Retired journalist John Seigenthaler is understandably upset at the “biography” posting about him on Wikipedia and writes in USA Today about his experience with “Internet character assassination.â€?
The Wikipedia article read in part:
“John Seigenthaler Sr. was the assistant to Attorney General Robert Kennedy in the early 1960’s. For a brief time, he was thought to have been directly involved in the Kennedy assassinations of both John, and his brother, Bobby. Nothing was ever proven.â€?
He explains his frustration…
“Major communications Internet companies are bound by federal privacy laws that protect the identity of their customers, even those who defame online. Only if a lawsuit resulted in a court subpoena would BellSouth give up the name.”
He tells us that U.S. law protects corporations like Wikipedia from being treated as publisher or speaker so that unlike print and broadcast companies, online service providers cannot be sued for disseminating defamatory attacks on citizens posted by others.
“And so we live in a universe of new media with phenomenal opportunities for worldwide communications and research — but populated by volunteer vandals with poison-pen intellects. Congress has enabled them and protects them.”
Times have certainly changed. Here’s a previous post of mine on “Internet Character Assassination” that dealt a little more with the importance of free speech against corporate interest. This USAtoday story is way more sympathetic than the Forbes article that inspired that post and it begs the question of how to deal with online gossip. Are we gonna be surrounded by gossip for the rest of our lives as if we’re trapped eternally a in a high-school or office from hell ?
How scary.
via: Public Eye , a CBS blog
