A vast web of vengeance

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/30/technology/change-my-google-results.html

by tysone • 5 years ago

229 104 5 years ago

danso• 5 years ago

The last line FTA:

Yet even that hasn’t solved the problem. See for yourself: Do a Google search for “Guy Babcock.”

The first "traditional" result for Babcock's name is now the NYT story, but the first 5+ (even moreso on mobile) are thumbnails [0] showing his image with a text overlay of his name and "paedophile".

The first 3 thumbnails link to the sites cheaterboard dot com, cheaters dot news, thecheatalert dot com. The fourth thumbnail is a Pinterest account linking to a ripoffreport post.

All these "top" results feature the same "content" [1] – the victim's name spammed repeatedly, along with "paedophile" and "racist POS".

I know spam abuse detection isn't trivial, but this seems like the most basic kind of spam abuse that Google claims it knows how to downrank.

[0] https://i.imgur.com/gosroWQ.jpg

[1] https://i.imgur.com/kFI9XNc.png

sebastien_b8• 5 years ago

Yeah I’m not sure it was a good idea of the author to include a link to that search from the article (seems like that would boost the existing results).

blakesterz• 5 years ago

I think I'd argue that it was a good idea. This isn't me linking to that from my blog that gets 100 views to a post. This is the NY Times linking to that. Love them or hate them, them linking to something will get attention, and I would bet that attention will lead to changes.

tedunangst• 5 years ago

I don't see how linking to a search would boost the results.

gowld4• 5 years ago

Or is down ranked, innit? The problem was (before the NYT article) that this person is not a public persona so there's no content to uprank above it.

baybal2• 5 years ago

Just get used to it.

It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value.

I've been on the Internet under a few identities since 1998, and has since stopped much trying hiding.

The more your online notoriety goes, the more your IRL consequences snowball.

I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!," and at most it will make people chuckle, and remark on you being famous.

xg15• 5 years ago

It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value.

It's been 30 years and so far it hasn't happened.

I also very much doubt it will ever happen as this would go against all we know about basic human psychology. Rumor sites such as this one tap into the same mechanism that makes rumors, conspiracy theories and superstions effective since forever: Once people have decided for whatever reason they trust a particular source of information, it will take some exceptional events to make them distrust it again. Someone else simply stating that the source should not be trusted is by far not enough.

blululu• 5 years ago

30 years is not a lot of time. People who grew up with the internet are only now coming into positions of power. A majority of American Internet users grew up in a very different era, and their experiences and expectations may not be reasonable in the current era. Furthermore they have been passing an understanding of media from the 70’s onto future generations. I suspect that it will take quite a lot of time for society at large to adjust.

For example, many kids are taught in school that Wikipedia is not reliable since anyone can edit it, whereas corporate publications are more trustworthy since they are written by experts whose reputation is at stake. Wikipedia is not always reliable but it is verifiable/auditable and this is a criteria of trustworthiness that is not widely appreciated for digital literacy.

ketamine__2• 5 years ago

It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value.

That was the case before the internet exploded in popularity. People were very suspicious.

Ekaros2• 5 years ago

It feels weird how things have changed in past 20 years. Like as child we learned not to trust anything on Internet. Or to share our own information... And then everyone started using social media and sharing everything...

Maybe we had the right thing then, if you are using your real name or connectible info keep it professional. And lot of information is false... But now it seems all that has gone away...

sn41• 5 years ago

It comes down to what counts as admissible evidence in court.

Also on and off, countries have tried asking travelers to submit all online social n/w profiles, under threat of perjury, during immigration. Every time there is a hue and cry, it gets rolled back, but one has to be vigilant.

sgnelson• 5 years ago

"It will come a time in US when people will come to understanding that the Internet exists, and one does not take any random thing on the Internet at face value."

I have to ask, have you heard of Qanon? Do you remember what happened in Washington DC on January 6th?

