Archive for the ‘Web 2.0’ Category

Neil Richards on Why Video Privacy Matters

posted by Danielle Citron

Our guest blogger Neil Richards, a Professor of Law at Washington University School of Law, turns his sights on video privacy in this guest blog post.  It whets our appetite for his forthcoming book on Intellectual Privacy.  So here is Professor Richards’s post:

The House of Representatives recently passed an amendment to a fairly obscure a law known as the Video Privacy Protection Act.  This law protects the privacy of our video rental records.  It ensures that companies who have information about what videos we watch keep them confidential, and it requires them to get meaningful consent from us before they publish them.  The House, at the urging of Netflix and Facebook, has passed an amendment that would allow these companies to share our movie watching habits much more easily.  The Video Privacy Act was passed after the Washington City Paper obtained the video rental records of Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork and published them in order to politically discredit him.  It worked.  The Video Privacy Act rests on the enduring wisdom that what we watch is our own business, regardless of our politics.  It allows us to share films we’ve watched on our own terms and not those of video stores or online video providers.

What’s at stake is something privacy scholars call “intellectual privacy” – the idea that records of our reading habits, movie watching habits, and private conversations deserve special protection from other kinds of personal information.  The films we watch, the books we read, and the web sites we visit are essential to the ways we make sense of the world and make up our minds about political and non-political issues.  Intellectual privacy protects our ability to think for ourselves, without worrying that other people might judge us based on what we read.  It allows us to explore ideas that other people might not approve of, and to figure out our politics, sexuality, and personal values, among other things.  It lets us watch or read whatever we want without fear of embarrassment or being outed.  This is the case whether we’re reading communist or anti-globalization books; or visiting web sites about abortion, gun control, cancer, or coming out as gay; or watching videos of pornography, or documentaries by Michael Moore, or even “The Hangover 2.”

For generations, librarians have understood this.  Libraries were the Internet before computers – they presented the world of reading to us, and let us as patrons read (and watch) freely for ourselves. But librarians understood that intellectual privacy matters.  A good library lets us read freely, but keeps our records confidential in order to safeguard our intellectual privacy.   But we are told by Netflix, Facebook, and other companies that the world has changed.  “Sharing” as they call it is the way of the future.  I disagree.  Sharing can be good, and sharing of what we watch and read is very important.  But the way we share is essential.  Telling our friends “hey – read this – it’s important” or “watch this movie – it’s really moving” is one of the great things that the Internet has made easier.  But sharing has to be done on our terms, not on those that are most profitable for business.  Sharing doesn’t mean a norm of publishing everything we read on the Internet.  It means giving us a conscious choice about when we are sharing our intellectual habits, and when we are not.

Industry groups are fond of saying that good privacy practices require consumer notice and consumer choice.  The current Video Privacy Act is one of the few laws that does give consumers meaningful choice about protecting their sensitive personal information.  Now is not the time to cut back on the VPPA’s protections.  Now is the time to extend its protections to the whole range of intellectual records – the books we buy, our internet search histories, and ISP logs of what we read on the Internet.  As a first step, we should reject this attempt to eviscerate our intellectual privacy.

  January 4, 2012 at 11:42 am   Posted in: Legal Theory, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Bigoted Harassment, Alive and Well Online

posted by Danielle Citron

With the help of law and changing norms, invidious discrimination has become less prevalent in arenas like schools, workplaces, hotels, and public transportation.  Due to our social environments, anti-discrimination law is fairly easy to enforce.  Because leaders usually can figure out those responsible for discriminatory conduct and ignore such behavior at their peril, bigotry raises a real risk of social sanction.  So too hate discourse in the public sphere is more muted.  A hundred years ago, Southern newspapers and leaders explicitly endorsed mob violence against blacks.  As late as 1940, a newspaper editor in Durham, North Carolina could state that: “A Negro is different from other people in that he’s an unfortunate branch of the human family who hasn’t been able to make out of himself all he is capable of” due to his “background of the jungle.”  In the post-Civil Rights era, the public expression of bigoted epithets and slurs occurs infrequently.  One rarely hears racist, sexist, or homophobic speech in mainstream media outlets.  Some interpret this state of affairs optimistically, as a sign that we are moving beyond race, gender, and arguably even sexual orientation.  The election of the first black President provoked proclamations of our entry into a “post-racial” era.  Many contend that we no longer need feminism anymore.  Prime time television is filled with images of female power, from Brenda Leigh Johnson’s chief on The Closer to Dr. Miranda Bailey’s “take no prisoners” surgeon on Grey’s Anatomy.  Who needs feminism anymore as its goals have been achieved?

But a new era is not upon us.  In some arenas, hate’s explicit form has repackaged itself in subtlety.  In public discourse, crude biological views of group inferiority are often replaced with a kinder, gentler “color-blind racism,” as sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva calls it. The face of modern racism is, in journalist Touré’s estimation, “invisible or hard to discern, lurking in the shadows or hidden.”  The media has also better disguised sexism with its anxiety about female achievement, renewed and amplified objectification of young women’s bodies and faces, and the dual exploitation and punishment of female sexuality, as media scholar Susan Douglas explains.

Offline public discourse may now be on more neutral ground but its online counterpart is not.  While virulent bigotry continues behind closed doors, it increasingly appears in online spaces that blend public and private discourse.  Although televised sports commentary rarely features anti-gay rhetoric, online sports message boards are awash in in-your-face homophobic speech.  Racial epithets and slurs are common online, whether in Facebook profiles, Twitter posts, blog comments, or YouTube videos.  College students encounter more sexually inappropriate speech in online interactions than in face-to-face ones.

Matters have not improved since I started talking and writing about it since 2007, when we woke up, for a brief second, and paid attention to sexualized, misogynistic attacks on Kathy Sierra on her blog and two others and the targeting of female law students on AutoAdmit.  Then, technologist Tim O’Reilly and Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales called for a Blogger’s Code of Conduct.  That effort failed to gain traction, and ever since the bigoted online abuse continues, silencing victims, ruining their online reputations, costing them jobs, and interfering with their ability to engage with others online and offline.  Newsweek’s always insightful Jessica Bennett has published important new piece on online misogyny and the Guardian’s Vanessa Thorpe and Richard Rogers similarly explore the rape threats and abuse of female bloggers.  I will be blogging about bigoted online harassment, as I am amidst writing a book about it and serving on the Inter-Parliamentary Task Force on Online Hate, which recently held a hearing at the House of Commons.  This all has to stop, and now.

