What's more disturbing is that you seem to think there's content which should be banned from being published.
What a perfect idea, let's start doing that right now. I'll let you decide what's bad for me! BTW, just bought some baby food, can you please spoon feed it to me? Also: change my diaper.
Whether an idea should or should not be made available to the masses should never be in the hands of a process, even a democratic process. Attempts at doing so are terribly misguided.
If you get offended at drive-by trolling by stupid people then you need to seek the issue in yourself, not in the website that was the playground to such behaviour. Grow up. No one's going to play nanny for the world, and if the UK wants to start doing that, then you can be sure as hell it'll see backlash.
> What's more disturbing is that you seem to think there's content which should be banned from being published.
If you'd read TFA, you'd know that this case is where the trolls impersonated a woman, setting up a facebook profile with her name and photos on it - so that people who knew her IRL thought it was her profile. That profile painted her as a paedophile and drug dealer. They did this just for fun.
I'm pretty sure that identity theft and libel (or the equivalent definitions in other legal systems) are illegal just about everywhere; and can and should result in this content being "banned from being published", and the anonymity of the people doing it being stripped away.
This law could be over-broad, I don't know, but if you find the take-down the most disturbing part of this case, check your sense of proportion.
There already are laws against identity theft, so we don't need another one that has the convenient side effect of adding more ways to cut free speech. This law might be used in rare cases like this, but probably more often to shut up negative opinions about policy and large companies.
Can we be careful with the term "identity theft", please? Creating a fake social network profile for the lulz should not ever be a crime. Taking out credit in someone else's name should be.
A friend is being federally prosecuted (a five-year felony!) for identity theft... for possessing a list of email addresses.
> Can we be careful with the term "identity theft", please?
Ok, lets be careful with it:
> "Identity theft is a form of stealing someone's identity in which someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity, typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits in that person's name. The victim of identity theft (here meaning the person whose identity has been assumed by the identity thief) can suffer adverse consequences if they are held accountable for the perpetrator's actions"
Taking out credit in someone else's name fits that definition exactly. Just possessing a list of email addresses does not at all.
Now, as for making a fake facebook profile with someone's name and photos:
"someone pretends to be someone else by assuming that person's identity" yes, that fits.
"typically in order to access resources or obtain credit and other benefits" - no, but note that is "typically" not "always".
"The victim of identity theft can suffer adverse consequences" - yes, that happened.
So on the whole I would say that the definition of identity theft fits in this case.
Someone who suffers from depression and has ADHD should probably be extremely closely monitored by their parents/carers. It's not for the government to directly intervene in things like this. If a certain message is going to trigger someone to committing suicide, then connecting them to the internet is probably a very bad idea.
> Just in the same way you can't harass someone in the street
It happens all the time. People harass other people, begging, wanting you to fill out surveys, trying to sell you stuff. Go down a pub... Look at football supporters harassing each other. People need to grow far thicker skin when it comes to words.
> there shouldn't be carte blanche for bullying just because it happens to be online
Online "bullying" isn't really bullying though. It's your computer telling you that some human being apparently said something. You should take that with a huge grain of salt. It could as likely be a bot. It's parents place to educate their children into the mindset of assuming nothing is real online. People are not who they say they are. People may not exist.
Am I being online "bullied" by the automated spam process sending me emails suggesting I need penis enlargement devices?
So someone who's got ADHD and depression should effectively be stopped from using the internet in case they get bullied?
Asking you to fill out a survey is not harassment, neither is trying to tell you stuff. This person was the victim of a vicious and malicious campaign against her, and you really have the guts to compare it to someone trying to sell you stuff on the street?
Online bullying is real bullying. Would you say that if someone sends you a text message you should ignore it because it 'could be a bot'.
Yes- people should be educated that people online may not be who they say there are, or may not exist. But I think this is orthogonal to the proposal, which is that if someone harasses and bullies you online, you should be able to find out who they are and stop them. Just the same way you'd expect the police to help you out if someone started making abusive phone calls to your house.
