In America, you do NOT have the right not to be offended.
In America, we do not hold manufacturers or service providers liable for the actions of their customers.
Imagine Ford being held legally liable for people running moonshine using Ford vehicles.
Imagine Ma Bell being held legally liable for terrorist plots crafted during telephone conversations.
Imagine the USPS being held legally liable for criminal activity conducted using the mail.
The internet reflects the pinnacle of freedom of ideas & information in all of human history. It doesn’t take a genius to see why governments worldwide see that as a threat.
See: Germany, Australia, China, and a growing list of other nations which are actively censoring the internet, including and especially politically sensitive information.
You’ll see fear-mongering about child predators (just in the news yesterday: ChatRoulette), “piracy” (see: ThePirateBay which actually does the same functionality as Google), “cyber bullying” (see: a single suicide referenced above). All of this fear mongering has a common end goal: reduction of your freedom to access and exchange information on the internet.
Fine. I am computer un-savvy. If someone slanders you or threatens your life on the world wide web, is that freedom of speech or is there someway to find these anonymous weenies who like to cause trouble for others but not show who they are?
“they face a public that increasingly is more inclined to blame them for cyber-bullying and other online transgressions”.
Why doesn’t anyone take any responsibility for their own actions anymore? Although the situations above are indeed tragic, it is up to us to monitor our children’s time on the Internet and on Social Networking sites.
Does anyone out there take the time to, as
CSN & Y sang, “teach your children well”?
May sound cliche, but it IS the truth!
I agree with you, Matt…please don’t take away our Constitutional rights!
I think that the powers that be should shut down all printing presses. Just look at all the trouble Gutenberg caused! Why if books hadn’t been invented, the masses wouldn’t have been able to educate themselves! The wealthy elite might have been able to keep their slaves! Why can’t you people just leave things be! Everything’s fine the way it is now! Stop bothering me with your facts!
“You People?” King, I was being facetious. By “you people,” I was referring to those who object to the freedom of expression that the internet allows. These are the type who say things like, “well freedom of speech is O.K. but when it becomes offensive, the authorities should step in and regulate it.”
I don’t think anyone considers libel to be under the umbrella of freedom of speech.
That being said, we need more SLAPP type legal protections to prevent abusive lawsuits. Bringing frivolous suits to silence undesirable criticism (but not libel) should be swiftly and strongly punished.
The internet (Google, FB, etc.) does not assault, kill, redicule, or otherwise hurt an individual. People are responsible for those acts. I say to the victims of such harrassment: go wherest thou shalt not be rediculed. (I.E stay out of the chat rooms where people are ganging up on you). Libel and slander is the same thing on the internet as it is in the newspapers. It’s important to go after the individual responsible for the crime and not the maker of the tool used to commit the crime. It’s very tricky how we set these precidents now. Freedom of speech is also at stake. There just are some things the legal system cannot fix. This is one of them. Good luck to all Judges who must navigate this very slippery slope. May they get it right the first time….
Holy crapola, Robin! This is the same issue that is debated in IJ everyday: personal responsibility, but with a different twist in that the offensive becomes criminal, not just a civil matter. Just because someone can write anonymously does not mean it should be published. People are very ignorant of libel laws when it comes to the internet, which is more like having a private phone call put on a loudspeaker for all to see, hear or read. And that is the problem. It will take some time for the law to catch up, but I doubt if our freedom of expression will be inhibited; more likely, standards will be promulgated and people will get used to adhering to them. Making ISPs responsible for the content is just letting folks off the hook when they should be held accountable. And the fact is that all content can be traced to its source but it will also take some legal wrangling to work out the details so that privacy and freedom can be balanced. I have faith that this ruling will be overturned. Governments may want to restrict content but that is nothing new; in fact, it is the exact same issue with the printed press; repression is not a new concept; it is just that the internet is more wide-reaching but graffiti is endemic whether on a wall, skrill on paper, or on blogs. People would have you believe this is new, just because it is electronic, but it’s not at all new.
If we require the IP addresses to be recorded- and begin holding people accountable for their own identity we should see a significant drop in this behaviour.
Make creating a fictitious profile illegal. A 40 year old male posing as a 25 year old woman would be prosecuted just as a pedophile posing as a child. Static IPs with registration REQUIRED.