  November 7, 2011 at 10:56 am   Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Feminism and Gender, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0   Print This Post   16 Comments

Parents Facilitating Facebook Use for the Under 13 Set: The False Promise of Minimum Age Requirements

posted by Danielle Citron

The Child Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), enacted in 1998 and finalized in 2000, requires commercial websites that target children under 13 or have actual knowledge that users are under 13 to ask for parental permission before collecting and using their information.  Legislators hoped to protect children from predatory marketing, safety risks such as stalking or kidnapping, and other abuses related to the use of children’s private data.  They also wanted more parental involvement in online data-collection practices and to encourage the development of technologies designed to give parents better tools to protect their kids’ online privacy.  Although COPPA has succeeded in stopping egregious predatory data practices, it has fallen short of its core goals.  The Federal Trade Commission (FTC), tasked with implementing and enforcing COPPA, admits that online industries have neither innovated nor emphasized mechanisms for obtaining verifiable parental consent.  Instead, to avoid costs associated with obtaining parental consent including potential fines for inappropriately dealing with children’s data, many sites just limit their services to children 13 and older. Sites typically include the age restriction in their Terms of Service agreements (ToS), to which users must consent when they create an account.  Many sites ask users for their age or birth date to ascertain if they are 13 or over.  Facebook does, for instance, and reserves the right to terminate accounts of users who “violate the letter or spirit” of its ToS.  To protect itself from possible legal exposure, Facebook employs cookies to prevent users from changing their minds about their age to evade the site’s requirements and actively deletes accounts where evidence suggests that the users are not in fact 13 or older.  This spring, the FTC called for comments on a proposed amendment to its Child Online Privacy Protection Rule, enacted in 2000 and renewed without change in 2005.  As FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz explained: “In this era of rapid technological change, kids are often tech savvy but judgment poor. We want to ensure that the COPPA Rule is effective in helping parents protect their children online, without unnecessarily burdening online businesses.  We look forward to the continuing thoughtful input from industry, children’s advocates, and other stakeholders as we work to update the Rule.”

A study released this week by danah boyd, Eszter Hargittai, Jason Schultz, and John Palfrey sheds new light on COPPA’s failings.  Given the current regulatory attention to COPPA, the study could not be more timely or more important.  The authors surveyed a national sample of 1,007 parents and guardians who have children ages 10-14 living with them.  They found that although many sites restrict access to children, many parents knowingly allow their children to lie about their age–indeed, they often help them do so– to gain access to age-restricted sties in violation of the sites’ ToS.  This is true for some of the most popular social media sites and services, such as Facebook, Gmail, and Skype.  Specifically, the study revealed that 55% of 12 year olds had Facebook accounts while 32% of 11 year olds and 19% of 10 year olds did as well.  Seventy-eight percent of the parents of 10 year olds helped their kids set up their Facebook accounts; 68% of the parents of 11 year olds helped their kids sign up; and 76% of the parents of 12 year olds did the same.  Of those parents who reported that their child joined Facebook underage and helped create the child’s account, 74% knew that Facebook had a minimum age that their kids failed to meet.  Although Facebook’s minimum age is a requirement, just over a third of the those parents believed the minimum age was a recommendation.  Over three-quarters of parents believed that there are circumstances that make it okay for their child to sign up for a service even if their child fell short of the age requirement.  Those reasons included communicating with parents, other family members, and friends; use of the service for educational purposes; and because classmates used the service.  Half of the parents indicated that their child could violate the restriction only if under parental supervision.  As the authors explained, those parents felt as though the violation was acceptable because they were monitoring their children’s online practices.  Importantly, most parents either did not understand the reason for the age requirement or failed to appreciate its privacy goals.  While most parents had no idea what animated the requirement, some offered explanations such as concerns about the adult content or language on the site, “children don’t need to have a social media presence,” and “to protect minors from perverts.”  A small fraction of the parents referred to legal issues.  Only two parents referenced privacy.

What does all of this tell us?   Rather than providing parents and children with greater options for controlling the use of youth’s personal information, COPPA has actually encouraged the adoption of formal limits on children’s access to online services.  Those limits are rather meaningless, though.  As the authors explain, parents are “taking matters into their own hands to circumvent the restrictions . . . at the cost of their children’s privacy and at the risk of acting unethically and potentially in violation of the law.”  While providers and parents together circumvent COPPA’s requirements, the true losers are the parents who don’t get the chance to audit and delete their children’s data, as COPPA mandates when sites have actual knowledge that they are collecting and using data from kids under 13.  We are also seeing parents help their children engage in public deceit because they think their kids would benefit from online services.  This creates a serious parenting conflict among those who wish to encourage honesty. Because children pretend that they are far older than they actually are in online interactions, they also may open themselves up to other risks including stalking, something the statute sought to avoid.  In the end, COPPA has accomplished very little and risked a lot.  Kids under 13 do not end up with privacy protections afforded by COPPA and may even put themselves at risk.  Providers get around COPPA’s requirements with age cutoffs that are routinely violated.  Innovation for greater parental controls remains illusive.  As the study’s authors urge, policy-makers should “shift away from privacy regulation models that are based on age or other demographic categories and instead develop universal privacy protections for online users.”

More broadly, the study shows us that parents are involved in their kids’ social media use, whether it’s deceptive and in violation of ToS or not.  One might say that parents are increasingly taking over the role of Chief Family Privacy Officer, but, as we now appreciate, without COPPA’s protections.  What’s needed is far more education for parents and kids about the privacy risks associated with social media.  That’s of course true for the under 13 set and for those 13 and older. But since parents are helping expose their kids to social media services without COPPA’s protections, we need to work on education as early as elementary/lower school.  High school students, their parents, and educators often don’t appreciate the potential privacy risks of social media so one can imagine that kids in lower school, their parents, and teachers don’t as well.  Do students really want to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a college education and then end up unemployable due to something they posted on Facebook (which now is at greater risk for being indexed and searched online due to changes in Google’s algorithm)?  Do they know that colleges may someday look at their social media activity, to their detriment?  A new survey done by Kaplan Test Prep of admissions officers at 359 selective colleges and universities revealed that 24 percent of respondents reported using Facebook or other social networking pages to research an applicant, see here too.  All of this also reinforces the lessons of Ryan Calo’s important work on the flaws of current notice regimes and the potential for improvement through thoughtful design–parents neither get that ToS requirements are not just suggestions nor appreciate the privacy concerns animating those requirements.  Intermediaries can and should do better in that regard.  The study has contributed much to our appreciation of COPPA and the regulation of privacy online more generally.  I am hoping that legislators and regulators are paying attention.

  November 6, 2011 at 10:19 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

Facebook, Bullet Not Dodged Yet (Part Deux)

posted by Danielle Citron

In June, I blogged about the dreaded question (for parents of teenagers): “Mom, can I have a Facebook profile?”  At the time, we talked about its benefits and drawbacks.  On the one hand, it’s a gateway to socializing that she had been missing given her late birthday.  Different sports leagues had Facebook groups, perhaps she needed to join, and other activities would as well.  On the other hand, her privacy and reputation could be jeopardized, by her own hand or her “friends.”  Facebook’s privacy settings are notoriously whimsical, and more importantly as Steve Bellovin’s work shows notoriously misunderstood–setting up an account was indeed a game of chance, or as Bob Keller notes, like giving your kid a pipe of crystal meth.  We gave our thirteen year old kid the choice and told her to talk to us when she was ready to get started.  The summer came and went and all was quiet.  So now, a good five months later and a good five months wiser, my kid has decided that she wants to think about getting a Facebook page again.  And the conversation went something like this (she did all of the talking):  So I’m feeling excited about this.  Facebook would let me stay in touch with my sleep-away camp friends who live all over the place and I could friend kids that I meet from other schools in the area, at games, mixers, etc.  And I am jazzed about this new close friends feature that everyone’s been talking about.  This way I can share photographs only with my five best pals and I don’t have to worry.  (Pause).  But, I really want to friend the kids from camp and want them to see what I am up to, so this close friends feature may not work.  And what if those camp friends have weird friends or end up being strange themselves.  I can’t de-friend them, can I and still pal around at camp?  And I don’t want other people making judgments about me based on what those not-so-close friends are up to?  Will colleges see what I am doing, when it comes time?  And what if someone goes on my close friend’s computer and copy and pastes my silly remarks and it goes viral, like the Friday girl who ended up getting death threats and harassed.  Can I put up my favorite artists?  I definitely can say I like the Beatles and Elton John, but can I say Kesha?  Will people think I am appropriate if I put Kesha down or Katy Perry?  Some of their songs are, err, a little inappropriate.

