Over at Concurring Opinions, Maryland lawprof Danielle Citron has taken the next step down the slippery slope of cyber civil rights by calling for “intermediaries” to impose “digital citizenship” on those who are the targets of her wrath.
Although intermediaries’ services can facilitate and reinforce a citizenry’s activities, they pose dangers that work to undermine them. Consider the anonymous and pseudonymous nature of online discourse. Intermediaries permit individuals to create online identities unconnected to their legal identities. Freed from a sense of accountability for their online activities, citizens might engage in productive discourse in ways that they might not if directly correlated with their offline identities. Yet the sense of anonymity breeds destructive behavior as well.Push aside those concerns about the right to be anonymous online, for whatever reasons any particular person offers, and focus instead on how anonymous speech fosters hate. In the balance, Citron posits that free speech give way to eliminate hate speech, as the latter impairs the cyber civil rights of all to participate without fear of others, usually anonymous, attacking them.
The new agenda is that websites, message boards, blogs, the intermediaries on the digital world, become responsible for the good citizenship of their visitors.
Intermediaries should recognize these particular challenges that cyber hate in networked spaces poses to individuals’ capability to participate meaningfully offline and online. In our upcoming article Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming Boston University Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I invoke a concept of digital citizenship to ensure that intermediaries acknowledge and address these challenges.
That people say things online that are patently offensive isn’t in issue. They do. It’s long been my policy to police the comments, deleting those that attack baselessly among others, in an effort to keep the place reasonably neat and clean. But I do that because I choose to keep my house in order, at least to the extent that it appears in order to me. Others will think my hand is too heavy on the delete button. Still others, too light.
But nobody has ever suggested that commenters are somehow citizens here, or that I am somehow the official in charge. Until now. And it’s urged that I “acknowledge and address these challenges,” meaning keep you in check and make sure you behave yourselves.
Or what?
The idea behind Citron’s cyber civil rights view is that if someone is made to feel badly about something they say, then their right to “participate meaningfully” is impaired. Of course, if others aren’t allowed to disagree, even if it hurts the feelings of Citron’s favored class, then their right to participate meaningfully is impaired as well. But aside from this gap of reason, the push is recreate rules, with hard liability for their violation, on the wild west of the internet, just as we’ve done in the real world.
On the one side, there is criminal and civil liability in real life for making people feel badly online. On the other side, there is the creation of this concept of digital citizenship to hold places like Simple Justice liable for your nastiness. The reason is clear: if intermediaries are required to keep their “citizens” in line, then we can clean up the speech that offends and make this digital world a happier place, where no one need fear expressing their thoughts and being met with anyone who disagrees in a manner that hurts their feelings.
This isn’t to say that those of us who happen to be intermediaries are in favor of those who would anonymously attack others, especially for the purpose of just causing offense. There’s a surprising amount of that, even here, which never sees the light of day. But then, it’s a fine line between challenging ideas with which one disagrees, and attacking. Where Citron would draw the line remains unclear, though what became brutally clear during the cyber civil rights discussion was that it all fell under the rubric of hate speech when it hurt someone’s feelings. It’s hard to keep our citizens in line when the line changes with every new hurt feeling.
So now that the next step in the campaign is to make you digital citizens of Simple Justice, we need to come up with some of the basic rules of citizenship. A dress code, a pledge of allegiance. Maybe a flag or a bird (the turkey is still available). Of course, in the land of SJ, we need an anthem. I’m thinking this?
I wonder if Danielle Citron will approve.
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I’m all for civility. A dress code? I’m not sure about that one. How fitting that my pajamas this morning consist of my Whisper Concerts t-shirt from the 70s.
Exactly. Norms develop naturally in any “society,” even one as small and inconsequential as a blog. But rules of law constraining speech upon pain of liability is an entirely different matter. The crux of cyber civil rights is to hold the intermediary legally responsible for the civility of other speakers based on the feelings of those spoken about. Be careful what you wear for pajamas while you type.
Well, if the dress code is pajamas, I’m in. And I like the anthem!
Seriously, if you can’t stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen. I don’t think “intermediaries” should become censors to keep the feelings of the thin skinned from being hurt.
Would Professor Citron have censored the tabloids and broadsheets of the 18th century? Modern discourse is, for the most part, much more civilized than the political media of that time. But maybe I’m a dinosaur.
Anyone who thinks that content providers should be responsible for what is said by their commenters should stroll on over to YouTube and read some of the brilliant screeds authored by the digital citizens of that community.
This sounds like it will work about as well as stopping the flow of drugs by busting low-level street dealers.
This proposal sounds like yet another last-gasp of the big media companies, who can’t stand the fact that the front pages of Time and the NY Times no longer define what is mainstream.
How about a motto for Citron (and many other law profs) who clearly need some actual lawyer-work to do:
Idle hands are the Devil’s tool
If that’s our anthem, I’m in. Years ago when I was pre-med (“pre-med, pre-law, what’s the difference?”) we would take the ferry from Plattsbugh to Burlington for the annual Zevon show. His pairing of the words “guns” and “money” with “lawyers” was responsible in no small part for the adjustment in career paths.
This may not be the main point of your blog but it relates to some of the things you say there. You, of course, can do anything you want with your blog. It is after all, “your” blog. If you want to delete something someone writes here that is your privilege. If you want to block someone from commenting on your blog, that is your right to do so because it is “your” blog.
However in your message you talk about “hate speech” and someone writing something, “intending to make someone feel bad online” and the criminal penalties for that. These types of politically correct laws scare me to death and are contrary to the whole idea of free speech.
As someone who worked as a Registered Nurse in psychiatry and as someone who can think, i know that it is impossible to say anything that doesn’t offend someone. I also know that someone can’t “make” anyone feel bad by what they say. Whether a person has unpleasant feelings about what someone else says depends on what is going on inside of the person feeling bad not what the other person says.
The end result of this trend to make what a person says illegal based on whether a person from a protected group feels offended or not is the complete loss of free speech and the government completely controlling what people can hear or read, just like the old Soviet Union.
For whatever it’s worth, I’m offended by everything that Obama says. Whenever he lies about anything I feel offended. How can he prove that he is not doing this on purpose. Should Obama be arrested because I am offended by what he says? Of course not. Why should anyone be liable for civil and criminal penalties because someone didn’t like what they said.
I’m going to leave your comment up this time only to make one point: I realize that you hate Obama, but every post that can relate in any way to your hatred of Obama does not become your platform to be critical of Obama. Start an “I hate Obama” blog, if that’s your desire, but your hatred adds nothing whatsoever to the discussion. You hate Obama. Great. Move on.