And anyone who says ‘don’t go there if you don’t want to be bullied’ has obviously never been in the situation. These kids need the internet to do their school work, they deserve the same opportunity to use the internet as those bullies that live to torment because they don’t have to give their real names. Make PARENTS respondsible. If you child is using your IP addy to cause trouble, YOU pay. Make it steep, too. So parents will be forced to watch what their kids are doing.
The music industry is already doing it. Parents are being find thousands because their kids download songs illegally. How difficult would it be to do the same thing for cyber crimes?
IP addys are exceedingly easily spoofed. Not to mention cannot be tracked to any individual user. That would be a great way to catch a lot of innocent people in the dragnet.
Kind of like the story about the elderly woman getting sued by the recording industry for piracy despite having neither the tools nor the ability to do so.
Someone could jump on your wireless and conduct illegal activity, which by IP tracking alone would then incriminate you for an unknown 3rd party’s actions.
The bottom line is the people who have a will to conduct illicit business on the internet will find a way. The more intrusive, the more draconian we make our system, the only result will be that these people will be farther underground and much more difficult to detect, while simultaneously negatively affecting the rights and freedoms of the 99.9% of us who are using the internet in a responsible manner.
Countries like Iran and China have found net censorship (under guise of child pornography, defamatory content, preventing access offensive material, piracy, and terrorism) to be quite useful. There’s a reason Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and sometimes the entire internet and cell phone communication network goes down every time there’s a planned mass rally in one of those countries. And it isn’t stopping piracy.
The number of kids involved in cyber-bullying is climbing as an exponential rate due to anonymity. That needs to stop. We need to be able to track them and hold them accountable.
Sexting can now be prosecuted as child porn. Kids that receive- not fwd out, but receive indecent pics can now be tried for possession. The number of kids who will foward indecent pics of themselves, their exes, etc has dropped drastically in the states where ‘examples’ have been made. Do I agree with a 14 year old being a registered sex offender for getting a pic of a naked cheerleader because her ex boyfriend got mad at her? No. But something has to be done to stop it.
Teenagers don’t seem to realize the repurcussions of this behaviour and the parents aren’t willing to teach it- or don’t have the technology ‘smarts’ to do it. The adult who convinced that child to commit suicide got off way too lightly IMHO.
So what’s another answer? Running the wild wild virtual west doesn’t seem to be working. And yes, incarceration/execution of pedophiles would help a LOT, but they aren’t the only threat on the internet.
We are overlooking is the fact that no matter what you say, do, or regulate; people are still going to harass, humiliate and make fun of other people. Period. Remember when graffiti was a way of bullying people? Or a letter? Words spray painted on houses, tp-ing, egging… The list goes on and on. Just because this is “on line” doesn’t make it any worse!
Is it perhaps because a face cannot go with a name? That you can “say” whatever you want? This is the same for everyday life. There are NOT ALWAYS consequences for people words. A person can physically walk up to some one, and threaten their life, run away, never be caught, and it would be the same thing as posting on a site.
I guess it all boils down to this (as they are using the “Myspace Suicide” as the example here) Please know what your children are doing. Just because they are teenagers doesn’t mean they still don’t need parental involvement.
Also Some people are juvenile and will not grow up. As the “mother” who posed as a child so the story goes. Do I think that mother really, deep down, thought the girl would kill her self? Doubtful.
Let me tell you this. I have been love sick, broken hearted, and in just plain pain from a break up… However. I would have gotten a message such as that girl did, I wouldn’t have ended it all. Perhaps there was something more going on than just that letter.
If make negative or perhaps even misleading words that are posted on the internet have legal consequence it goes into the “he said, she said” category as written speak has no emotions (well without “smilys”) and its hard to distinguish what is what and not take something out of content..
Its a slippery slope. There is a fine line between protecting people and impeding on freedom of speech! Sure words are hurtful… But we all learned to deal with that or will learn to deal with that in High school…. Right?
bottom line – PARENTS need to teach their children WELL…obviously they are not. This is a societal issue, not an internet issue. That being said, if you bully someone on the internet, that can still be considered assault (if you bullied face to face it is assault) – SO, HOLD THE PARENTS OF THESE FREAKIN IRRESPONSIBLE JUVIES RESPONSIBLE, ALONG WITH THE JUVIES AND THROW THEM ALL IN JAIL AND/OR FINE THEM. We’ll see how quickly it will stop.
With regard to freedom of speech, the internet is a dangerous tool as far as some governments are concerned. That being said, we have become a global society and privacy is pretty much all but gone thanks to the internet. I wonder what George Orwell would say about the internet?