After all of that, my kid said she needed to think about it, it all seemed so, well, complicated.  That seemed just the right word: complicated.  But the question seems even more tricky now than it did in June.  Who is she doing this for?  Taking cues from Erving Goffman, life is a performance.  Some of it is just for you–a way to develop oneself, experiment, play, and figure out who you are as much as who you are not.  Much of it is for others.  We perform different roles for the people in our lives: friends, parents, co-workers, coach, priest/imam/rabbi, acquaintances, and strangers.  Some performances are oppressive: we cover or pass as best we can in the face of stigma and prejudice.  And we perform at a time of extensive social and political surveillance.  We feel watched, and for good reason.  Companies give us social influence scores.  Employers, marketers, and businesses use those scores to benefit some, leaving others less favored and less fortunate.  Maybe we perform online for them?  Colleges look at social media profiles.  (danah boyd has a great piece about a question a college asked her about a student’s MySpace page, which seemingly contradicted his college essay.)  Do young people perform for them?  At the same time, government monitors our online presence, searching for threats to critical infrastructure and the like.  Government 2.0 social media sites may be keeping track of the stories we like, the friends we make, and pictures we post.  Who knows?  Agencies aren’t promising not to watch us, so maybe being careful is smart.  Are we performing for fusion centers and our government social media friends?  All of this watching brings to mind Julie Cohen’s book Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice (Yale University Press, forthcoming 2011, see her talk here)–more on that in early 2012 in our online symposium on the book.  Navigating those questions every time one posts on Facebook is bewildering, especially because we can’t really control what happens to the information posted there.  A commentator on my previous post basically said that I had better get a grip on reality, that nothing I did or said could influence what she did and she would hate me anyway.  I guess we just fundamentally disagree.  Parenting is a huge responsibility, and lots of what my kid is mulling comes from long, long conversations we have had about being a responsible and smart digital citizen.  I am looking forward to talking it through again, once she has a better idea of what she wants to do.

P.S. Sorry about the light blogging, working on my first book on cyber mobs and hate (forthcoming Harvard University Press).

H/T Susan McCarty (who helped me find the db piece) , JJC

  October 6, 2011 at 9:07 am   Posted in: Culture, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Privacy (Electronic Surveillance), Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0, Weird   Print This Post   5 Comments

Hot Summer Flashes, Black Urban Mobs

posted by Olivier Sylvain

  September 5, 2011 at 11:52 pm   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Culture, Current Events, First Amendment, Media Law, Philosophy of Social Science, Politics, Race, Social Network Websites, Sociology of Law, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   8 Comments

Comic-Con and Social Networks

posted by Ari Waldman

Comic-Con is many things: awesome, hilarious, tragic, fun, hilarious, expensive and hilarious. Every July, San Diego becomes the homeof more than just balmy temperatures and the alt-rock tones of Jason Mraz; it hosts Comic-Con, an extraordinary pop culture event that brings together Trekkies and Chris Evans (the 2011 Captain America), Jedis and Ryan Kwanten (of True Blood) and more than a few people who have never picked up a comic book. I’ve joined the crowds the past two years because, well, it’s what you do in San Diego this weekend.

I have found that Comic-Con is a prime beneficiary of the decline of anonymity in online social networks.

Facebook may be leading the way in the fight against anonymity, but digital communities built around shared interest in science fiction are giving Mark Zuckerberg a run for his anti-anonymity money. To be sure, online games like World of Warcraft (WoW) allow you to create fantastic identities and personae for yourself, but I had a feeling they have become so much more than that. I did not know from experience: I enjoy Sci Fi and have my share of SyFy shows waiting on my DVR, but I’ve never played WoW. I was never a big gamer, even when “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” actually came on those large black floppy discs. So, I did what any nerd would do: I went to Comic-Con to test a theory.

I looked for groups where members were of similar ages (thus excluding families), but did not restrict myself to any particular age, race, gender or costume. I spoke to about 100 people. I wanted to know where they met their friends: online or in person? If online, on what platform? If not on a traditional social networking site like Facebook, where? Did they ever have pseudonyms or online identities that hid their real identities? If so, how and when did they come out of the closet to meet each other? In other words, I was trying to understand the role of online anonymity in social interaction among people at Comic-Con, many of whom are highly wired.

Of 107 people, 67 met the friends they were with at the time online. Notably, that is not the same as saying that nearly 2/3 of respondents came to Comic-Con with people they met online, but still, that is a staggering number! In any event, all of them eventually ”met” or “found” each other on Facebook, but some initially linked up through sci-fi themed groups. But, since it all happened through Facebook, no one was anonymous. 

Not all relationships started on Facebook’s science fiction corner. A few knew each other as frequent commenters on Gateworld.net, an all-things-Stargate fan website; some were WoW buddies who “never kept [themselves]hidden. He sounded cool, so whatever. It’s all on Facebook or MySpace anyway.” Another young man met his Jedi-clad friend “playing a few different online games. In the chat rooms, he mentioned he was from China and I thought that was so cool, especially since I live in Georgia.” He meant the country, not the state. The two struck up a friendship, became MySpace “friends,” then Facebook “friends” and then decided that they both should meet each others’ friends at Comic-Con. I also met a few young women who lamented that I wasn’t in costume and said that they too bonded online as three of the precious few females to comment about the show Warehouse 13 with any frequency. “As soon as I saw another girl, I immediately asked who she was and where she was. She then friended me on Facebook and I had a friend in a place called Riverside, California. I live in Oklahoma.”

Comic-Con attendees bear the brunt of a lot of stereotypes, none more common than of the adolescent, nonathletic boy who projects the kind of person he wants to be into his WoW elf. But, my initial research suggests that these men and women are not hiding behind the perceived anonymity that their online games could provide. Instead, they see their digital selves as extensions of their physical selves and their online identities as ways to help them meet people in real life. It is difficult for all of us to meet new people, so while an elf-self may be a foot in the door, the man behind the elf wants nothing more than to drop his mask and allow his digital community to supplement his physical community.

Admittedly, my tiny sample set answered informal questions in an unscientific survey. But, this concept — who we really are online and what are we really doing — has implications for the kind of policies websites, intermediaries and users would want to adopt to make the Internet a safe community for all. If we don’t want to be anonymous and have less and less need for it, why should we put safety and certain rights at risk in the name of protecting absolute anonymity? If even elf-selves are eschewing anonymity because of the community-building possibilities of Facebook and Gateworld.net, perhaps anonymity is not part of the liberating potential of the Internet. Perhaps community-building is.

  July 22, 2011 at 6:40 pm   Posted in: Culture, Cyberlaw, Web 2.0   Print This Post   4 Comments

When We Say “Stop Cyberbullying,” What Are Our Goals?

posted by Ari Waldman

Being laid up for a week with a nasty tonsil infection gave me the opportunity to catch up on some Sunday NY Times crosswords (Side Note: I refuse to accept that we’re now spelling the word “epilogue” as “epilog,” Mr. Will Shortz), some nerdy SciFi television and some law review articles on cyberharassment. Many esteemed colleagues, not to mention countless law students, are writing about this or related topics in some way. There is indeed much to talk about. But, what does not get as much play are the assumptions upon which much of the results-oriented scholarship is based.

