[liberationtech] ADL's Civil Liberties Director calls for intermediaries to police speech

[Jillian C. York]

...and stands on the graves of Boston victims to do so.

https://www.privacyassociation.org/privacy_perspectives/post/in_curtailing_hate_speech_online_will_privacy_sometimes_have_to_take_a_back

It's pretty short, but here are the choice paragraphs:

In the book, and previously in a *New York Times
*column<http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/27/opinion/sunday/sunday-dialogue-anonymity-and-incivility-on-the-internet.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0>
*, *I have suggested that Internet intermediaries can play a role, in
appropriate circumstances, to limit online anonymity in an effort to
curtain online hate. The *Times* itself has come up with an approach that
publishes the comments to news stories of readers who use their real names *
first*, relegating anonymous (pseudonymous) comments to the end of the
queue.

Facebook also recently came up with a thoughtful and innovative solution to
the problem of anonymous online hate. While Facebook’s real-name policy
means that a user will be identified with his or her posts, Facebook Pages
allow for anonymous postings. Some of those postings cross a line—not the
Community Standards line Facebook sets, which allows the immediate deletion
of the content—but a line that when crossed can lead to distress for, and
potential harm to, minorities. The frequently invoked example is humor that
has racist, homophobic or anti-Semitic meaning. When such content appears
on Pages and is brought to Facebook’s attention, Facebook asks the Page
“administrator” (a Facebook user) to have his or her real name associated
with the Page. Not surprisingly, most users prefer to remove the content
rather than be associated with it.

In the privacy world we populate, the debate usually is how to strike a
balance between commerce and privacy, or law enforcement and privacy. In
the world of hate speech, the balance between anonymity and its useful role
in free expression and the harm anonymous hate speech can cause requires a
careful look at circumstances when privacy needs to give way to reducing
the increasing instances of online hate.

Words of hate lead to acts of hate. And as important as words are, it is
vitally important in this mournful season of explosions and loss to address
the hate underlying the tragedies we experience all too often. As a privacy
lawyer and a privacy advocate, when it comes to hate speech, privacy may
have to take backseat.



-- 
US: +1-857-891-4244 | NL: +31-657086088
site:  jilliancyork.com <http://jilliancyork.com/>* | *
twitter: @jilliancyork* *

"We must not be afraid of dreaming the seemingly impossible if we want the
seemingly impossible to become a reality" - *Vaclav Havel*
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20130419/af377482/attachment.html>