The Montreal Gazette reports that ?mainstream media outlets are increasingly cracking down on anonymous commenters on their site:
?This month, Thomson Reuters, one of the largest media companies in the world, announced it would no longer allow anonymous comments on its website, citing the comments’ “repetition, taste, legal risk or political bias”.
The shift away from creating an online community, once the focus of media companies desperate to remain relevant in the digital age, has been echoed by CBC, New York Times, Washington Post, and many others who have all, in the past year, announced they would review the practice of unfettered, unidentified commentary online.
The case against anonymous online comments has been highlighted by news this week that a Toronto police officer has filed a lawsuit asking Google to reveal the identity of YouTube users who mocked his actions, which were captured on camera during a G2o summit protest this summer.
Const. Adam Josephs was filmed during the Toronto protests telling a young woman that she would be arrested for assault if she continued blowing bubbles in his face.
Nicknamed “Officer Bubbles”, clips of Josephs’ confrontation spawned plenty of comments directed at him, including comics created by a YouTube user, that the officer claims are defamatory, according to his statement of claim.
“From our client’s perspective, he was performing his duty as a police officer in what was an extremely volatile time at the summit,” said Josephs’ lawyer, James Zibarras.
While he said that Josephs’ actions at the summit can be subject to criticism, “that reaction had this massive backlash which we say is disproportionate and incommensurate to what happened, and started getting to the point where it included threats.”
The suit seeks the identity of YouTube user ThePMOCanada — as well as those of 24 other commenters who Josephs contends defamed him — and $1.2 million in damages.
The videos have since taken down. The videos drew comments both threatening and insulting to the officer.
Meanwhile, on Friday, an American woman had success in New York in a similar matter, as Switched reports:
A few months ago, former actress, model and Columbia graduate Carla Franklin took legal action against a mysterious cyberbully who posted defamatory comments about her on YouTube. At the time, Franklin said she had a pretty good idea of who the crude commenter might be, but her lawyers decided to file a court petition for Google to formally reveal his identity. The petition, which was initially filed in August, has now been confirmed by a Manhattan judge, meaning that Google must unmask the cyberbully within the next 15 days.
In the court filing, Franklin’s lawyer, David Fish, asserted that the posted comments “were made with the intention to harm Ms. Franklin’s reputation and interfere with her relationships, employment and livelihood.” Franklin, who graduated last year with an MBA from Columbia Business School, is now working as a business consultant. While at Columbia, she filmed a series of short clips for the university, in which she offered guidance and advice to other students. One such video was subsequently uploaded to YouTube, where a rogue user posted inexplicably obscene comments — including one that called Franklin a “whore.”
Once the prosecution identifies the true identity of the YouTube user, Fish says, Franklin will slap him with a lawsuit for “personal humiliation, mental anguish and damage to her reputation.” Perhaps more important than the identity of the user, however, is the legal precedent that the judge’s decision could set.
It’s interesting to see how these cases are banking up. I posted on the case of Liskula Cohen last year, a model who successfully sued to find the identity of a blogger who called her “NYC skank”. Google duly provided the IP address, and was then slapped with a lawsuit by the blogger, who alleged breach of privacy.
There’s a few comments to be made about these cases. First, there’s something about online anonymity which seems to unleash something in some people. Behind the mask of anonymity, they say terrible things which they’d never say if they had to put their own names to it. Personally, I think this is very dangerous. Although I was a pseudonymous blogger for years, I always behaved as though, one day, I’d have to put my name to my words. But there’s also something about the Net – you don’t have to look at the person while you say things, so it’s much easier to say something nasty. Another rule of thumb for me: if I couldn’t say it to someone’s face, I shouldn’t say it online. But of course, as someone who was pseudonymous for four years, I do think there is a place for anonymity on the Net in some situations, and I’ve written about this in relation to the unmasking of the pseudonymous blogger, “NightJack”. Just as anonymity frees some people to say very nasty things, it frees some other people to have very interesting, honest discussions which they wouldn’t otherwise have, because their employers would make them follow the “party line”. And in some countries, anonymity may be a necessity, as a refusal to follow the party line can have disastrous consequences.
Secondly, anyone who brings actions such as these must beware the “Streisand effect“: that is, where the act of bringing legal proceedings brings far more publicity than the original publication. (The term was coined after Barbra Streisand unsuccessfully attempted to sue photographers for US$50M in an attempt to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from publicly available collection of 12,000 California coastline photographs, citing privacy concerns. As a result, public interest in the picture increased substantially and it became popular on the Internet, with more than 420,000 people visiting the site over the next month.) As I said about the Liskula Cohen case, the difficulty is that typically, a plaintiff is trying to achieve a number of different things. Plaintiffs in these cases are trying to find out who was behind the defamatory comments (and thus far, it seems that they are likely to succeed on that). They are trying to punish the person who was behind the comments (and it looks like they are likely to succeed on that). Finally, they are trying to protect their reputation, but by suing, they may give a far greater prominence to the defamatory comments than would otherwise be the case. I doubt I’d ever have heard of these people otherwise. It’s a hard choice with this kind of a case.
(Hat tip for Josephs’ story to @LawAndLit)