The face-to-face and online harassment of young people, of any sexual orientation, of any gender, of any race, of any socio-economic status, is a bad thing. For the moment, let us put aside those who cling to the antiquated “this is all part of growing up” meme and assume that we all think harassing, attacking and emotionally abusing young people is bad. But, when we are asked to evaluate potential ameliorative responses — harsh punishments, tolerance education, increasing the role of government and a host of other possibilities — it is not enough to simply assume that a problem exists. In order to compare one response against another, we must first engage in a discussion about the values we’re trying to protect over and above solving the problem.

For example, let us assume for the moment that cyberharassment raises only two issues: the speech rights of harassers and the speech rights of victims. If we have to factor into any solution concerns about these stakeholders’ free speech, must we weigh them equally? No. But, then how do we weigh them? Does it matter whose rights? Sure. Those mean harassing kids don’t deserve their rights, only victims do. But, we all know what that kind of reasoning implies. Does it matter that in our example both the perpetrators and victims are students? Do minors even have speech rights (ask Justice Thomas for a resounding “Pfft. Surely you jest!“).

Do we have an adequate basis for finding an answer other than our own personal prejudices? I think we do, but our Internet speech law misses the mark. The legislative history of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (the immunity clause) and judicial opinions in cases like Reno v. ACLU, Ashcroft v. ACLU and Zeran v. AmericaOnline suggest that we determine what to value based on our vision of the Internet user as a modern day “pamphleteer” who can reach out “to a world-wide audience,” and do so “anonymous[ly].” A person like that in an environment like that would value individual autonomy and autonomy-based free speech values more than anything else, devaluing other First Amendment values. That vision of the Internet user and his online experience, however, is simply incorrect. Anonymity as a technical matter does not really exist and social networking platforms like Facebook are making anonymity a thing of the past. And, being a pamphleteer that can reach anyone is a little difficult when all content goes through and can be arranged and censored by intermediaries. This Internet user with this online experience would not only be concerned with individual autonomy above all other things. He would be concerned with his reputation, which can be irreparably damaged by online defamation and misbehavior. And, he would be concerned with getting his voice out there, especially since he is completely dependent upon third parties for access.

  July 15, 2011 at 3:24 pm   Posted in: Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Web 2.0   Print This Post   5 Comments

Scoring Ourselves to Economic Death

posted by Danielle Citron

In The New York Times, Stephanie Rosenbloom asks readers to “imagine a world in which we are assigned a number that indicates how influential we are.”  That number would help determine our success at getting a job, hotel-room upgrade, break on a service, or free samples at the store.  As Rosenbloom tells us, imagine no more, companies, such as Klout, PeerIndex, and Twitter Grader, are mining our social media activities and assigning us influence scores.  Social scoring is based on our online social network activity, including the number of followers, friends, and the extent to which our online activity gets people moving.  If if you recommend a salon to your social network friends and they follow suit, your good word has two functions.  You’re doing a good thing for your friends and the salon (let’s hope), and now you’re doing good for you.  Because you have inspired people to take action, your influence score may rise.  In the present, people with high scores get preferential treatment by retailers.  More than 2,500 marketers are now using Klout’s data.  Audi will begin offering Facebook users promotions based on their Klout score.  The Las Vegas Palms Hotel and Casino is using Klout data to give highly rated guests an upgrade or tickets to a show.  In the future, those scores could be used by prospective employers, friends, and dates.

On the one hand, this market trend has something important to commend — its visibility.  Consumers can find out their influence scores and work to raise them.  By contrast, the impact of behavioral advertising is often hidden.  We are tracked and scored in databases and have no idea how it shakes out.  Joe Turow’s excellent book Niche Envy explains that consumers know very little about how their data personalizes market transactions.  Some individuals may end up as haves and others as have-nots, but neither group knows the extent of it.  As Turow explains, “our simple corner store is turning into a Marrakech bazaar–except that the merchant has been analyzing our diaries while we negotiate blindfolded, behind a curtain, through a translator.”  On the other hand, the information isn’t perfect and the algorithms secret so people may waste time doing things that they believe will raise their scores but don’t.  But that isn’t really troubling, unless every job or blog post had the effect we hoped it might.  What’s troubling is the trend’s implications for society and culture.  It seems old school to say that people blog, make friends, and engage in online chats to play, experiment, and create culture.  Now, they may feel pressured to do all of these things as a matter of economic necessity.  We may forgo experimentation for product endorsements, and idle chatter for better job prospects.  This makes our children’s choice to engage with social media seem like less of choice than a carefully cultivated necessity.  It also spells far more trouble for people who are already victimized, those who cyber mobs target with lies, threats, technical attacks, and privacy invasions.  They go offline or write under pseudonyms to protect themselves.  We now know that those choices (if we can call it that) cost more economically than they already do aside from the many other costs that my work discusses.  I imagine there’s more to this influence score story but I thought I’d share my initial take.

  June 28, 2011 at 6:24 pm   Posted in: Advertising, Architecture, Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Consumer Privacy), Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Another Day, Another Sexting Politician

posted by Ari Waldman

My first reaction to Congressman Anthony Weiner’s admission was, “Oh… my… god!” My second reaction was to laugh — no matter how old we men get, we are all still 12 year old boys inside — and think of a post filled with double entendre. My third reaction was to wonder what this deeply unfortunate story means for tech law.

(NOTE: Any double entendre is purely unintentional! My mother reads these things!).

Brooklyn Congressman Anthony Weiner, a man I have had the opportunity to meet and even challenge to running race, first alleged that his Twitter account had been hacked, then maintained that he did not send the tweet but the image could have been of him and then, finally and mercifully, admitted that he sent the tweet and was carrying on “inappropriate relationships” with “several” women that he met online. Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi has called for an ethics investigation, conservative pundits are calling for the Congressman’s head and the rest of us are probably unmoved. We live in a world where Eric Massa, Christopher Smith, Mark Foley and so many other politicians are sexually crazed and hooked into a virtual world they either do not understand or are simply too arrogant to care about.

Weinergate has obvious lessons on the perils of throwing no caution to the wind regarding your Internet presence. It also reminds us that some men in power tend to lose their grip on reality. But, you do not have to be in Congress to be victimized by careless, stupid digital behavior.

If one divorcing spouse wanted to prove infidelity, perhaps as part of denying a 50/50 split of marital assets, text messages, emails and self-taken photographs on the other spouses cell phone, Twitter history and email inbox may be fair game. Just last year, a New York state judge in part used evidence of a man’s sexually charged conversations with various women online to deny him child custody. Notably, there had been no evidence that this man ever met any of these women in person or committed any sexual act. He messaged them online, adding jpegs of himself. Another judge in New Hampshire refused to use evidence of a divorcing spouse’s virtual interactions without evidence of an actual affair outside the digital universe. Family court judges have wide latitude in this area, but what are your thoughts about these cases?

Outside of the family law context, lewd online behavior can trigger morality clauses in contracts. Assuming for the moment that morality clauses — provisions in contracts that restrict certain elements of or behaviors in a party’s personal life — are even enforceable, sending a lewd photograph of yourself to “several” women with whom you are having “inappropriate relationship[s]” could be grounds for dismissal.

