Online Slander and Gossip Can’t Be Trusted
Here are some excerpts from Daniel J. Solove, Professor of Law at George Washington University Law School, taken from his book “The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.” (Boldface type added for emphasis).
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“When we determine whether gossip is good or not, we must look at the who, what, and why of it. We should ask: Who is making the disclosure? Is the disclosure made to the appropriate audience? Is the purpose behind the disclosure one we should encourage or discourage? The problem with Internet gossip is that it can so readily be untethered from its context.”
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“Shaming is nothing new-we’ve been doing it for centuries. But Internet shaming creates a permanent record of a person’s transgressions. And it is done by amateur self-appointed investigative reporters, often without affording the target a chance at self-defense. Numerous others then join in to help shame the victim, creating the cyberspace equivalent to mob justice.”
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“People who act inappropriately might not be able to escape into obscurity anymore; instead, they may be captured in pixels and plastered across the Internet. They’ll be held responsible for their actions. But perhaps responsibility cuts both ways. Shouldn’t the cyberspace norm police also have responsibilities? What if they get out of hand? What if they wrongly accuse somebody? What if their shaming punishes a minor transgression too much?”
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“People are careless when they gossip,” Brison observes, “because they know they will not have to take responsibility for their words. This means that rumor spreads easily and the truth is distorted.” As the philosopher Martin Heidegger noted, gossip “spreads in wider circles and takes on an authoritative character. Things are so because one says so. Idle talk is constituted in this gossiping and passing the word along, a process by which its initial lack of grounds to stand on increases to complete groundlessness.”
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“In other words, the problem with gossip is that it is based on unsubstantiated rumors, and people often don’t bother to learn the full story. For Heidegger, gossip is a superficial way of learning information about others. It doesn’t involve a serious attempt to understand another person but often remains shallow and careless.”
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“In the ordinary criminal justice process, a person is innocent until proven guilty. The world of shaming works differently, as people are punished without a hearing.”
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“Norm enforcers [bloggers] can be mistaken. There are no rules and procedures to ensure that the Internet norm police are accurate in their assessments of who should be deemed blameworthy. An example by the mainstream media illustrates the problems with mistaken attempts to shame.”
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A free copy of his book can be downloaded here:”The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet.”
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