Wow, it's been two months since this came around, huh?
I haven't really had time to write up a huge breakdown like I wanted to, but something happened recently that I want to post as a example.
Odious goblin-man Milo Yiannopoulos was banned from Twitter again, apparently because of disseminating faked tweets by actress and buster of ghosts Leslie Jones that made her look bad.
The question "should he be banned from Twitter" is different from "is this some sort of prosecutable offense," or "is this defamatory?" Because if it's not, it is protected by the First Amendment, full stop.
Now, Twitter can make whatever rules it wants. If it says that promoting faked tweets that you KNOW to be fake to make someone look bad is a bannable offense, they can do that, but good luck proving that. In fact, the fact that it's protected speech doesn't mean that it can't be taken off of Twitter. A website is private property, and they can run it however they want.
But... are people making fake tweets about Donald Trump going to get the same treatment? Before you draw some material difference between Trump and Mrs. Jones, please think on why one should have more or less constitutional protection than the other.
Removing things from a website should really be a last resort, unless it's a policy that will be followed rigorously. Hopefully, the Internet can be strong enough that we can find that the tweets are fake. We don't need to shut Milo up. We just need to remember and express to others that he's the sort of guy who would purposefully spread falsified tweets... to hurt someone he doesn't even know, or maybe for the sheer fun of it.
Remember: nobody needs free speech rights to protect admirable speech by people we like. It's designed to protect despised speech by people we hate. Yiannopoulos deserves contempt for monetizing bigotry, and his fans are loathsome, but his speech is protected.
So... what sort of speech should be banned from Twitter, and possibly made actually illegal? You have to think of the kind of speech that has the least expressive value and has the greatest ability to harm. Slander and that is up there, but those are already illegal.
I propose the most loathsome thing you can do with your Twitter account... is the dox. For this purpose, the dox is "releasing someone's personal information, their real name, their address, phone number, out into the Internet without that person's consent." For now, let's leave the intent out of it. Also, we're not going with Rebecca Watson's troublesome definition, which included releasing the email addresses of people who write her nasty letters. That's on a far smaller level, to the point where calling it a "dox" trivializes real doxxes. I wish we had a better word for that.
At the height of the Trayvon Martin scandal, someone doxxed George Zimmerman, the man who, by his own admission, took Martin's life. It got retweeted by a lot of people, including Spike Lee, because apparently he wanted to make sure Bamboozled wasn't the worst thing he ever did. It turned out that the address wasn't even actually George Zimmerman's; it was some very unfortunate and entirely innocent people.
Now, let's say it really was Zimmerman's house. What good does is do to publicize his address? So we can send him disapproving letters ? No, doxxes are used to intimidate and scare people, to bring crowds of people with far more emotion than sense storming around someone's home, to cause them stress and fear and whatever else.
Maybe you'd approve of that happening to Zimmerman. Surely, he deserves to drown in alligator shit. But that's not how we're supposed to do things in America. If someone shot George Zimmerman dead in an act of retribution, that would STILL be wrong. And if he was killed by someone who got his address through a dox, anyone who perpetrated the dox would be partially responsible for disseminating it. In a society, there is no such thing as justice dispensed by an individual. There is only revenge.
You could say, "Well, that information is out there anyway. We have no responsibility to whatever people chose to do with that information. Now please hang on as I hand out these swords to a crowd of nearsighted children. What they do with them is their business."
As you can see, that cuts none of my mustard. Anyone who would use their freedom of speech that casually and wash their hands of the responsibility doesn't deserve it... but they will still have it.
The dox really does contribute absolutely nothing to civilized society. If you've ever thought about looking up where someone lives... seriously, what got you in such a lather that you thought, "I'm going to go to this place's house and stomp on all the flowerbeds?" That's not healthy or constructive.
So, my Twitter rules would start with the highest crime at the top. If you make a Tweet that is a dox, as defined above, you get your account shut down. To determine what is a dox and what isn't, the "report" function could have a setting that says, "This is a dox!" and once someone (or possibly many, to avoid abuse) reports it, the tweet vanishes from all public view to stop its spreading, and the tweeter is temporarily suspended, along with anyone who retweeted it.
Then, a REAL LIFE PERSON who works for Twitter, and is in possession of good sense and a desire to follow the rules, investigates it and sees if it's a dox. If it is, the doxxer loses their account and can never be on Twitter again. The retweeters and other spreaders get a very stern message, telling them never to do it again, and if they proliferate a dox again, they will be banned as if they were the doxxer themselves.
If it turns out it AIN'T a dox, the person who reported it as a dox loses their report function for a great length of time, maybe six months. If they abuse it again, they get double the time without a report function. Maybe doing it too many times would result in a ban.
The details could be worked out a little, and it would have to be phrased very carefully to avoid being overturned as unconstitutional, but it's not impossible to make limits to the 1st Amendment and pass an anti-doxxing law. It's just really really difficult. And it shouldn't be easy to take away the rights in the Constitution. They are important, even as people sneer at them without even understanding them.
They just passed the "revenge porn" ban somewhere, didn't they? We'll see how enforceable that is, and if it stands to constitutional muster, but surely that's another act we can agree could stand to be specifically non-protected speech. The internet has plenty of pictures of naked people without anyone being there against their will.
On that rock, the rock of stopping people from doxxing.. that would be where I would start shaving the barest edge off the 1st Amendment. The trade for losing valueless speech and gaining some safety would be an appropriate trade.
I hope. I'm sure somewhere along the way, it would get fucked up. Maybe I've already fucked it up. I don't know. But at least I recognize how important those rights are, unlike some people... who are running for President.
https://popehat.com/2016/07/20/lawsplainer-are-milos-faked-tweets-defamatory/