The operative question is whether evidence of digital hanky-panky, without even a hint of actual infidelity or inappropriateness in real life, is enough wrongdoing in these and other contexts. It seems incongruous to simultaneously recognize the pervasiveness and salience of digital interaction today and still diminish the importance of digital inappropriate behavior below face-to-face conduct. We are both virtual and physical beings now. Excusing a person’s bad conduct in the former simply because it happened through packets of 1′s and 0′s on the Internet seems antiquated and a recipe for a blind spot in social norms.

  June 6, 2011 at 7:43 pm   Posted in: Culture, Current Events, Cyberlaw, Humor, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   6 Comments

Bullet, So Not Dodged

posted by Danielle Citron

The question that I had been dreading came at last: “Mom, can I have a Facebook page?”  My daughter provided a strong defense: she’s 13, so she meets Facebook’s Terms of Service age requirement; she’s nearly an adult in her religion’s eyes (her bat mitzvah is in a week); past practices proves she’s responsible; and well, she feels ready.  (And I just discovered, she’s done her homework: see this Yahoo Answers! “My mom won’t let me get a Facebook page, how do I convince her?” thread that I found on my computer).

Next came the conversation.  We talked about how increasingly social media activity is part of one’s life’s biography.  Anything said and done in social network spaces becomes part of who you are in our Information Age.  Colleges may ask for your Facebook password.  Over 70% of employers look at social media data for interviewing and hiring (and sad to say, the outcomes are grim for applicants who over 60% of the time don’t get the interview or job due to social network profiles).  It’s not just what you post that speaks volumes — your social network (friends and their friends) tells some of your story for you.  There goes any control that you thought you had.  FB users often wrestle with whether they should de-friend those whose online personas don’t match their sensibilities (or the way in which they want others to perceive them).  This means that users need to keep a careful eye on their friends’ profiles (as well as ever-changing privacy settings).

That’s a lot of responsibility.  Or, as Bill Keller of the New York Times put it when he allowed his 13-year old daughter to join Facebook, he felt “a little as if I had passed my child a pipe of crystal meth.“  Beyond the potential privacy and reputational concerns that accompany social media use, an online life has other potential perils, like overuse (and thus inattention to studies, face-to-face family time, etc.) that cyber-pessimists underscore (see Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows).  And bullying, serious harassment, bigotry increasingly appear in mainstream social media in ways that kids can’t necessarily avoid (my work explores those problems, see here, here, and here, as well as terrific work by guest bloggers Ari Waldman and Mary Anne Franks).  Of course, there’s also lots of positive stuff emerging from these networked spaces.  Social media outlets like Facebook allow us to enact our personalities.  They let us express ourselves in ever-changing and expanding ways.  FB and other outlets host civic engagement as Helen Norton and I have emphasized.

I wonder, too, if my kid has a meaningful choice.  Can digital natives really stay away from social media if all of their friends socialize there?  And will employers and colleges expect that applicants partake in these activities because everyone else does?  Someday, will resisting having a Facebook profile express something negative about you?  Will it signal that you’re not socially adjusted or successful?  As Scott Peppet underscores in his work, we may be forced to give up our privacy to show that we are indeed healthy, social, smart, and the like.  That’s a lot to process, right?  I’m going to chew on this a while.  Your thoughts are most welcome!

  June 4, 2011 at 11:19 am   Posted in: Architecture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Web 2.0   Print This Post   5 Comments

Cyberharassment’s Waterloo

posted by Ari Waldman

I begin my Co-Op blogging stint with deep appreciation for Danielle Citron’s invitation and for the entire Co-Op community’s indulgence. I am honored to be a small part of a wonderful online community that brings out the best in us and, for that matter, Web 2.0. My name is Ari, I am a Legal Scholar Teaching Fellow (just like a VAP) at California Western School of Law and I am a student of the interplay among the First Amendment, the Internet and other modern technologies and their effects on minority populations, like gays and lesbians. I go on the professor job market this Fall. I have a weekly blog (every Wednesday) over at the country’s most popular gay news site, Towleroad, for those interested in perspectives on LGBT legal issues for a mass audience. I also have a healthy relationship with physical fitness and an unhealthy relationship with the store Jack Spade. If there’s counseling for the latter, I’d appreciate a reference. Kidding…

For my month of blogging, I hope to engage with you in a few conversations, mostly about cyberharassment and the First Amendment, and hopefully with a healthy dose of humor.

My current project is the third in a series of projects about cyberharassment. The previous articles, available here, address the effects of cyberharassment on LGBT youth, argue for the use of affirmative “soft power” rather than after-the-fact criminalization to solve the problem and create a new analytical framework for adjudicating student free speech defenses to a school’s authority to punish cyberaggressors. Now I am considering the effect that cyberharassment, particularly harassment of a minority group, has on civic participation and the realization of democratic values. I argue that Internet intermediaries self-regulation of their sites and services to filter out hate, sexual harassment and other aggression conforms with long-standing First Amendment values.

Like President Obama likes to say, let me be clear. I do not mean to suggest that the First Amendment applies as a limit on the activities of private actors like Facebook or MySpace or Google; rather, I think that contrary to libertarian First Amendment scholars, we can expect these online intermediaries to regulate content and say that doing so reflects the democratic interests that underly the First Amendment.

Here’s the draft argument in brief that I am currently working out: The view of the Internet as an unencumbered and unfettered town square deserving the same Rawlsian liberal approach to free speech is wrong. Every online interaction is governed by intermediaries of varying kinds, all of which are the filters through which our online speech makes it through to our online communities. Traditional intermediaries have the power to regulate content consistent with the First Amendment, especially when not doing so would interfere with their and their users’ ability to participate in civil society. We see this more Aristotelian/communitarian approach to First Amendment values in intermediary jurisprudence — from publishers to book stores, and from schools to workplaces. And, like schools and workplaces, which can regulate their members’ speech in order to fulfill the institutions’ purposes, so too can online intermediaries like Facebook.

This project is in the early stages, and I always welcome comments/suggestions/evisceration of the argument. More to come…

I look forward to continuing this and other discussions with this splendid community.

  June 1, 2011 at 10:52 am   Posted in: Constitutional Law, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Legal Theory, LGBT, Web 2.0   Print This Post   5 Comments

Wikipedia’s Efforts to Close its Gender Gap

posted by Danielle Citron

Time magazine recently did a true-to-form story on Wikipedia, where guest editors (and our very own featured author) Jonathan Zittrain (see here too), Robert McHenry, Benjamin Mako Hill, and Mike Schroepfer assisted in writing/editing/re-writing a feature entitled Wikipedia’s “Ten Years of Inaccuracy and Remarkable Detail.” As the piece explained, Wikipedia just celebrated its 10th birthday.  The site has 17 million entries in more than 250 languages, quite a feat given that Encyclopedia Brittanica only has 120,000 and only in English.  The Time wiki-like piece notes that Wikipedia has a “diverse, international body of contributors.”

According to The New York Times, most contributors are male.  More specifically, “less than 15 percent of its hundreds of thousands of contributors are female.”  This, in turn, has skewed the gender disparity of topics and emphasis.  Wikimedia’s executive director Sue Gardner explains that topics favored by girls such as friendship bracelets can seem short when compared with lengthy articles on something boys typically like such as toy soldiers or baseball cards.  The New York Times notes that a category with five Mexican feminist writers might not seem so impressive when compared with 45 articles on characters in “The Simpsons.”