Because I've been on the Internet for quite a while now, and it's not getting better. It's getting worse. Much much worse.

notacoward5• 5 years ago

people will ... not take any random thing on the Internet at face value

Have you been following US politics lately? A great many people really seem to believe that Trump lost the election only because of massive voter fraud, that his enemies are literally harvesting children's blood for adrenochrome. And we're not talking just about random nobodies here. There's at least one member of the US congress (Marjorie Taylor Greene) who is pretty open about believing this stuff, and two or three more who are less obvious about it. I've been on the internet over a decade longer than you, and the trend has never been toward people being more discerning about what they read.

I've already written in this thread about being targeted, and it wasn't even the first time. The other, on LambdaMOO, got written up in a book. OP mentions not one but several examples. These campaigns do have real-world consequences, not just chuckles and remarks about fame. Maybe your experience does not include anything like that, but please don't act like your own experience must be the norm and anyone else's must be the anomaly. That's the most egregious kind of selection bias.

Thorrez2• 5 years ago

I've been to many countries, and in most of them you cannot character asassinate anybody by randomly calling guy's workplace and telling "guy A is a dreaded pedophile!,"

I don't think she did that. What she did (post tons of negative stuff online) did have negative effects when people applied for jobs:

A relative of one lawyer said she spent months applying for jobs in 2019 without getting any offers. The woman, who asked not to be named because she feared Ms. Atas, said her bills piled up. She worried she might lose her home. Then she decided to apply for jobs using her maiden name, under which she hadn’t been attacked. She quickly lined up three interviews and two offers.

When applying for a job, the resume screeners don't know much about you, so they rely on what they find online. With coworkers who actually know you, they don't need to rely on stuff online.

ghaff• 5 years ago

The reality is that someone doing a quick Google for a resume screen, potential date, or whatever is going to devote about 30 seconds to the effort and they'll probably move on if they uncover something sketchy rather than launch into a more detailed investigation.

sebastien_b8• 5 years ago

Wow.

The most “revenge” thing I ever did was to send a copy of the town’s noise bylaw, anonymously, to a nearby resident who had held a very loud “backyard concert” on labour day weekends over the previous two years.

They didn’t have one the third year.

coldtea3• 5 years ago

So his offense was having noisy fun on a bank holiday once a year?

IIAOPSW• 5 years ago

And his punishment was a passive aggressive letter in the mail.

sebastien_b8• 5 years ago

More like being total assholes to everyone else in the area.

It was VERY loud, way above “reasonable” and went on quite late. The second year made me assume they did it on purpose.

asiachick• 5 years ago

I somewhat agree with you that being loud once a year isn't that bad but .... if I was to do it I'd invite the entire neighborhood (which is also ends up being notification and a chance to object)

Also, in Japan this would almost never happen. If someone wanted to throw a loud party they'd rent a space for it. That doesn't seem common in the USA in my experience. But, having gotten used to it in Japan, it's kind of disappointing that it's not more common. Sure you can sometimes rent an entire bar or restaurant in the USA but it seems super rare where as it's common in Japan. On the other hand, it's also not common in the USA to pay for a party but in Japan no one blinks an eye if someone invites you to a party and says "We're having a party Friday night. It's $30 a person"

I know it's not entirely the same because it's indoors.

ReactiveJelly2• 5 years ago

Yes. It's a negative externality [1] which reduces the value GP would otherwise get from their home.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Externality

bryanrasmussen2• 5 years ago

since you don't know the noise levels of the fun or any other things that might have made it especially aggravating for the poster it seems slightly too negative an interpretation of things, I know I would probably let someone else slide on having big noisy parties - based on experiences with my neighbor - but part of that was the feeling of that poor guy has to be neighbors with me, can't be easy.

joe_the_user• 5 years ago

A simple thing would be for Google to de-list slander-based sites like the ones described in the article. Or just personal name search for things like that.

