No Section 230 Has Nothing To Do With Horrific NY Times Story Of Online Stalker Getting Revenge For Decades' Old Slight
If you haven't read it yet, I highly recommend Kash Hill's incredible NY Times story about a clearly disturbed individual, who admits to "suffering from severe mental health illnesses," who filled the web with horribly defamatory information about a random guy and everyone in his family. It turned out that the reason appeared to be that nearly 30 years ago, the guy's father had fired the woman from her job in a real estate office. The story is all too familiar to anyone who has experienced harassment online. One of the tactics used was posting completely made up information on a variety of "gripe sites," many of which do very little moderation, or will only take down information if you pay. These sites often fill up with garbage, and certain people have learned to abuse those sites. Indeed, there seem to be a few people who regularly attack everyone they feel has wronged them using such sites.
The article focuses mainly on Ripoff Report, a site we've written about many times in the past, in part because of its various court cases that have often created good Section 230 law. That's not to say Ripoff Report is a good player in the space. Other stories have revealed some highly questionable behavior and the company's position regarding how it handles content moderation is one that I think is short sighted and extremely unhelpful. There are, also, other sites in the space with a wide variety of policies, some much better than Ripoff Report, some much worse.
The article does mention Section 230, and suggests that it is somehow to blame for the problems experienced by the victims of the person in the story. However, I am perplexed about why and what it has to do with this story in any way. The abuser is Canadian. Most of the woman's victims are from Canada and the UK, not the US. The woman doing the abuse was identified and sued for defamation, and a Canadian court deemed her a vexatious litigant and ordered her to stop attacking people online. When it continued, she was held in contempt of court and sentenced to prison.
And even the main site listed in the story, Ripoff Report, notes that it responded to lawyers from some of the victims and took down the stories at issue.
So, we're talking about a non-US abuser and non-US victims, and a US website that actually took down the content. It did take more time than they had hoped, but the system still did work.
Or, some might argue, the problem is Google, that shows these sites way up the listings on searches on your names. Except... that's not true either. As the article notes, Google has increasingly downranked these kinds of sites:
Now Google will remove other harmful content, including revenge porn and private medical information. At the end of 2019, it introduced a new category of information it will take out of your results: sites with exploitative removal practices." Google also started down-ranking some of the complaint" sites, including Ripoff Report.
And yet, some people are running around saying that this article proves that Section 230 or anonymity is a problem. Except that in this case the abuser was not anonymous (or, at the very least, victims figured out who it was relatively quickly, and others seemed to know right away). Anonymity wasn't the issue here. And it's not clear how 230 was the problem either.
Heather Burns, from the Open Rights Group in the UK notes that the real lesson of this story is that so many other systems failed -- and people magically and wrongly expect intermediary liability laws to pick up and carry the weight of all those other failures:
My takeaway from this awful saga - and January, for that matter - is that intermediary liability law is now expected to carry the weight where social safety nets, mental health services, and criminal law enforcement have failed. That's not what it's for. https://t.co/ByWD5kjLbB
- Heather Burns (@WebDevLaw) February 1, 2021
That says:
My takeaway from this awful saga - and January, for that matter - is that intermediary liability law is now expected to carry the weight where social safety nets, mental health services, and criminal law enforcement have failed. That's not what it's for.
And that's exactly right. There are many large societal issues which need fixing in this world, including safety nets, mental health systems, both criminal and civil law procedures and enforcement. And if all those systems fail, blaming intermediary liability laws for not magically fixing them all seems incredibly misplaced. As for bad websites, there is no easy fix there, and changing Section 230 isn't going to fix any of it. As the article itself notes, after Ripoff Report did take down the defamatory posts, the abuser simply increased the posting to other sites and started attacking Ripoff Report too. This is a common practice. The abusive person clearly has mental health issues, and we should be focusing the blame on the system that failed her and her continued abuse -- not blaming the law in a different country because not every site deleted the content that she just kept posting anyway.