When Web Chat Turns Into Threats
posted by Daniel Solove
An interesting AP story:
Two weeks before William Freund donned a mask and cape and fatally shot two neighbors before killing himself, members of an online forum for people with a rare mental disorder read the 19-year-old’s string of violent rantings. Freund’s online musings and his pre-Halloween rampage raised fresh questions about the little-policed world of Internet discussion rooms: What, if anything, should Web site gatekeepers do when users post threatening messages online?
Internet law experts generally agree there is no legal onus on site owners or users to notify police. . . .
Before last Saturday’s shootings, Freund begged for help and told an online message board for people with Asperger’s syndrome, a neurological disorder marked by a lack of social and communications skills, that he was lonely and suicidal and would begin a “terror campaign to hurt those that have hurt me.” . . . .
“It is very risky to impose responsibility on Web site owners to police their users,” said Jennifer Granick, executive director of Stanford University’s Center for Internet and Society. “How do you know if someone is serious? Are you making a big deal out of nothing? How hard are you supposed to try? Are you betraying the person?”
November 9, 2005 at 12:01 am
Posted in: Blogging
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Responses (1)
John Armstrong - November 9, 2005 at 3:11 am
As I see it (and tried to advance in an interdisciplinary seminar on computer law over at the law school here), the question is one of appropriate social analogues. This sort of message board — freely joinable and departable, essentially anonymous, and devoted to discussion amongst sufferers — is most closely analogous to something like an AA meeting.
If an alcoholic says at a meeting that he’s going to kill someone he feels has contributed to or exacerbated his problems, is the moderator of that meeting required to alert the authorities? The answers to the question in and out of cyberspace is the same.
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