At the same time, it's remarkable that people put credence in completely random sites that let anyone post anything.

sebastien_b8• 5 years ago

Towards the end of the article they state this is what Googles has started to do with sites that make it hard to get false info removed (like requiring a fee).

adolph• 5 years ago

That’s weird. Yelp still seems to feature prominently. Guess they’re still working on it.

tjpnz• 5 years ago

I'm surprised they've allowed this to continue for as long as it has. At the very least they shouldn't be indexing low quality content from sites labeling someone a pedophile. That would go a long way towards stopping all but the most sophisticated of cranks - which the individual in the article clearly isn't.

doctor_eval2• 5 years ago

I believe in the concept of free speech, but I’ve said it before: free speech is the right to speak without going to jail, and that’s the extent of it. It doesn’t mean the right to be heard, or the right to speak without other consequences. And this is a clear cut case where the supposed right to be heard is profoundly damaging to the targeted individuals and to society as a whole.

So why don’t we apply the same standard to speech which targets larger groups? Why is it OK for platforms to publish the 30K lies [0] made by the former US president - for the profit of both the platform and the politician - but not ok for these horrid shame sites to exist? Why is it OK for Google to redirect these people and sites to /dev/null, but not for Twitter or Facebook to do the same?

Anyone who is upset by this article needs to understand that the only difference between the vengeance nutbags and lying politicians is the scale of the damage they can cause.

It’s got to stop.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veracity_of_statements_by_Do...

drdeca2• 5 years ago

If you only mean that you believe in the right to speak without going to jail, and no protections of speech beyond that, then ok. I mean, I strongly disagree, but I acknowledge your position of not supporting protections beyond that.

But you should know that that isn't what other people generally mean when they say "free speech". For example, most people would also say that freedom of speech also requires that people aren't fined money for saying things that they believe, or things like that.

If by saying this you are trying to shift the public understanding of the term in a direction of such minimal applicability, I would oppose this shift.

doctor_eval2• 5 years ago

I was being slightly hyperbolic. A proper definition of free speech - not my definition - is that it is the freedom to speak without interference _from the government_. So fines, jail time or anything else driven by the government is out. This I can agree with to a large extent.

Free speech does not, and has never, meant the right to be free of consequences for your speech, or the right to speak anonymously in public, or to have your identity hidden. Free speech does not give you the God-given right to post anything you like to any service or publication. You can’t force the NYT to put your opinion on their home page and you can’t, or at least shouldn’t be able to, force Twitter to spread your lies.

And, again in my opinion, if someone does say something harmful then there needs to be accountability. That means that if someone is hurt by someone else’s speech, then the victim should be able to sue or otherwise take action against the perpetrator.

Here’s the problem. Sites like Twitter and others can publish anonymous hate speech while hiding behind the CDA. This means neither the anonymous asshole nor the profitable company can be touched, and this is causing huge damage to our society.

The solution seems pretty simple. Anonymous speech should be the responsibility of the platform, and subject to civil action against the platform. Speech published by platforms which is not anonymous can and should be the responsibility of the individual making the claims.

This simple change would force platforms to moderate all their anonymous content, instead of the current, low cost statistical methods they are obviously using today.

Also, it does not mean that speech can’t be published anonymously. It just means that the service must know the details of the writer, and that the anonymity of a user can be uncloaked by a court.

Note that this is how “letters to the editor” worked for a very long time.

If you like your privacy, then don’t intentionally invade the privacy of others, or otherwise harm them, with your lies.

notacoward5• 5 years ago

This sort of happened to me once. I was one of the first to identify children's fiction author Robert Stanek as both a terrible writer and an Amazon astroturfer. My blog post about him was widely cited by other critics as they discovered the same things. Eventually this led to posts on a couple of his "fan" sites - almost certainly set up and most content written by Stanek himself - including my home address and accusations that I'm a child molester. He also tried sending me emails threatening legal action. Besides the claims being utterly fraudulent, the letters were so clearly fake that I replied telling him to piss off (in exactly so many words). With a little effort I succeeded in having the posts taken down, or at least made invisible to Google. The more generic attacks continued on and off for years, again as more people discovered the now-numerous accounts of his transgressions and re-triggered Stanek's delusions about a cabal, but it has been at least a couple of years since the last one. Who knows, maybe he'll try again now.

