true because "there's no smoke without fire."
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Free Speech does not equate to guaranteed anonymity.
Without anonymity, you can't have free speech.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
There is nothing that an anonymous person can say about someone that I will take seriously without evidence. So, if an anonymous person says that candidate X is a pedophile, but offers no evidence, I will take it as the ranting of a liar, and candidate X has not been harmed in any way, beyond registering as a person who has angered some random anonymous coward. On the other hand, if candidate X takes it upon himself to waste the court's time with crap which endangers the anonymity of legitimately fearful critics of policy everywhere, I suddenly believe candidate X is an ass, unelectable, and possibly even a pedophile.
Without anonymity, you can't have free speech.
Sure you can. Free speech protects the speaker from prosecution based on beliefs or opinions, but does not free the speaker from accountability.
That's nice in theory, but in the real world but the only protection people have against prosecution for what they said is anonymity. Try offending a mob boss, saying something your local police department really doesn't like, printing cartoons of a prophet, etc, and see if your government's protections for free speech save you from being persecuted for what you said.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Defamation, along with obscenity and inciting panic or violence, have never been free speech. Slander and libel are civil crimes that you can be sued for in court, and it's been that way since day one. To facilitate enforcement of defamation laws, the court has decided it's acceptable to try and de-anonymize the poster in question.
Just because the words are about a political candidate, does not make it political speech. This case is not the same as speaking unpopular political views and opinions - that WOULD be protected speech. It's the difference between supporting Nazi idealism (free speech) and accusing someone of being a Nazi (not free speech).
=Smidge=
Nope. According to Times v. Sullivan https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... it is not a civil offense to make false, defamatory statements about public officials unless you do it with malice, which means that you either knew that it was false or disregarded whether it was true or false. (The Times printed false statements in the advertisement at issue in Times v. Sullivan.) Anyone running for office is a public figure.
People accuse public figures of being Nazis all the time. In the Wall Street Journal comments section, which requires people to use their full names, people accuse Obama and others of being socialists, and sometimes Communists and Nazis. One ongoing debate is over whether Frank Marshall Davis was a Communist, as J. Edgar Hoover and one recent right-wing book said he was. Davis was the unnamed mentor that Obama mentioned in his autobiography.
The rule in civil damages is no harm, no foul. That's the next hurdle. In order to get damages in court, you have to prove that the action caused you damages. John Henry Faulk won a libel suit against Aware, the blacklisting group, because they called him a Communist when he wasn't, and he lost income as a result of being blacklisted.
I haven't seen any evidence that Bill Hadley was harmed by being likened to a pedophile. Hadley is going to try to find someone who will testify that he actually believed the anonymous pedophile accusation, and did something damaging to Hadley as a result.
One of the defenses in a libel case like that would be the "political hyperbole" defense, that nobody took it seriously. That's like the parody defense in Hustler Magazine v. Falwell (where Hustler published a parody of a liquor ad which quoted Falwell of saying that his first time was with his mother in the outhouse).