Internet trolls are very touchy people. Sometimes their rage is targeted at public figures, institutions, or groups who do and say horrible things (the Westboro Baptist Church comes to mind). More often, the phenomenon of “trolling” is a free-for-all of absurdist online pranks or verbal abuse directed at anyone and everyone. And far too often, online abuse is specifically directed at vulnerable people or victims of tragedy. But, as you’ll see from the comments on the above video from PBS’s Offbook series (if you care to peruse them) almost nothing makes the internet angrier than discussions of trolling itself, since so many people see these conversations as preludes to censorship or nannyish and unconstitutional regulation.
The researchers in the above video don’t, however, make any recommendations for curbing speech. Whitney Phillips, a lecturer at New York University, allows for the potential of trolling to open up dialogues that would otherwise be smothered by taboos. Harvard University’s Andy Sellars makes an important distinction between public speech regulated by the government and that restricted by private entities, like online service providers—an important legal distinction in first amendment cases (he cites the recent fracas over the inflammatory “Innocence of Muslims” video). Sellars points out that, at the moment, the authority for regulating online speech rests with corporations (who, unfortunately, do bow to government pressure, especially abroad). Attempts to regulate the internet by the government have been ham-handed, unpopular, and mostly driven by the profit-motives of the recording and film industries, and Sellars doesn’t address them.
Some attempts at legislation have specifically targeted the cherished culture of online anonymity in order to deal with the ugly phenomenon of cyberbullying. Sellars defends the importance of anonymity, saying it protects victims of real world abuse and oppression from being identified and targeted if they speak out on safe spaces on the internet. Unfortunately, anonymity can also enable what Fordham’s Alice Marwick calls the “online disinhibition effect,” a psychological term for the freedom trolls feel to say abusive things online that they would never say in person.
Marwick discusses this effect in the context of what she calls “aggressive speech acts” but allows that the prevalence of bullying on Facebook, which ties online identities to real names and faces, acts as a counter-example to the theory that anonymity is solely responsible for online abuse. She frames her research as taking a look at our cultural values and “seeing how those play out in technical spaces” and points out that an exclusive focus on cyberbullying ignores the range of other, offline behaviors generally present in—most disturbingly—cases of suicide following online bullying. While the advocacy group Cyberbullying Research Center has adopted the term “cyberbullicide,” defined as “suicide indirectly or directly influenced by experiences with online aggression,” and offers policy suggestions to deal with the problem, Marwick is more circumspect. She calls these cases “complicated” and says that they don’t warrant restricting content but instead improving responses to kids who need help.
Complicated is precisely the word for the tangle of issues relating to internet speech. After watching the balanced, if cursory, discussion above, however, I found the responses of the trolls baffling and lacking all proportion, since no one in the video calls for legislation to limit online speech. But that’s instructive. Trolling is a pervasive hum surrounding almost all popular online content. Sometimes it’s politically pointed, sometimes it’s clever or surreally funny, sometimes it’s just low-level noise, and sometimes it’s a kind of rage-filled adolescent viciousness that is genuinely unsettling and hard to understand.
Josh Jones is a doctoral candidate in English at Fordham University and a co-founder and former managing editor of Guernica / A Magazine of Arts and Politics.
Last summer, Samuel L. Jackson delighted listeners when he narrated the audio version of Adam Mansbach’s twisted little children’s bedtime story, Go the F**k to Sleep. Now, Jackson returns with Wake the F**ck Up for Obama. According to the New York Post (if they say it, it must be true!), Mansbach wrote the Dr. Seussian script for the political ad. And it was apparently funded by the Jewish Council for Research and Education, a liberal super PAC funded by George Soros’ 25-year-old son. Until today, I thought that Citizens United, the SCOTUS decision that unleashed a torrent of Super PAC ads on our airwaves, did more to undermine American democracy than any foreign threat. But when the video hit the 2:44 mark, you start to have your doubts.