The point is that these kinds of revenge campaigns have been easy for a long time (my blog post was in 2003) and keep getting easier. Using Pinterest in this case seems like an interesting twist, since Google's suspicious love for them is already a matter of some discussion. It's also interesting that an NYT reporter takes a so-predictable swipe at Section 230 as part of the story. While I wouldn't be in favor of holding platform providers responsible for users' content, I do think defamation deserves to be treated with at least the same seriousness as copyright violation, for which special provisions already exist.

P.S. I'm well aware that Stanek accuses me of being the defamer. Such reciprocal accusations are practically always a feature of these cases, including OP, and that should be kept in mind when considering them.

Shared404• 5 years ago

Assuming your statements are true, username checks out.

How did you go about getting the posts taken down/made invisible? I have yet to tick someone off enough for them to try something like this, but knowing myself it'll probably happen someday.

notacoward5• 5 years ago

Assuming your statements are true, username checks out.

Heh. Thanks for the chuckle.

How did you go about getting the posts taken down/made invisible?

I made my own legal threats, basically. One site was a ProBoards forum, so I contacted them. I didn't pretend to be a lawyer or anything, just told them I'd get one if needed. I never received any acknowledgement, but the posts did disappear from view. I think they were made private, not deleted. Good enough as far as I was concerned. The other site was kind of a cross between Wikipedia and Quora. In that case I found the site owner and sent a similar email. That time I did get a quite-reasonable response, and the article was taken down.

I haven't been involved in a lot of legal stuff, on either side, but enough to know how it works and not fear the process. Once someone realizes that you have the resources and determination to drag them into actual court, they tend to think pretty hard about what persisting might cost them - in this case possibly in terms of reputation even more than money. No surprise that he/they folded quickly.

harlanji• 5 years ago

Statute of limitations is 1 year, I was unaware for longer than that. The Internet means it’s without limit. A year of last access? To court records with fraudulent statements? Forever. The lawyers know they can get away with it now. I don’t know the scale, but I sit on a hill right now seemingly without remedy. I am a forgiving person.

dan-robertson• 5 years ago

... letters were so clearly fake that I replied telling him to piss off (in exactly so many words).

In this case I wonder if you should contact the law firm the letter is purportedly from (or Stanek if the firm doesn’t exist) warning them that some idiot is impersonating them and sending ridiculous letters, with a copy of one attached. Even if they really sent them it feels like an amusing way of telling them that their allegations are absurd.

I think I saw an example of this happening in another case, perhaps for a letter received by a baseball stadium.

raphlinus• 5 years ago

https://lettersofnote.com/2011/02/14/regarding-your-stupid-c...

I don't think this is a scalable technique.

notacoward5• 5 years ago

the law firm the letter is purportedly from

I quickly determined that there was no such entity; that's part of why I felt completely comfortable responding as I did. Here's another example of fake legal threats in this affair, from what I would consider the canonical site about it.

http://conjugalfelicity.com/robert-stanek/stanek-responds-to...

IIRC (it was a long time ago) the email I received wasn't quite the same, but it was broadly similar - fake identity, clearly from someone barely educated let alone educated in law, same general amateurishness as Stanek's books and reviews.

BTW, while I'm here: this deep dive into l'Affaire Stanek might seem indulgent and off topic, but it's not. This is the archetype. This is how online defamation and anti-defamation campaigns play out. They're ugly, they're messy, lots of third parties get dragged in, and people do get hurt. To a defamer, merely getting your target involved in something so obviously tawdry is almost as good as having the initial accusations stick. The internet's infinite memory can be used in more than one way to get revenge, and I think that's important to know.

crispyambulance• 5 years ago

This reminds me of those "MyLife" low-lifes who mine the internet on everyone's "behalf" and then email people telling them they have a "negative reputation".