My first post was that the parents should be held accountable. If Sony records can track a million IP addys and sue the parents of the kids that pirated music, we should be able to find these kids and make their parents pay for NOT teaching their children better.
That being said, it was a PARENT who bullied that child into suicide. It is ADULTS who are posing as children to get them to send nude pictures.
Too many parents are of they ‘not my kid’ cult. Or they have no idea how to use a computer themselves and their kids are lightyears ahead of them technologically speaking. We need to make examples of them so to speak. Most of them have no fear because the state will only smack their wrists and if their parents are too strict on them the cops will arrest the parents and the kids know it.
We had to deal with bullies and people that loved to torment. But, at least in my school, it rarely went farther then a lot of words, the periodic fist fight. I think in all 4 years of my high school we had one knife fight- no bullies involved- two guys fighting over a girl.
Today, violent beatings and sexual assault are more the norm. Guns kill thousands of teenagers a year- even exclusing gang bangers. These are kids who are bullied that the bullying has escalated or that the kids have had enough and shoot their tormentors. Today’s teenagers feel that if a 14 year old girl gets a reputation for being a slut on the internet it’s okay to drag her behind the school and rape her. She had it coming. Parents are using the internet to set up fights between kids and putting it on You Tube. The ‘your kid posted something about my kid so my kid is going to beat your kid IRL’.
When we were growing up a business was graffitied, the business painted over it. These days you paint over a ‘tag’ you get shot. It’s disrespecting the gang that put it there.
I am a 17 year old girl. I see everyday the horrors of cyberbullying on the internet, and even through text message. I myself was caught in a battle with my ex-boyfriend and the innapropriate text messages he’d send. Cyberbullying is a disgustying thrill for people who are too cowardly to say something to a person’s face. I dont think that the websites should be to blame. they should fault the people behind the crimes. I am always on the internet and wish i could stay away from all of the bad stuff, but lets face it, its not possible. I love http://www.textkills.com/ because its always up to date and it lets me share my thoguhts on their articles. check it out and spread the word!
The executives of IJ are all in hot water for the comments posted here!!
In America, you do NOT have the right not to be offended.
In America, we do not hold manufacturers or service providers liable for the actions of their customers.
Imagine Ford being held legally liable for people running moonshine using Ford vehicles.
Imagine Ma Bell being held legally liable for terrorist plots crafted during telephone conversations.
Imagine the USPS being held legally liable for criminal activity conducted using the mail.
The internet reflects the pinnacle of freedom of ideas & information in all of human history. It doesn’t take a genius to see why governments worldwide see that as a threat.
See: Germany, Australia, China, and a growing list of other nations which are actively censoring the internet, including and especially politically sensitive information.
You’ll see fear-mongering about child predators (just in the news yesterday: ChatRoulette), “piracy” (see: ThePirateBay which actually does the same functionality as Google), “cyber bullying” (see: a single suicide referenced above). All of this fear mongering has a common end goal: reduction of your freedom to access and exchange information on the internet.
Fine. I am computer un-savvy. If someone slanders you or threatens your life on the world wide web, is that freedom of speech or is there someway to find these anonymous weenies who like to cause trouble for others but not show who they are?
“they face a public that increasingly is more inclined to blame them for cyber-bullying and other online transgressions”.
Why doesn’t anyone take any responsibility for their own actions anymore? Although the situations above are indeed tragic, it is up to us to monitor our children’s time on the Internet and on Social Networking sites.
Does anyone out there take the time to, as
CSN & Y sang, “teach your children well”?
May sound cliche, but it IS the truth!
I agree with you, Matt…please don’t take away our Constitutional rights!
I think that the powers that be should shut down all printing presses. Just look at all the trouble Gutenberg caused! Why if books hadn’t been invented, the masses wouldn’t have been able to educate themselves! The wealthy elite might have been able to keep their slaves! Why can’t you people just leave things be! Everything’s fine the way it is now! Stop bothering me with your facts!
You People?
“You People?” King, I was being facetious. By “you people,” I was referring to those who object to the freedom of expression that the internet allows. These are the type who say things like, “well freedom of speech is O.K. but when it becomes offensive, the authorities should step in and regulate it.”
I don’t think anyone considers libel to be under the umbrella of freedom of speech.