> So someone who's got ADHD and depression should effectively be stopped from using the internet in case they get bullied?
No, as long as people caring for them know the potential risks and impact. It's up to parents to ensure their children are aware of how to view/use the internet.
If your child has epilepsy, then you have to be careful with strobe lights etc. It's just basic risk assessment.
> Would you say that if someone sends you a text message you should ignore it because it 'could be a bot'.
Every so often I get an automated bot SMS messages from vodafone. If someone/something sends you a message that you don't care about, delete it. Move on. If you're getting lots, then maybe you need a technological solution to filter out the spam/bots. The point is, don't start waging a war against the noise, just ignore it.
> "Just the same way you'd expect the police to help you out if someone started making abusive phone calls to your house."
I doubt the police would care unless there were specific threats to your life, or stalking etc. More likely you'd just be told to block their number.
It's a very slippery slope from this, toward "I find this joke offensive, the joke teller should be prosecuted".
I think it is more of a case of our civil laws starting to catch back up to how far technology has been pushed.
Unfortunately, it seems there will always be some humans out of the whole who will abuse/take advantage of/mess it up for the rest for whatever reason. In many of our civilizations, we attempt to codify what is acceptable behavior and what is damaging behavior, and what recourses we have for harm inflicted.
I always thought bullying doesn't count unless there is a real threat of being beaten up behind the school on a regular basis. Apparently mainstream definitions are much broader...
My point is that your first response when getting a message, through any medium, is "Did this message come from who I think it did". Is it from someone I care about.
If it's from someone/something you don't care about, discard it, block it. Setup filters etc.
> The medium is irrelevant; the content is what's relevant.
The content is only relevant if it's from someone you care about. If it's from a bot, or some anonymous internet troll, the content is irrelevant. Discard it.
I could go through my "spam" folder and start getting offended/repulsed/scared by everything it contains. But what would be the point?
It's a lot easier for a bot/human to make out they're someone else online, than it is leaving a voicemail. (Until you can say to a speech changer "Make me sound like my targets girlfriend").
> The content is only relevant if it's from someone you care about. If it's from a bot, or some anonymous internet troll, the content is irrelevant. Discard it.
I don't think that's true. There are lots of cases of disturbing content containing specific knowledge of and threats to the recipient where the source is an anonymous internet troll. The latest case is here: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/laurie-pen...
> People need to grow far thicker skin when it comes to words.
I prefer this viewpoint: "a culture where the only people able to contribute to the national conversation are thick-skinned, insensitive, white, straight males who can repel or ignore this ugly trench of abuse is not a culture any thinking person should want to live in." http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/laurie-pen...
I also suspect that turning this into a conversation about spam and how this happens to everyone would be classed as "derailing"
People need to grow far thicker skin when it comes to words.
Sometimes these cases seem to be coming from people who just bought their first internet machine and become deeply offended that arguing on the internet works by different rules than their dinner table conversations. I would even go so far and argue that trolling can lead to a higher level of tolerance, as it pushes the believes of those being trolled over the top. In an ideal scenario this could lead to realization that their opinions, views, and in the end reality, are not as black and white as they think - i.e. a Steven Colbert effect.
> Online "bullying" isn't really bullying though. It's your computer telling you that some human being apparently said something. You should take that with a huge grain of salt. It could as likely be a bot
Let me just take a second to call bullshit on that.
There are people in London who spend their Christmas Eves running around barefoot Clapham High Street from gay bar to gay bar clothed as a bottle of mustard. Just to put this in perspective.
> Do you really think that is OK
Yeah. In fact, I wouldn't only say "OK" but "highly usual" to see such a report. Why? Because 1) at least one thirteen year old killed themselves 2) telegraph, being the rag they are, obviously picked it up and made it into a tearful story, or maybe even made it up (which wouldn't be beyond their reach). Someone didn't seek help and therefore killed themselves. Who cares? Are you next going to grief us about the fact that someone drove too fast and killed themselves? That someone ate a razor and killed themselves? That someone touched a live electrical wire and killed themselves? Rest assured more people die and become crippled in traffic accidents than in effect of bullying, yet metropolitan areas in the US do not even have an investigative unit responsible for ascertaining the identity of a hit and run car driver unless the person dies. Crippled for life? Yup, fine with us, just go home. Dead? We might investigate. There's one guy in our metro area handling those. For millions of drivers.