Why is this so?  Joseph Reagle, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard and author of “Good Faith Collaboration: The Culture of Wikipedia,” explains that Wikipedia’s early contributors shared “many characteristics with the hard-driving hacker crowd,” including an ideology that “resists any efforts to impose rules or even goals like diversity, as well as a culture that may discourage women.”  He notes that adopting an ideology of openess means being “open to very difficult, high-conflict people, even misogynists.”  The demographics of Wikipedia’s editors may also stem, in part, from the tendency of women to be “less willing to assert their opinions in public.”

How Wikipedia is now, and has been, responding is worth noting.  Sue Gardner told the Times that she hopes to raise the share of women contributors through subtle persuasion and outreach to welcome newcomers to Wikipedia.  Dave Hoffman and Salil Mehra’s terrific piece Wikitruth Through Wikiorder demonstrates that the site has already fostered efforts to create a more inclusive environment.  As Hoffman and Mehra explain, Wikipedia has an Arbitration Committee whose volunteer members rule on disputes and set forth concrete rules on how users should behave.  The Arbitration Committee has sanctioned users who make homophobic, ethnic, racial or gendered attacks or who stalk and harass others.  According to Hoffman and Mehra’s empirical study, in cases when either impersonation or anti-social conduct like hateful attacks occur, the Administrative Committee will ban the user in 21% of cases.  Wikipedia’s more than 1,500 administrators, in turn, enforce those rules.  Wikipedia also permits users to report impolite, uncivil, or other difficult communications with editors in its Wikiquette alerts notice board.

  February 1, 2011 at 11:39 am   Posted in: Anonymity, Architecture, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Social Network Websites, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   5 Comments

Love’s Labour’s Lost in Cyberspace

posted by Danielle Citron

Early this month, a class of  Match.com subscribers sued the service for breach of contract, breach of the implied covenant of good faith, and negligent misrepresentation in federal district court in the Northern District of Texas.  The complaint alleges that while Match.com claims to have “millions of active subscribers, well over half of the profiles on its site belong to inactive members who have canceled their membership or allowed their subscriptions to lapse and/or are fake and fraudulent profiles posted by scammers and others.”  It asserts that as for inactive members, Match.com “takes virtually no action to remove these profiles . . . for months and sometimes years,” only removing them after former subscribers call to complain.  As to fake and fraudulent profiles, the complaint states that Match.com “makes little to no effort to vet, police, or remove these profiles.”

According to the complaint, Match.com intentionally failed to remove the profiles of inactive and former subscribers in order to induce members of the class action “to either become or remain paying members.”  The complaint claims that Match.com: (1) “routinely and intentionally represents that there are significantly more active members on the website than there actually are,” (2) falsely labels profiles as “active within [#] days” when the accounts belong to canceled and/or inactive accounts,” (3) sends “former and inactive members ‘winks’ informing them that a potential match is trying to contact them in order to get them to renew their subscriptions (only to find out after they do so that the supposed seeker does not exist), (4) fails “to effectively vet new profiles to determine whether they are fake or fraudulent despite easily discernible ‘red flags’ (including repeated use of imagery and language, and use of notorious IP address origins), and (5) misleads users into believing that the site has equal numbers of male and female members while the “makeup of actual active users is heavily skewed towards single males.”

To support their allegations, Plaintiffs point to changes in the site’s architecture.  For instance, whereas members could themselves hide their profiles after becoming inactive members from 2006 to 2007, only Match.com employees could block a member’s profile from view beginning in 2008.  The complaint also recounts the testimony of former Match.com employees who attest that the company’s database included a “huge” number of “filler profiles.”  As for the complaint’s allegation that Match.com failed to police the site for fraudulent members, the plaintiffs seemingly point to language in the Terms of Use agreement that permits Match.com to review and delete content that violates its terms.  They also suggest that “computer technologies exist that would allow the company to effectively and efficiently police its website for the benefit and safety of its customers.” Read the rest of this post »

  January 27, 2011 at 2:27 pm   Posted in: Contract Law & Beyond, Current Events, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   2 Comments

Advancing the Fight Against Cyber Hate with Greater Transparency and Clarity about Hate Speech Policies

posted by Danielle Citron

Today, online intermediaries voluntarily seek to combat digital hatred, often addressing hate speech in their Terms of Service Agreements or Community Guidelines.  Those agreements and guidelines tend to include vague prohibitions of hate speech.  The terms of service for Yahoo!, for instance, requires users of some services to refrain from generating “hateful or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable” content without saying more.  Intermediaries can advance the fight against digital hate with more transparency and clarity about the terms of, and harms to be prevented by, their hate speech policies, as well as the consequences of policy violations.  With more transparency and clarity, intermediaries can make behavioral expectations more understandable and users can more fully appreciate the significance of digital citizenship, see here, here, here, and here.  The more intermediaries and users understand why a particular policy prohibits a certain universe of speech, the more likely they can then put into practice, and adhere to, that policy in a way that achieves those objectives.

Before seeking to provide guidance on how intermediaries might do that, it is important to recognize that efforts to define hate speech raise at least two significant challenges.  First, many disagree over which, if any, of the harmful effects potentially generated by such speech are sufficiently serious to warrant action.  Second, controversy also remains about the universe of speech that is actually likely to trigger harms deemed important enough to avoid.  So, for example, even if an intermediary defines hate speech as that which tends to incite violence against targeted groups, how do we determine which speech has the propensity to do that?  Much of this lies in identifying the factors relevant to making such causal predictions.  In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming BU Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I don’t pretend that that we can make hard choices easy and recognize that intermediaries’ choices among various options may turn on a variety of issues: their assessment of the relative costs of hate speech and its constraint; empirical predictions about what sort of speech is indeed likely to lead to what sorts of harms; the breadth of their business interests, available resources, and the like; and their sense of corporate social responsibility to foster digital citizenship.  Intermediaries’ choices on how to define hate speech and the harms that they seek to avoid — however difficult — can and should be made in a more principled and transparent way. Read the rest of this post »

  January 7, 2011 at 11:36 am   Posted in: Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Google & Search Engines, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Ammori on Assange, Free Speech, and Wikileaks

posted by Danielle Citron

At Balkanization, Professor Marvin Ammori has a thoughtful post on the Wikileaks story.  Professor Ammori, who will be guest blogging with us soon, gave me the thumbs up on reproducing his post.  Hopefully, it will spark some interesting discussion on CoOp.  Here is Ammori’s post:

Many of our nation’s landmark free speech decisions are not about heroes–several are about flag-burners, racists, Klansmen, and those with political views outside the mainstream. And yet we measure our commitment to freedom of speech, in part, by our willingness to protect even their rights despite disagreement with what they say, and why they say it.

The story of Wikileaks publishing U.S. diplomatic cables has become the story of Julian Assange: is he a hero or villain, a high-tech terrorist or enemy combatant? Should the U.S., which may have already empanelled a grand jury in Virginia, prosecute him as a criminal under the Espionage Act of 1917 or under the computer fraud and abuse act?

Though I have spent years advocating for Internet freedom, I don’t think Assange is a hero for leaking these diplomatic cables.  According to plausible reports, the leaks have harmed U.S. interests, made the work of U.S. diplomats more difficult, likely endangered lives of allies, and may have set back democracy in Zimbabwe and perhaps elsewhere.  Even some of Assange’s friends at Wikileaks are doubting Assange’s heroism: a few left him to launch a rival site and to write a tell-all book.  Whatever the harms of secrecy and over-classification, Assange’s actions have caused tremendous damage.  No wonder polls show nearly 60% of Americans believe the U.S. should arrest Assange and charge him with a crime.

