Assuming every legislator, from Congress to state, decides to end the blight of revenge porn by criminalizing all expression that its advocates demand.  Problem solved, right?  Ah, have you forgotten the apocryphal story of Timmy and the rat?  Those who truly seek to do harm, when foreclosed from one avenue, will find another.

Via Gawker comes the next new thing.

It’s a well-known fact that unsourced, unverifiable, anonymous Tumblr posts are an agent of social progress and meaningful change. So it’s surprising that some prick used “Racists Getting Fired,” an enormously popular new web attraction, to smear his ex.

The premise of RGF is simple, and a perfectly representative product of 2014 Internet: send screenshots of people saying racist shit on Facebook or Twitter to their employers, get them canned, and thus end American racism, or something. This is foolproof until someone uses the formula to frame someone who didn’t actually say anything racist.

The ease with which one can put “words” in another person’s “mouth” on the internets is obvious.  The example is brutal.

This isn’t an argument against criminalizing revenge porn.  There are enough sound reasons to question the propriety of ill-conceived laws without this, and there is no rational person who disputes that the “real” revenge porn is despicable.

It’s not that there aren’t methods to address such deception, and that sites won’t be compliant with removal of phony racist attacks posted to smear and harm a person.  It’s that once seen, stuff like this propagates.  The harm is done, at least to some extent.  Once the seed of racism is planted, it can be very hard, maybe impossible to remove.

Before the site realized the trick and issued something resembling a correction, the Brianna smear racked up tens of thousands of reblogs and notes and prompted readers to bombard the real Brianna’s workplace with phone calls and tweets. Probably because RGF provided instructions on doing this exactly.

So RGF is, without a doubt, inherently evil.  No, it doesn’t matter that you think she deserved it.  No, lying about someone being a racist to harm her is still lying, no matter how truly you believe she (or he) deserves to be harmed.

The point here is that angry people on the internet are nothing if not imaginative in finding methods of accomplishing the goal of causing people we don’t like harm.  If it’s not naked images, it’s racist comments.  And if it’s not racist comments, it will be something else. Don’t ask me what, as my mind doesn’t go there, but I’m sure others already have nasty ideas brewing.

To make matters worse, the spirit of lazy entrepreneurship that permeates the slackoisie mentality, that all you need to do is come up with some website to become fabulously rich and famous, and you don’t really give a damn who gets harmed in the process, as long as you become fabulously rich and famous and no hard work is required, is thriving.

Hey, who cares what damage you do. You’re entitled to make money, right?  And you’re not responsible for anything anyway.  It’s the Millennial way.  No, not you personally, of course, but that other guy. The one who wants work/life balance. Jerk.

Do we criminalize every new method of wreaking havoc in the lives of people who suffer on the internet?  Should there be a new “crime of the month”?  The speed with which imaginative people online come up with new, really great, ideas for ruining lives will invariably outpace the ability of law to address it.

Worse still, should law attempt to address it, it will be knee-jerk, emotional and, I predict, invariably impair the constitutional rights of those who aren’t doing it but whose conduct falls within the vague lines drawn by overheated evangelists.

In the olden days of the internets, pre-Windows when any idiot could get online by clicking on a cute picture, users tended to be more sophisticated. They both understood the games could be played online, and dealt with jerks harshly to shut them down.  While I realize this is, in light of today’s usage, unseemly, as feared by many to hurt the feelings of people who believe they are entitled to express their deepest emotions without hint of criticism, it kept the place surprisingly clean.  Not perfect, but better than today.

There needs to be a maturation process online, both in understanding that lies, schemes and scams happen for the express purpose of harming people who don’t deserve to be harmed, and in quelling the bad dudes organically.  Sure, it may not work, but this may be the best use of crowdsourcing the internet offers.

The law, on the other hand, will never keep apace with the bad stuff that happens on the internets.  Those who demand that the law fix whatever evils people conceive will be perpetually disappointed by its failure to stay close to the curve, no less ahead of it.  The law isn’t made for that, and rushing its deliberative process will have the unintended consequence of impairing all people, not just the evil doers.  The law is not the answer.  We are.