When predicting things, sometimes you feel like there's an itch and you follow up on it and it turns out you notice a pattern which lets you reason about the nature of the world as a whole. Here's the tip: if there were a trend with people being bullied killing themselves, I might be able to agree. If it were additionally undoubtedly correlated, in that bullying meant a rise in suicide rates across people with all sorts of psychological backgrounds, and the raise is well above what happens under other conditions when mental illnesses are accounted for, i might even be compelled to agree. But posting a story of one person, out of millions in Los Angeles alone, is nothing. It's not an indicator, it's not even an itch on a fly's butt.
But to answer your question:
> Here's an example of a 13 year old girl who commited suicide after being bullied online. Do you really think that is OK
True answer? I don't give a shit, and I'm not going to start walking like on broken glass, turning my whole world upside down, and assuming inane and unnatural behaviours because of someone else's unique and unusual deficiency. Get real.
As it was done many times in the past, the second can be gamed to prevent the first. It is not about the intentions, it's about the possible outcomes and this is just another reach for fear based censorship. Because you know the system is always gamed and abused when in place.
You realize this law has nothing to do with web-filtering right ?
What this law means is if a UGC website is used by an individual for the purpose of harassment, the UGC website won't be liable for it as long as they co-operate in allowing the individual responsible to be prosecuted directly.
It essentially gives UGC sites safe-harbour protection whereas before they could have been considered responsible for the content themselves as publishers. The legal responsibility is pushed back onto the individual who created the content, which is exactly how it should be.
... to push action from a site to reveal someone that will be up for legal process. You can word that a lot of ways, but to define harassment through online communication is the sort of overreach needed to make sites do the dirty work with no due process or checks. Just the pathway. To provide a path for easy censorship is another way to put it, but you selectively left that out.
What this law means is if a UGC website is used by an individual for the purpose of harassment, the UGC website won't be liable for it as long as they co-operate in allowing the individual responsible to be prosecuted directly.
Everything can be gamed to suppress free speech. The same logic says we should do away with fraud statutes. You think this is an insightful and important point, but it's really a banal point.
The problem is the chilling effect. Who determines what "bullying" is? I've seen some heated discussions online that could be mistaken for something that they're not in more than one instance.
I'm personally of the opinion that "online bullying" is a nonsense phenomenon. How do you deal with a bully online? You access the block function of the medium you're using and block the idiot. Done. You never have to deal with them again.
Not everything can be gamed to suppress free speech, in particular statutes, the attempt to do so is predictably forbidden. That may or may not be a piece of banal insightful information.
This legislation is proposed for online communication and that is the target and reach that can be gamed. Blanket statements will not make it any other than what it is. An abusive new piece of language that is open to be used for censorship purposes. As to what I believe is insightful or not, that is up to my devices and I am free to share it or not when and how I choose to, for the time being. Tend to keep it that way.
The only banal point is arguing that freedom of speech and privacy are antiquated. I like how you frame OP as a hick because his opinions differ from yours. Is it easy being the smartest guy you know?
What a perfect idea, let's start doing that right now. I'll let you decide what's bad for me! BTW, just bought some baby food, can you please spoon feed it to me? Also: change my diaper.
Whether an idea should or should not be made available to the masses should never be in the hands of a process, even a democratic process. Attempts at doing so are terribly misguided.
If you get offended at drive-by trolling by stupid people then you need to seek the issue in yourself, not in the website that was the playground to such behaviour. Grow up. No one's going to play nanny for the world, and if the UK wants to start doing that, then you can be sure as hell it'll see backlash.