When the history of the Internet is written, one of its major
elements will be the explosion of online forums (aka discussion
boards, chat rooms), newspaper websites, and blogs (web logs).
The Internet has provided thousands of outlets for comments by
viewers, and comment they do, from banal to droll to informative to
vicious. A large number of these are offered anonymously, and
partisans of the form argue that to require real names would
inhibit free speech. The limits of this kind of free speech are in
the process of being tested.
Last year, two women students at Yale Law School filed a lawsuit
in federal court against one student by name and several anonymous
posters. They claim that their “character, intelligence, appearance
and sex lives have been thoroughly trashed” by the defendants.
Their claim was based on anonymous comments made about the women on
the law school message board of AutoAdmit, a group of Internet
forums for prospective and actual college and law students.
Among the statements at issue are postings that the named women
should be raped. The women’s complaint contends that the posts
defamed them, were sexually harassing and could have adverse
effects on their careers. The reputation of the AutoAdmit message
board is not exactly wholesome. One law professor cited
by the Wikipedia Encyclopedia calls it “a cesspool of infantile
morons and sociopaths.”
The named defendant, Anthony Ciolli, a third-year law school
student at the University of Pennsylvania, subsequently resigned
from school and his job offer from a law firm was rescinded. His
name has since been dropped from the list of defendants. The
plaintiffs subsequently sent subpoenas to the posters’ Internet
service providers. This has yielded the name of one poster, a
University of Texas student.
This is not the first time AutoAdmit has been the center of
controversy. In early 2005, one reader accused it of allowing
racist and anti-Semitic comments. The forum’s administrators took
the position that they had no legal obligation to remove offensive
material.
The next year, U.S. Senator George Allen, at a campaign
reelection appearance, referred to a volunteer of his opponent as
“macaca,” considered to be a slur. Not long thereafter, someone
using that man’s name (S.R. Sidarth) made wild posts on AutoAdmit,
alleging that he’d had sex with a transvestite while high on
amphetamine. The real Sidarth denied ever posting to the site and
the actual impostor later confessed (without revealing his real
name).
Two days after the Virginia Tech massacre last year, a poster
using the name “Trustafarian” put a message on AutoAdmit suggesting
that he might repeat the event at the University of California’s
Law School. Classes were canceled and the school shut down for the
day.
Jarret Cohen, who owns AutoAdmit, subsequently wrote an article
in the Harvard Law Review in which he defended his forum’s
policies and said that censorship was not the answer. Of course it
is not.
The answer lies in self-restraint. The trigger for that is
disclosure of a writer’s identity. With rare exception, people who
must put their names to their views do not engage in prurient
statements and character defamation. I can attest to that from
recent experience. The newspaper of which I am the editorial pages
editor re-launched its website in January. It welcomed comments,
but did not require those making them to use their real names. It
received plenty of anonymous comments. Many of these were vile,
vicious, profane and demeaning. None of them advanced rationale
arguments about articles or issues at hand.
We then did what needed to be done: We imposed the same rule we
used for letters to the editor in the printed newspapers. Writers
had to give us their real names along with telephone numbers so
that we could verify their authenticity. The result: The number of
comments on the website dropped, but those that are there are
civil. They may argue strenuously, some more effectively than
others, but they are free to argue any point they wish to make. The
lesson here is that self-restraint advances free speech; anonymity
for the purpose of peddling hate or mischief harms it.