My initial reaction was similar.  I thought that if a case could be made against Assange, one should be made.

But, as time passed, the political and legal downsides of prosecution came into clearer focus, and I am rethinking that initial reaction.  Despite still believing Assange’s actions have been harmful, I have now come to the opposite conclusion—not for the benefit of Assange, but for the benefit of Americans and of the United States.

Prosecuting Assange could do more harm than good for our freedom of the press and would inflict further harm on diplomatic effectiveness.  Despite the appeal of prosecuting Assange, it is not worth the cost.  We will not get the cables back.  We will not deter aspiring Wikileakers, as both our allies and our enemies know.  We will, as Dean Geoffrey Stone has best articulated, likely sacrifice established principles of freedom of the press in doing so.

Here are some thoughts on why we should think twice about prosecuting Assange, categorized by harms to the U.S.’s freedom of the press and then harms to America’s diplomatic effectiveness. And, in advance, I thank the many scholars, policy experts, and friends who took the time to give me thoughts on earlier drafts of this post. Read the rest of this post »

  January 4, 2011 at 1:59 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Current Events, Cyberlaw, First Amendment, Media Law, Technology, Web 2.0, Wiki   Print This Post   One Comment

Rights and Responsibilities of Digital Citizenship

posted by Danielle Citron

In response to a previous post, Seth Finkelstein asked me to develop the implications of a conception of digital citizenship, and rightly so.  This post begins by explaining which intermediaries Helen Norton and I address and then develops our conception of digital citizenship in a bit more detail.  A follow-up post will provide preliminary suggestions about how intermediaries could, and should, educate users about their rights and responsibilities as digital citizens.

As Jack Balkin highlights, the “informational filter, not information, is king” in our digital age.  Internet intermediaries wield significant influence over our information landscape in much the same way that mass media does.  Search engines, such as Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, determine “what we read” and “who gets heard” by producing links to content in response to user requests.  Popular social media sites, such as Facebook, YouTube, and Digg, structure online environments that enable large groups of individuals to connect with each other.  While highlighting certain content and voices, Internet intermediaries downplay, block, and delete others.  Christopher Yoo has extolled intermediaries’ exercise of editorial discretion as “promot[ing] important free speech values by helping shield audiences from unwanted speech and by helping them identify and access desired content.”  As he observes, “the image of the Internet as an unintermediated experience, in which speakers speak directly to audiences without passing through any gatekeepers, is more myth than reality.  The real question is not whether some actor, but rather which actor, will serve as the intermediary.”

Commentators have expressed concern about governmental efforts to enlist intermediaries as “proxy censors to control the flow of information.”  In Intermediaries and Hate Speech: Fostering Digital Citizenship for the Information Age (forthcoming Boston University Law Review 2011), Helen Norton and I focus exclusively on intermediaries’ purely voluntary decisions to address hate speech.  As private entities, intermediaries can, and do, refuse to address cyber hate.  Twitter has taken this position.   Rather than taking a neutral position vis-a-vis online hatred, other intermediaries encourage it.  Consider the social network site Hate Book whose motto is “Post something you hate!” and thousands of websites, blogs, social network sites, and the like designed to spread hate.  Our conception of digital citizenship addresses intermediaries that choose to prohibit hateful content (and those might do so in the future) rather than intermediaries that ignore or support it.  Pursuant to terms of service agreements and community guidelines, intermediaries remove, denounce, or ignore instances of cyber hate.  Yet beyond vaguely-worded prohibitions of “hateful or offensive” speech, intermediaries often provide little explanation or consistency for their actions.  They leave unstated and perhaps unexplored how their decisions regarding cyber hate impact citizens whose capability to participate meaningfully offline and online depends upon their inclusion in networked spaces.  Intermediaries ought to teach users how to be responsible and respected digital citizens. Read the rest of this post »

  November 28, 2010 at 10:53 am   Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Education, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Virtual Perils of Cyber Hate and the Need for a Conception of Digital Citizenship

posted by Danielle Citron

Although intermediaries’ services can facilitate and reinforce a citizenry’s activities, they pose dangers that work to undermine them.  Consider the anonymous and pseudonymous nature of online discourse.  Intermediaries permit individuals to create online identities unconnected to their legal identities.  Freed from a sense of accountability for their online activities, citizens might engage in productive discourse in ways that they might not if directly correlated with their offline identities.  Yet the sense of anonymity breeds destructive behavior as well.  Social science research suggests that people behave aggressively when they believe that they cannot be observed and caught.  Destructive online behavior spills offline, working a fundamental impairment of citizenship.

For instance, digital expressions of hatred helped inspire the 1999 shooting of African-Americans, Asian-Americans, and Jews in suburban Chicago by Benjamin Smith, a member of the white supremacist group World Church of the Creator (WCOTC) that promotes racial holy war.  Just months before the shootings, Smith told documentary filmmaker Beverly Peterson that: “It wasn’t really ‘til I got on the Internet, read some literature of these groups that . . . it really all came together.”  More recently, the Facebook group Kick a Ginger Day urged members to get their “steel toes ready” for a day of attacking individuals with red hair. The site achieved its stated goal: students punched and kicked children with red hair and dozens of Facebook members claimed credit for attacks.

Cyber hate can produce so much psychological damage as to undermine individuals’ ability to engage in public discourse.  For instance, posters on a white supremacist website targeted Bonnie Jouhari, a civil rights advocate and mother of a biracial girl.  They revealed Ms. Jouhari’s home address and her child’s picture.  The site showed a picture of Ms. Jouhari’s workplace exploding in flames next to the threat that “race traitors” are “hung from the neck from the nearest tree or lamp post.”  Posters included bomb-making instructions and a picture of a hooded Klansman holding a noose.  Aside from moving four times, Ms. Jouhari and her daughter have withdrawn completely from public life; neither has a driver’s license, a voter registration card or a bank account because they don’t want to create a public record of their whereabouts.

Search engines also ensure the persistence and production of cyber hate that undermines citizens’ capability to engage in offline and online civic engagement.  Because search engines reproduce information cached online, people cannot depend upon time’s passage to alleviate the damage that online postings cause.  Unlike leaflets or signs affixed to trees that would decay or disappear not long after their publication, now search engines index all of the content hosted by social media intermediaries, producing it instantaneously. Read the rest of this post »

  November 27, 2010 at 3:49 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Law and Inequality, Legal Ethics, Legal Theory, Politics, Psychology and Behavior, Race, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Unwitting Mashup of Facebook and Juicy Campus?

posted by Danielle Citron

In a move that recalls the postings on the now-defunct Juicy Campus, Facebook groups devote themselves to vulgar descriptions of female high school students.  As Donna St. George of the Washington Post reported on November 11, a Facebook page targeted 30 female students from the T.C. Williams High School in Alexandria, Virginia.  It featured photographs of the students accompanied by “offensive or sexual comments.”  Another similar page included a picture of the school’s female principal.  The Daily Beast recently reported that Choate Rosemary Hall boarding school banned access to Facebook through campus computers after discovering a 200-plus-page-long threat penned by female students that disparaged fellow female students.  The Facebook page described Choate students as “hos” and “gross and faked and spray tanned.”

