Noah Mullane

Summary

For my research paper I need to have two sources summarized so I shall start by summarizing “Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy” by Emily B. Laidlaw first and “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act” by Kristine Gallardo second.

“Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy” starts by telling the read what to expect and lets us know that this paper is focusing more on the broad subject of public shaming in the present day and how it is dealt with legally around the world. Specifically the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and the United States of America. Shame is considered not to belong to any one category and more of a tool employed by all. It talks about the difference between shaming and privacy invasion vs. shaming and offense taken. It does this by splitting shaming into vigilantism, bullying, bigotry, and gossiping. Vigilantism is people going out of there way to find people doing wrong. Bullying, “any behavior performed through electronic or digital media by individuals or groups that repeatedly communicates hostile or aggressive messages intended to inflict harm or discomfort on others” ([30], Robert Tokunaga quoted, p. 3) was quoted in the text as a definition. This part was mostly what you expect when it comes to online bullying, ruined lives and lost lives. Bigotry “concerns an identifiable group attacked on the basis of their race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, colour or ethnic origin” (quoted from text). Seems that mostly women are in trouble when it comes to this and it’s not be they started it. Finally gossiping, not inherently bad but can lead to large problems. After going over these forms the paper moves on to the structure of online shaming. That some of the worst comments, the ones the law can do something about normally appear in larger groups of public shaming. In this portion it is acknowledged that the law has very limited response ability for large group shaming. It is also in this part that talk of change of a behavior is acknowledged as a hard if impossible window to stay in. After that the paper enters its main topic, privacy.  Privacy is broken into three parts dignity, privacy in public places and social privacy. Dignity is involved in many instruments for human rights and yet go undefined. Here shame is seen as something that can get to one’s core and and shatter it. Dignity is fragile and dependent on many different things while equally affected by many things. Privacy in public is a difficult thing to deal with legal due to the fact that it is happening in the public domain. As far as the laws in America are concerned privacy in public in none existent. Though the same can be said about the internet in general. Over all public privacy is more the ability to leave the public and not protection from what is done in public. Social privacy is the want to be apart of society without the fear of being publicly shamed. The thought of being social and safe. Though the question of is anything private in public comes up again. Which goes to privacy being up to the person and yet it is flawed in so many ways in that the person is their own defence. Finishing up the paper talks about if regulation public shaming is possible with so many ways for shame to be achieved.

Now on to “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act”. First we are ment with the introduction of public shaming quickly followed by Justine Sacco’s story of shame. Which is followed by the best advice to avoid public shaming in my opinion, think before you speak, tweet, post, or comment. This leads into not stories but examples of people who had their lives ruined with public shaming. Then it starts to hit the main topic, it is hard to take any real legal action due to many difficulties. Farther in we see a breth history on public shaming and move onto the start of online shaming. The focus from there was the point that if a social norm was violated then the chance of public shaming grew. It was also seen that public shaming could be used in any sense as long as enough people joined in. This lead into anonymity while online, simply put if no one knows it’s you  it is much easier to say hurtful things. It also goes back to the difficulties of finding who ever posted the comment, in the actual off line world. After that the paper enters the field of torts and explains Defamation which is a state-law claim, so the applicable elements vary slightly from state to state, as  existing to curb undue harm to individuals’ reputations. The problem is how hard it is to meet all the requirements or to use it against someone as it relies on falsehood. Next it gets into the Communications Decency Act and ways of regulating with their individual downfalls. It also talks about whether holding the site responsible for post was possible or not. Site with no filtering actual didn’t have to worry about this due to not taking responsibility from the start of what was on their site. While the 21st century policy, any site that had filters to stop obscene content couldn’t be held liable for a user’s post if it insulted someone so they could continue to censor obscene things. This meant that just about all sites couldn’t be held liable about their users. Issues did arise but judges have been weary in how they handle cases due to the difficulty of getting around Section 230 (section in Communications Decency Act) immunity for web sites. Section 230 has been the center of many legal debates on whether there should be change or not, due to the change  having a chance to go wrong. Though this is not to say that Section 230 can’t be used against public shaming, for example it allows the site to check post for shaming or even give warning that they may start to shame someone. The idea of the warning is to make a would be shamer think about the effects of there would be shaming post. At this point the paper talks about the conser of freedom of speech. Though the warning idea answers that question because it doesn’t take down or stop the post it just makes the poster aware. After that the paper enters the conclusion wrapping up with the simple think before you post.

Works Cited

Gallardo, Kristine. “Taming the Internet Pitchfork Mob: Online Public Shaming, the Viral Media Age, and the Communications Decency Act.” Heinonline, drive.google.com/file/d/0B0ljeoGlfu6MSDZtSEpUWUYyYk0/view?ts=59e8b27e.

Laidlaw, Emily B. Online Shaming and the Right to Privacy. www.mdpi.com/2075-471X/6/1/3/htm.