“Truman Capote didn’t study to become expert in capital crime and its punishment,” says William F. Buckley on the Firing Line broadcast of September 3, 1968, “but his five and one half year engagement of the slaughter of the Clutter family, which went into the writing of In Cold Blood, left him with highly settled impressions in the matter.” You can hear Buckley elicit and Capote concisely lay out the position to which these impressions brought him in the clip above. Though remembered for his own conservative views, Buckley seemed ever eager to invite onto his show, frequently and without hesitation, public figures who strongly disagreed with him. This sense of controversy generated a stream of classically compelling televisual moments over Firing Line’s 33-year run, but for my money, all the direct conflicts have less to offer than the times a guest — or even the host — broke from standard ideological positions, as Capote does here.
Buckley opens by asking whether “systematic execution of killers over the preceding generation might have stayed the hand of the murderers of the Cutter family.” Capote replies that “capital punishment — which I’m opposed to, but for quite different reasons than are usually advanced — would in itself be a singularly effective deterrent, if it were, in fact, systematically applied. But because public sentiment is very much opposed to it and the courts have allowed this endless policy of appeal — to such a degree that a person can be eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen years under a sentence of capital punishment — it becomes, in effect, an extreme, unusual, and cruel punishment. If people really were sentenced to be executed and were within a reasonable period of time, the professional murderer knew the absolute, positive end of their actions would be their own death, I think it would certainly give them second thoughts.” This perhaps lends itself poorly to a sound bite, but Firing Line at its best never dealt in those.
While an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee, writer Robert Penn Warren began writing about the south and its turbulent racial history. He traveled throughout the United States and interviewed men and women involved with the Civil Rights Movement, recording each conversation on a reel-to-reel tape recorder—a project that resulted in the 1965 book Who Speaks for the Negro? This month, Vanderbilt University’s Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities makes a full digital record available of Warren’s research for the book—an impressive and well-constructed collection of interviews with historical figures including Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin and Malcolm X. The richness of the site is its connective design. Each interview is tagged by topic, including a subject’s link to broader issues or to other interviewees, making evident through user experience the complex nature of the Civil Rights Movement. A search for the NAACP, for example, yields multiple interviews featuring different points of view on the organization’s formation along with PDFs of original letters and the searchable text of newspaper articles about early NAACP demonstrations. But the site’s audio offerings are its most powerful assets.
The material offers a potent portrait of a historical moment and is rich with references to politics, art and specific conflicts over integration. The group interviews with university students and protesters are worth a listen, both for the content and for the early 1960s group dynamics. When Warren interviews men and women together, men tend to speak first and at most length. But the views expressed are fascinating, as in one case when a female sit-in participant gives her opinion about assimilation.
“My first reaction of course would be, thinking of Socrates: Know thyself. We do face the problem of amalgamation into the whole of American life, being Americans first, say, or being what I would like to term Negro Americans or Black Americans. I think that we as black men have an obligation to know ourselves as black men and be proud of what we are, and contribute to America what we could actually offer to this culture.”
Kate Rix is an Oakland based writer. See more of her work at .
How to combat internet piracy, the daily theft of copyrighted music, films and other digital goods? Our congressional leaders think they’ve figured it out, and their solution is called the Protect IP Act. The only problem is that the pending legislation creates more problems than it solves. Kirby Ferguson, creator of the Everything is a Remix video series, explains. And The New York Times offers its own objections.…
Anyone know what law these dancers were violating, since the arresting officer apparently doesn’t know (or won’t say)?