Facebook’s Terms of Service requires users to agree to refrain from bullying, intimidating, or harassing other users.”  Pursuant to that policy (or so we can guess), Facebook took down the page of the 30 girls with the sexually demeaning comments five days after T.C. Williams High School’s principal filed a complaint with Facebook.  Despite Facebook’s real-name culture, the author of the Facebook page has not been identified, an unsurprising result given the advantages provided ill-meaning individuals who want to evade responsibility for online activity.  In the boarding school matter, it seems that a student copied the thread, publishing it for the consumption of students (and everyone else) who were not privy to the Facebook page.  According to the Daily Beast, school administrators “hired a computer forensics expert to track how it had been made public.”  Two of the girls who wrote the post were expelled and four were suspended.

In the T.C. Williams High School matter, the principal went on the school’s PA system for two days in a row to let students know that she thought the page was “totally offensive.”  The Washington Post reports that the principal also asked students to avoid accessing it: “We’re better than this,” she told the students.  If that is all the principal did, it seems a weak showing of moral leadership and civic education.  Hopefully, the incident began a longer-term conversation about many things, including bullying, gender harassment, the risks of online activities, and the responsibilities of students while online.  Now, the school officials’ response in the Choate matter is worth discussing.  Norm Pattis, a Connecticut trial lawyer, contends that the school’s response is too harsh given the dire consequences of a school expulsion on a student’s chances of getting into college.  Prohibiting Facebook on campus may also be an empty gesture.  On the one hand, Choate students have continued to tweet and tumbl on their school accounts.  They also can access social media including Facebook on their mobile devices, raising the same concerns of online civility.  On the other, as Pattis suggests, the school missed a crucial teaching opportunity (beyond a 90-minute discussion with students) on how to be leaders, rather than the quick fix of banning Facebook on the campus network.  That sounds right to me, too.

  November 26, 2010 at 5:06 pm   Posted in: Anonymity, Current Events, Cyber Civil Rights, Feminism and Gender, First Amendment, Privacy, Privacy (Gossip & Shaming), Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   3 Comments

Facebook and Google: Twenty-First Century Institutions for Civic Engagement

posted by Danielle Citron

Democracy is often said to work best when citizens build networks of social interaction and trust.  Civic engagement informs the inputs into the political process.  So, too, it facilitates the formation of social capital, i.e., interpersonal connections and the norms of trust and reciprocity that arise from them.  Social capital allows groups to overcome collective action problems so that they can “accomplish things together.”  Moreover, civic engagement allows people to see their lives as entwined with others, to “feel [themselves] one of the public,” and “to weigh interests not [their] own.”  In turn, citizens inculcate “habits of cooperation and public-spiritedness.”  Civic engagement reinforced Alexis de Tocqueville’s “self-interest properly understood”—i.e., weighing interests other than one’s own—and encouraged “responsible citizenship.”

As Benjamin Barber explains, mediating institutions “give expression to the idea of citizenship.”  This is especially so when institutions cultivate norms of trust across lines of social division (often referred to as “bridging ties”).  In Amy Gutmann’s view, the “more economically, ethnically, and religiously heterogeneous the membership of an association is, the greater its capacity to cultivate the kind of public discourse and deliberation that is conducive to democratic citizenship.”  According to Neil Netanel, a liberal democratic polity needs citizens to encounter competing ideals so that they can test their commitments and gain empathy for those with whom they disagree.

Alexis de Tocqueville emphasized the importance of townships and civic associations for citizens to acquire the skills and habits of dialogue.  John Dewey found schools uniquely situated to teach children and adults about the social meaning of community.  In his view, schools brought diverse people together in ways that “introduce deeper sympathy and wider understanding.”  For Cynthia Estlund, the workplace stood  as the most important site for the formation of social and political views because it permits informal discourse among people “who are both connected with each other, so that they are inclined to listen, and different from each other, so that they are exposed to diverse ideas and experiences.”  She also emphasized its atmosphere of enforced civility and equality, which allows diverse voices to be heard.

Online intermediaries constitute important twenty-first century mediating institutions.  They extend workplaces, schoolhouses, and community centers to digital spaces.  In this way, they supplement real-space exchanges of information and opinion with virtual ones.  Companies encourage employees to use social network sites to deepen workplace relationships.  Workers, in turn, discuss issues in person and in online postings.  Student organizations meet face-to-face in classrooms and in social network groups.  Neighborhood communities combine offline activities with online ones.  Google’s Blogger hosts blogs designed to facilitate commentary on community events.  In these and other infinitely different ways, users of online intermediaries perform their roles as citizens.

Worth recognizing are the potential democratic goods facilitated by intermediaries.  Online intermediaries continue discussions among diverse groups of workers and students who are inclined to listen to each other.  Because social media brings the personal lives of individuals to the fore, it has the capacity to deepen empathy for different backgrounds.  Of virtual communications amongst workers, Cynthia Estlund notes: Because the workplace would provide face-to-face interactions, “electronic communications can expand and equalize work relationships.”  Social science research shows that social network sites support loose social ties that allow users to maintain networks of relationships.  A 2007 study found that Facebook does indeed cultivate bridging social capital.  Because intermediaries enable groups to combine real-space activities with virtual ones, they impact civic engagement through their architecture and content choices. Read the rest of this post »

  November 26, 2010 at 3:30 pm   Posted in: Culture, Cyber Civil Rights, Cyberlaw, Google & Search Engines, Politics, Social Network Websites, Technology, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

Data-ism: Fuel for Frey’s Fiction Factory?

posted by Frank Pasquale

Momus once predicted that, on the Internet, everyone will be famous for 15 people. But there are still valiant warriors against media fragmentation. Epagogix tries to find the movie scripts that will appeal to wide audiences. Now James Frey is assembling writers, Andy Warhol factory-style, to try find the next Twilight:

This is the essence of the terms being offered by Frey’s company Full Fathom Five: In exchange for delivering a finished book within a set number of months, the writer would receive $250 (some contracts allowed for another $250 upon completion), along with a percentage of all revenue generated by the project, including television, film, and merchandise rights—30 percent if the idea was originally Frey’s, 40 percent if it was originally the writer’s. The writer would be financially responsible for any legal action brought against the book but would not own its copyright.

Full Fathom Five could use the writer’s name or a pseudonym without his or her permission, even if the writer was no longer involved with the series, and the company could substitute the writer’s full name for a pseudonym at any point in the future. The writer was forbidden from signing contracts that would “conflict” with the project; what that might be wasn’t specified. The writer would not have approval over his or her publicity, pictures, or biographical materials. There was a $50,000 penalty if the writer publicly admitted to working with Full Fathom Five without permission.

At this point, perhaps a purely mechanized “writing program” would be a better approach for Frey. Kurzweil’s patented a poetry generator, and the Dada Engine can use recursive grammars to compose text. Whatever the method, I have a sense that the story of the motivations of the creator of the writing machine/collective will always be more interesting than whatever it manages to produce (just like the NYM article about Frey’s work is more interesting than Frey’s company, and Richard Powers’s Galatea 2.2 won’t be surpassed by the machines it describes.). The article mentions that Frey is inspired by artists—I wonder if one of them is Jean Tinguely?

Image Credit: Photo of Dadaist sculpture by acb.

  November 17, 2010 at 10:21 pm   Posted in: Humor, Intellectual Property, Philosophy of Social Science, Technology, Uncategorized, Web 2.0   Print This Post   No Comments

• « Older Entries
• Newer Entries »