That being said, we need more SLAPP type legal protections to prevent abusive lawsuits. Bringing frivolous suits to silence undesirable criticism (but not libel) should be swiftly and strongly punished.
The internet (Google, FB, etc.) does not assault, kill, redicule, or otherwise hurt an individual. People are responsible for those acts. I say to the victims of such harrassment: go wherest thou shalt not be rediculed. (I.E stay out of the chat rooms where people are ganging up on you). Libel and slander is the same thing on the internet as it is in the newspapers. It’s important to go after the individual responsible for the crime and not the maker of the tool used to commit the crime. It’s very tricky how we set these precidents now. Freedom of speech is also at stake. There just are some things the legal system cannot fix. This is one of them. Good luck to all Judges who must navigate this very slippery slope. May they get it right the first time….
Holy crapola, Robin! This is the same issue that is debated in IJ everyday: personal responsibility, but with a different twist in that the offensive becomes criminal, not just a civil matter. Just because someone can write anonymously does not mean it should be published. People are very ignorant of libel laws when it comes to the internet, which is more like having a private phone call put on a loudspeaker for all to see, hear or read. And that is the problem. It will take some time for the law to catch up, but I doubt if our freedom of expression will be inhibited; more likely, standards will be promulgated and people will get used to adhering to them. Making ISPs responsible for the content is just letting folks off the hook when they should be held accountable. And the fact is that all content can be traced to its source but it will also take some legal wrangling to work out the details so that privacy and freedom can be balanced. I have faith that this ruling will be overturned. Governments may want to restrict content but that is nothing new; in fact, it is the exact same issue with the printed press; repression is not a new concept; it is just that the internet is more wide-reaching but graffiti is endemic whether on a wall, skrill on paper, or on blogs. People would have you believe this is new, just because it is electronic, but it’s not at all new.
If we require the IP addresses to be recorded- and begin holding people accountable for their own identity we should see a significant drop in this behaviour.
Make creating a fictitious profile illegal. A 40 year old male posing as a 25 year old woman would be prosecuted just as a pedophile posing as a child. Static IPs with registration REQUIRED.
And anyone who says ‘don’t go there if you don’t want to be bullied’ has obviously never been in the situation. These kids need the internet to do their school work, they deserve the same opportunity to use the internet as those bullies that live to torment because they don’t have to give their real names. Make PARENTS respondsible. If you child is using your IP addy to cause trouble, YOU pay. Make it steep, too. So parents will be forced to watch what their kids are doing.
The music industry is already doing it. Parents are being find thousands because their kids download songs illegally. How difficult would it be to do the same thing for cyber crimes?
IP addys are exceedingly easily spoofed. Not to mention cannot be tracked to any individual user. That would be a great way to catch a lot of innocent people in the dragnet.
Kind of like the story about the elderly woman getting sued by the recording industry for piracy despite having neither the tools nor the ability to do so.
Someone could jump on your wireless and conduct illegal activity, which by IP tracking alone would then incriminate you for an unknown 3rd party’s actions.
The bottom line is the people who have a will to conduct illicit business on the internet will find a way. The more intrusive, the more draconian we make our system, the only result will be that these people will be farther underground and much more difficult to detect, while simultaneously negatively affecting the rights and freedoms of the 99.9% of us who are using the internet in a responsible manner.
Countries like Iran and China have found net censorship (under guise of child pornography, defamatory content, preventing access offensive material, piracy, and terrorism) to be quite useful. There’s a reason Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and sometimes the entire internet and cell phone communication network goes down every time there’s a planned mass rally in one of those countries. And it isn’t stopping piracy.
The number of kids involved in cyber-bullying is climbing as an exponential rate due to anonymity. That needs to stop. We need to be able to track them and hold them accountable.
Sexting can now be prosecuted as child porn. Kids that receive- not fwd out, but receive indecent pics can now be tried for possession. The number of kids who will foward indecent pics of themselves, their exes, etc has dropped drastically in the states where ‘examples’ have been made. Do I agree with a 14 year old being a registered sex offender for getting a pic of a naked cheerleader because her ex boyfriend got mad at her? No. But something has to be done to stop it.
Teenagers don’t seem to realize the repurcussions of this behaviour and the parents aren’t willing to teach it- or don’t have the technology ‘smarts’ to do it. The adult who convinced that child to commit suicide got off way too lightly IMHO.