Update: This article/post gives you the backstory. It explains that the dancers were “there protesting a … court decision [handed down] earlier this month that upheld a ban on dancing within the memorial.” The members of the “civil danceobedience” were charged with demonstrating without a permit, and then released a short time after. That’s the answer to the question, in short…
To commemorate the 219th birthday of the Bill of Rights, the National Constitution Center will host today (Wednesday) a free webcast exploring the history of the U.S. Constitution’s first ten amendments. It will start with James Madison’s initial work on this list of essential freedoms, then cover the years when these provisions were seldom applied, and finally explore their rebirth in the 20th century and some contemporary debates. The 20 minute program will be viewed by six million students across the United States, and you can tune in as well for free. To take part, simply visit this site between 7:00 a.m. and 6:00 p.m. EST. And please note that the webcast will be supplemented with a live blog hosted by constitutional experts. (Photo by G. Widman for GPTMC)
Simon Singh is a man who refuses to be silenced. In 2008, the British science writer published an article in The Guardian calling attention to some of the wilder claims of the chiropractic industry. A short time later he found himself sifting through 35 pages of legal documents from a libel suit brought by the British Chiropractic Association. The lawsuit specifically named Singh, and not the newspaper. As he told The Times of Londonrecently, the experience was “scary.”
Singh decided to fight back. Two years later, the British Chiropractic Association has received a great deal more public scrutiny than it bargained for, while Singh and his predicament have become the cause célèbre of a rapidly growing movement to reform England’s notorious libel law. London’s status as “Libel Capital of the World “ has begun to teeter.
The chain of events began April 19, 2008, on the “Comment and Debate” page of The Guardian: “This is Chiropractic Awareness Week,” wrote Singh. “So let’s be aware. How about some awareness that may prevent harm and help you make truly informed choices?” From there Singh went on to report that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, had claimed that “99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae.” Even now, Singh wrote, modern chiropractors still hold some “quite wacky ideas.” The lawsuit revolves around a particular passage, quoted last week in a court document:
“The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organization is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.”
When the BCA objected, The Guardian offered to make space available for a rebuttal — if there was “a jot of evidence,” the BCA could present it. Instead, the organization declined the offer and sued the writer.
At the time, Singh was promoting his new book, Trick or Treatment: Alternative Medicine on Trial, which he co-wrote with Edzard Ernst. Several of his earlier books were international bestsellers, including Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe, and Fermat’s Last Theorem, which was published in America as Fermat’s Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World’s Greatest Mathematical Problem. The commercial success of Singh’s books enabled him to absorb the enormous expense of fighting a case in the British libel courts.
Singh was dealt a serious setback in a preliminary hearing last May, when a judge ruled that the writer’s phrase “happily promotes bogus treatments” amounted to a factual claim that the BCA was intentionally dishonest – an interpretation of meaning which Singh flatly denied. Singh appealed the decision, and last Thursday, in a ruling that may prove to be a watershed, not only in Singh’s case but in the larger struggle for libel reform, the England and Wales Court of Appeal reversed the lower court judge’s decision and cleared the way for Singh to use a “fair comment” clause in his defense.
In the written decision, Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge commented on the societal impact of the BCA’s action. “It is now nearly two years since the publication of the offending article,” Lord Judge wrote. “It seems unlikely that anyone would dare repeat the opinions expressed by Dr. Singh for fear of a writ. Accordingly this litigation has almost certainly had a chilling effect on public debate which might otherwise have assisted potential patients to make informed choices about the possible use of chiropractic.”
In the days following last week’s landmark decision, we talked with Singh by email.
OPEN CULTURE: Congratulations on your victory in the Court of Appeal. How do you feel?
SIMON SINGH: I am delighted that the Court of Appeal has backed my interpretation of my own article, namely that the British Chiropractic Association is reckless, but not dishonest. I will still have to defend my article at trial, but I will be defending something I meant to write, as opposed to an extreme accusation that never existed in the first place. Although this is a big step forward for me, there is still a long way to go on libel reform in the UK. English libel laws are the worst in the free world, and they need radical reform so that other scientists and journalists do not find themselves in my position next year.
OPEN CULTURE: What happens next?
SIMON SINGH: I think the British Chiropractic Association is in a difficult position, but it has three choices. First, it could take the case to trial, which is fine by me because I would relish the opportunity to discuss my article in a courtroom. Second, it could appeal last week’s decision and go to the Supreme Court, but again this is fine by me because I would relish the opportunity to discuss my article in such an elevated forum. Third, it could abandon the case, but the BCA would have to pay my costs before being allowed to walk away.
