User-driven websites — also known as online intermediaries — frequently come under fire for disabling user content due to bogus or illegitimate takedown notices. Facebook is at the center of the latest controversy involving a bogus takedown notice. On Thursday morning, the social networking site disabled Ars Technica’s page after receiving a DMCA takedown notice alleging the page contained copyright infringing material. While details about the claim remain unclear, given that Facebook restored Ars’s page yesterday evening, it’s a safe bet that the takedown notice was without merit.
Understandably, Ars Technica wasn’t exactly pleased that its Facebook page — one of its top sources of incoming traffic — was shut down for seemingly no good reason. Ars was particularly disappointed by how Facebook handled the 
situation. In an article posted yesterday (and updated throughout the day), Ars co-founder Ken Fisher and senior editor Jacqui Cheng chronicled their struggle in getting Facebook to simply discuss the situation with them and allow Ars to respond to the takedown notice.
Facebook took hours to respond to Ars’s initial inquiry, and didn’t provide a copy of takedown notice until the following day. Several other major tech websites, including ReadWriteWeb and TheNextWeb, also covered the issue, noting that Ars Technica is the latest in a series of websites to have suffered from their Facebook page being wrongly disabled. In a follow-up article posted today, Ars elaborated on what happened and offered some tips to Facebook on how it could have better handled the situation.
It’s totally fair to criticize how Facebook deals with content takedown requests. Ars is right that the company could certainly do a much better job of handling the process, and Facebook will hopefully re-evaluate its procedures in light of this widely publicized snafu. In calling out Facebook’s flawed approach to dealing with takedown requests, however, Ars Technica doesn’t do justice to the larger, more fundamental problem of bogus takedown notices.
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Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs.” When he worked at the Post, he fought to keep anonymous and unmoderated comments off the WP.com site entirely because it was too difficult to pre-screen them all and “the bigger problem with The Post’s comment policy, many in the newsroom have told me, is that the comments are anonymous. Anonymity is what gives cover to racists, sexists and others to say inappropriate things without having to say who they are.”
But Feaver now believes those anonymous, unmoderated comment have value because:
I believe that it is useful to be reminded bluntly that the dark forces are out there and that it is too easy to forget that truth by imposing rules that obscure it. As Oscar Wilde wrote in a different context, “Man is least in himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” Too many of us like to think that we have made great progress in human relations and that little remains to be done. Unmoderated comments provide an antidote to such ridiculous conclusions. It’s not like the rest of us don’t know those words and hear them occasionally, depending on where we choose to tread, but most of us don’t want to have to confront them.
It seems a bit depressing that the best argument in favor of allowing unmoderated, anonymous comments is that it allows us to see the dark underbelly of mankind, but the good news, Feaver points out, is that:
But I am heartened by the fact that such comments do not go unchallenged by readers. In fact, comment strings are often self-correcting and provide informative exchanges. If somebody says something ridiculous, somebody else will challenge it. And there is wit.
He goes on to provide some good examples. And he also notes how unmoderated comments let readers provide their heartfelt views on the substance of sensitive issues and let journalists and editorialists know how they feel about what is being reported or
how it is being reported. “We journalists need to pay attention to what our readers say, even if we don’t like it,” he argues. “There are things to learn.”
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David Margolick has penned a lengthy piece for Portfolio.com about the AutoAdmit case, which has important ramifications for the future of Section 230 and online speech in general. Very brief background: AutoAdmit is a discussion board for students looking to enter, or just discuss, law schools. Some threads on the site have included ugly — insanely ugly — insults about some women. A couple of those women sued to reveal the identities of their attackers and hold them liable for supposedly wronging them. The case has been slowly moving through the courts ever since. Again, read Margolick’s article for all the details. The important point here is that the women could not sue AutoAdmit directly for defamation or harassment because Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 immunizes websites from liability for the actions of their users. Consequently, those looking to sue must go after the actual individuals behind the comments which (supposedly) caused the harm in question.
I am big defender of Section 230 and have argued that it has been the cornerstone of Internet freedom. Keeping online intermediaries free from burdensome policing requirements and liability threats has created the vibrant marketplace of expression and commerce that we enjoy today. If not for Sec. 230, we would likely live in a very different world today.
Sec. 230 has come under attack, however, from those who believe online intermediaries should “do more” to address various concerns, including cyber-bullying, defamation, or other problems. For those of us who believe passionately in the importance of Sec. 230, the better approach is to preserve immunity for intermediaries and instead encourage more
voluntary policing and self-regulation by intermediaries, increased public pressure on those sites that turn a blind eye to such behavior to encourage them to change their ways, more efforts to establish “community policing” by users such that they can report or counter abusive language, and so on.
Of course, those efforts will never be fool proof and a handful of bad apples will still be able to cause a lot of grief for some users on certain discussion boards, blogs, and so on. In those extreme cases where legal action is necessary, it would be optimal if every effort was exhausted to go after the actual end-user who is causing the problem before tossing Sec. 230 and current online immunity norms to the wind in an effort to force the intermediaries to police speech. After all, how do the intermediaries know what is defamatory? Why should they be forced to sit in judgment of such things? If, under threat of lawsuit, they are petitioned by countless users to remove content or comments that those individuals find objectionable, the result will be a massive chilling effect on online free speech since those intermediaries would likely play is safe most of the time and just take everything down. Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.
Anonymity, Reader Comments & Section 230
by Adam Thierer on April 9, 2009 · 18 comments
Doug Feaver, a former Washington Post reporter and editor, has published a very interesting editorial today entitled “Listening to the Dot-Commenters.” In the piece, Feaver discusses his personal change of heart about “the anonymous, unmoderated, often appallingly inaccurate, sometimes profane, frequently off point and occasionally racist reader comments that washingtonpost.com allows to be published at the end of articles and blogs.” When he worked at the Post, he fought to keep anonymous and unmoderated comments off the WP.com site entirely because it was too difficult to pre-screen them all and “the bigger problem with The Post’s comment policy, many in the newsroom have told me, is that the comments are anonymous. Anonymity is what gives cover to racists, sexists and others to say inappropriate things without having to say who they are.”
But Feaver now believes those anonymous, unmoderated comment have value because:
It seems a bit depressing that the best argument in favor of allowing unmoderated, anonymous comments is that it allows us to see the dark underbelly of mankind, but the good news, Feaver points out, is that:
He goes on to provide some good examples. And he also notes how unmoderated comments let readers provide their heartfelt views on the substance of sensitive issues and let journalists and editorialists know how they feel about what is being reported or how it is being reported. “We journalists need to pay attention to what our readers say, even if we don’t like it,” he argues. “There are things to learn.”
Continue reading →