So what’s another answer? Running the wild wild virtual west doesn’t seem to be working. And yes, incarceration/execution of pedophiles would help a LOT, but they aren’t the only threat on the internet.
Internet….serious business.
http://temp-e.net/files/incoming/internet%20is%20serious%20business.jpg
We are overlooking is the fact that no matter what you say, do, or regulate; people are still going to harass, humiliate and make fun of other people. Period. Remember when graffiti was a way of bullying people? Or a letter? Words spray painted on houses, tp-ing, egging… The list goes on and on. Just because this is “on line” doesn’t make it any worse!
Is it perhaps because a face cannot go with a name? That you can “say” whatever you want? This is the same for everyday life. There are NOT ALWAYS consequences for people words. A person can physically walk up to some one, and threaten their life, run away, never be caught, and it would be the same thing as posting on a site.
I guess it all boils down to this (as they are using the “Myspace Suicide” as the example here) Please know what your children are doing. Just because they are teenagers doesn’t mean they still don’t need parental involvement.
Also Some people are juvenile and will not grow up. As the “mother” who posed as a child so the story goes. Do I think that mother really, deep down, thought the girl would kill her self? Doubtful.
Let me tell you this. I have been love sick, broken hearted, and in just plain pain from a break up… However. I would have gotten a message such as that girl did, I wouldn’t have ended it all. Perhaps there was something more going on than just that letter.
If make negative or perhaps even misleading words that are posted on the internet have legal consequence it goes into the “he said, she said” category as written speak has no emotions (well without “smilys”) and its hard to distinguish what is what and not take something out of content..
Its a slippery slope. There is a fine line between protecting people and impeding on freedom of speech! Sure words are hurtful… But we all learned to deal with that or will learn to deal with that in High school…. Right?
bottom line – PARENTS need to teach their children WELL…obviously they are not. This is a societal issue, not an internet issue. That being said, if you bully someone on the internet, that can still be considered assault (if you bullied face to face it is assault) – SO, HOLD THE PARENTS OF THESE FREAKIN IRRESPONSIBLE JUVIES RESPONSIBLE, ALONG WITH THE JUVIES AND THROW THEM ALL IN JAIL AND/OR FINE THEM. We’ll see how quickly it will stop.
With regard to freedom of speech, the internet is a dangerous tool as far as some governments are concerned. That being said, we have become a global society and privacy is pretty much all but gone thanks to the internet. I wonder what George Orwell would say about the internet?
My first post was that the parents should be held accountable. If Sony records can track a million IP addys and sue the parents of the kids that pirated music, we should be able to find these kids and make their parents pay for NOT teaching their children better.
That being said, it was a PARENT who bullied that child into suicide. It is ADULTS who are posing as children to get them to send nude pictures.
Too many parents are of they ‘not my kid’ cult. Or they have no idea how to use a computer themselves and their kids are lightyears ahead of them technologically speaking. We need to make examples of them so to speak. Most of them have no fear because the state will only smack their wrists and if their parents are too strict on them the cops will arrest the parents and the kids know it.
We had to deal with bullies and people that loved to torment. But, at least in my school, it rarely went farther then a lot of words, the periodic fist fight. I think in all 4 years of my high school we had one knife fight- no bullies involved- two guys fighting over a girl.
Today, violent beatings and sexual assault are more the norm. Guns kill thousands of teenagers a year- even exclusing gang bangers. These are kids who are bullied that the bullying has escalated or that the kids have had enough and shoot their tormentors. Today’s teenagers feel that if a 14 year old girl gets a reputation for being a slut on the internet it’s okay to drag her behind the school and rape her. She had it coming. Parents are using the internet to set up fights between kids and putting it on You Tube. The ‘your kid posted something about my kid so my kid is going to beat your kid IRL’.
When we were growing up a business was graffitied, the business painted over it. These days you paint over a ‘tag’ you get shot. It’s disrespecting the gang that put it there.
I am a 17 year old girl. I see everyday the horrors of cyberbullying on the internet, and even through text message. I myself was caught in a battle with my ex-boyfriend and the innapropriate text messages he’d send. Cyberbullying is a disgustying thrill for people who are too cowardly to say something to a person’s face. I dont think that the websites should be to blame. they should fault the people behind the crimes. I am always on the internet and wish i could stay away from all of the bad stuff, but lets face it, its not possible. I love http://www.textkills.com/ because its always up to date and it lets me share my thoguhts on their articles. check it out and spread the word!