OPEN CULTURE: Those costs have been considerable, haven’t they?
SIMON SINGH: I estimate that in my case both parties have run up bills of over £300,000, of which £200,000 has been spent establishing the meaning.
OPEN CULTURE: The Appeal Court ruling quotes Milton on the imprisonment of Galileo, and warns that under current law the court is invited to become “an Orwellian ministry of truth.” Do you think the tide is turning in favor of libel reform?
SIMON SINGH: I think the Appeal Court judges were sending a clear message that they are unhappy with libel law, which should encourage politicians to act radically on libel reform. All the main parties seem keen to reform our libel laws, but this is not yet in the manifestos of the two main parties. I think the pressure from campaigners, the public and the legal profession will ultimately encourage the next government to reform libel, but we have to maintain the pressure.
OPEN CULTURE: What makes English libel law so onerous?
SIMON SINGH: There is so much wrong with English libel law that it is hard to know where to start. It is horrendously expensive, which forces writers to back down even if they are right, because they cannot afford to defend their writing. It has been estimated that an English libel trial can easily cost over £1 million, and this is over 100 times more than the cost of an average libel case in mainland Europe. Second, there is the problem that large corporations can sue lone scientists, journalists and bloggers, which again forces them to back down because they are up against such powerful and rich organizations. Third, the burden of proof is uneven, because writers are assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Fourth, there is no so-called robust public interest defense, namely something that would protect writers commenting on important issues. The law should encourage such debate, not silence it. Finally, there is a problem of libel tourism, whereby overseas companies sue overseas writers in London because they know that English libel law is hostile to journalists.
OPEN CULTURE: Why should this concern someone living away from the British Isles?
SIMON SINGH: The issue of libel tourism means that everyone in the world should be scared of the English libel law. If you write anywhere in the world about a billionaire, then the London court can probably claim jurisdiction because the material can probably be read in England over the internet and billionaires typically have business interests in England so they can claim to have a reputation in England. There are many cases of libel tourism, such as Saudi billionaires suing an American journalist, a U.S. company suing a Danish researcher, an Israeli technology company threatening to sue a paper written by a Swedish professor, a Tunisian man suing a German newspaper, an Icelandic bank suing a Danish newspaper, and so on – all these cases ended up in London, the libel capital of the world.
OPEN CULTURE: Libel law affects all forms of journalism and free expression, but the British scientific community has been especially outspoken on this issue. Richard Dawkins for example gave a high-profile speech on the problem. Why are scientists, in particular, so up in arms?
SIMON SINGH: I think scientists are at the forefront of the campaign for libel reform because science can only progress through open discussion and robust debate and criticism. I think the public accepts that libel is important for protecting the reputation of individuals, but they now realize that there must be a problem when libel blocks scientific discussion. In addition to my case, in the last year we have seen the science journalist Ben Goldacre, the cardiologist Peter Wilmshurst, the Swedish linguist Professor Lacerda and the Danish medical researcher Henrik Thomsen all being sued for libel in London. The libel laws block our right to discuss scientific ideas, but they also block the public’s right to hear these ideas.
OPEN CULTURE: With everything that has happened, have you been able to carry on with your work as a writer? Are you writing a new book?
SIMON SINGH: As well as the legal costs, I have also lost out because my income has been seriously damaged by my inability to write. I should be writing a new book now, but I cannot even submit a book proposal because I don’t know if I would ever be able to deliver it. Right now I am spending the majority of my time on my own legal case, and devoting any spare time to the campaign for libel reform.
OPEN CULTURE: Are you working with any organizations to bring about reform?
SIMON SINGH: I am working closely with three charities (Sense About Science, English PEN and Index on Censorship), who have formed the Libel Reform Coalition. We have a petition for libel reform and we welcome signatories from around the world, because English libel law affects writers all over the globe. I hope that readers will add their names to the petition at www.libelreform.org/sign — I have spent over a million minutes of my life defending my article and my right to free speech, so I hope readers will take one minute to show their support.
This article was contributed by Mike Springer, a journalist in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
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