I found part two of chapter five, control upon the content of speech to be quite interesting. Daniel Solve, a law profess and privacy expert observed that " when people are less accountable for their conduct, they are more likely to engage in unsavory acts. When anonymous, people are often much nastier and more uncivil in their speech. It is easier to say harmful things about others when we don't have to take responsibility." I agree with his observation. I think that when people have the privacy to say whatever they want on the internet, they are more likely to behave recklessly because they won't be held accountable for their actions. The concept of unmasking an anonymous speaker is also interesting because it is difficult to do. Especially on social media platforms when anyone can have as many private accounts as they want to behave recklessly. For example, on Instagram you can create as many accounts as you want, you just have to have a unique email address for each account. Under Instagram Policy you can use the same phone number to connect your accounts. This makes unmasking anonymous speakers impossible unless they're under investigation. Back in 2016, Leslie Jones disabled all of her social media because of the harassment she was receiving because she acted in the remake of Ghost Busters. Masked voices all over social media attacked her because she was black and women. It was unable to police because the majority of the people harassing her weren't using the personal accounts to do so. They were using fake ideas they created purely to harass people online. Instagram and other media platforms do no have up to date policies on how they can police these matters.
The historical context of freedom of speech is an extremely interesting one. Why is it that the concept of free speech has been an undying one and has span the history of human communication. Breaking free speech in to three traditional rationals makes the concept easier to understand and definitely makes sense. These three modes of freedom of speech are philosophical, political and individual. They are easy to distinct from one another and function in completely different ways. From a philosophical level, free speech is a device of truth. That if people are able to speak freely and let their ideas compete, "in the long run the truth will prevail" according to Tedford and Herbeck. I find this interesting, because in my mind, this is the most important facet of free speech. I say this, because I find free speech essential for any kind of societal advancements. If people are not allowed to speak their mind and share their ideas, or discredit others ideas, how is a society supp...
I agree that people will often respond much more harshly when they hiding by anonymity. It is hard to stop people when they create fake accounts, because you don't know who to trace it back to. Social media has been a complete game changer, and will continue to do so in the future. They make privacy law so much harder to regulate and it has only created more problems. The hard part about anonymity is you can't regulate it. How do you know when someone is in the midst of creating an account, that they are using a fake persona. Privacy laws in regards to social media usage are very tricky because there is no black and white answer. It is a lot of grey area, and it makes us have to be more careful because of the actions of other people.
ReplyDeleteYou brought up Instagram and the online privacy issues it poses, as well as how Leslie Jones had to delete all her social media accounts because of all the harassment she received, which I agree are troubling issues with no simple solution. Both examples speak to overarching privacy issues with the advent of the internet. I kind of addressed this in last week's post when I talked about revenge-porn, and the reality that many of our IRL privacy, harassment, stalking issues are compounded online. Our traditional laws simply don't have the teeth and hold up in online spaces as effectively as we need them to be. In addition to the issue and difficulty of unmasking an anonymous speaker you address, what about judging the nature of their comments? We've experienced it: you send a text and then it isn't decoded as you intended, because the receiver didn't pick up the sarcasm of the text. By extension, if a person comments, "I will kill x person," how do you determine what is a legitimate threat when the person can just claim sarcasm or lightheartedness in their defense? Are we willing to sacrifice our privacy for more surveillance?
ReplyDeleteWow, i didn't know any of that about instagram or twitter, that's scary. What we should do is put a data block or a security on social media platforms where you can only access specific your account on specific devices. One phone per social media account, with computers it would be different i'm sure. Did you read anything about what they're doing to combat this? Or, better yet, are the social media platforms....even trying?
ReplyDeleteIt in interesting concept. The more privacy a person has, the more comfortable they will be saying degrading things to others. Sadly, we live in a cowardly society where anonymous people an sit behind a screen and deflate others with no remorse. With almost all people between the age of 16-25 having at least some form of social media, it's scary to think about the number of fake accounts that can be lingering out there. Countless number of accounts that can say anything with no consequences. I'm really glad that you brought this to light, because I actually think it's a legitimate problem right now.
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