It's possible to remove yourself so that your name does not appear when someone searches on MyLife.com by making a tedious phone-call to their call-center in India, but then they email you EVERY DAY with offers to clean up your online reputation for some fee.

The vengeance griefer in the NYT story is obviously a deranged crazy, but one person can only do so much. The guy who started MyLife however, Jeffrey Tinsley, is a multi-millionaire who has successfully gotten venture capital funding-- and causes grief on an internet-scale.

I wish there would be more media take-downs of MyLife, Classmates, Radaris, other scummy operations. Even better, I would expect that GDPR rules put in place for the USA would put these people out of business?

theknocker• 5 years ago

Archive link for those of us who don't understand why we have to make an account to read a news article that's being aggregated:

https://archive.is/oQIOd

(I would tend to conclude that they don't want it aggregated to begin with.)

jessaustin2• 5 years ago

To avoid hassling on NYT, just turn off javascript on nytimes.com.

thih9• 5 years ago

It’s a pain to remember which workaround still works at specific sites. I like archive links because they’re easy to find in the comments and they tend to work.

sebmellen2• 5 years ago

This is a stunning article. Imagine if everyone focused their deplatforming efforts on sites like this.

- DDOS attacks, if those don't work aggressively go after Cloudflare or their DDOS shield

- Pressure their payment processors to deplatform them

- Get Visa and Mastercard to drop these sites

- Once they have no DDOS shield, pressure their hosting providers to drop them

- Set up landing pages to bump them out of search results

- Aggressively pressure Pinterest et al. to take down any posts with "Ripoff Report" or "Cheat Alert" in the name

A similar playbook to Gab/Parler, but efforts like this would really, tangibly help people and right a serious wrong that can affect anyone, regardless their beliefs or politics.

deathgrips• 5 years ago

The reason why we don't focus on deplatforming sites like this is precisely because it's a concrete problem with a concrete solution. If instead you're a culture warrior fighting "fascism" or "the alt-right" you'll never run out of blue check marks to deplatform and your personal influence will never stop growing.

vlovich123• 5 years ago

Do you think that creating such laws magically solves the problem? You don’t think people will just adapt to accomplish their goals within the technicality of the law? Cyberbullying was a huge problem when I was growing up and laws were constantly being passed. Did cyberbullying somehow become less prevalent or their criminals easier to punish? It seems like the problem has only gotten worse.

The reason is one of organization. Gab/Parler was intentionally trying to organize white supremacists. That is the entire goal and motivating raison d’etre. Cyberbullying like this is not some shared idealogy but a personal vendetta. As such it’s impossible to solve with the legal system or technology - at best you get a punishment effect a small fraction of the time for such a small expense that punishment is reserved for extreme cases that devolve to real-world altercations as an add-on multiplier as it takes a significant amount of time and effort to convince authorities whose the party telling the truth. Slander and libel are already things but people can’t seem to acknowledge that you can’t legislate away the fundamental problem that communication is now cheaper and more widespread than ever. Imagine if you could anonymously distribute pamphlets in multiple cities with minimal effort with very difficult ways to trace it back to you. The problem here is people fail to recognize that there’s nothing technology can do to solve a fundamental human failure mode here. People get pissed off at each other, and one party starts slandering the other. The legislation needs to focus on making it easier to deanonymize. But such legislation is actually bad for the internet and doomed to fail anyway since technology makes it easier than ever in ever increasing ways. From a social well-being perspective, anonymity is critically important for those who legitimately speak truth to power (eg sources for reporters).

sebmellen2• 5 years ago

Sorry, I'm not sure what part of my post you're responding to — I didn't mention anything about laws.

I also don't really fundamentally disagree with any of what you say in your post, I think it's a rather accurate appraisal of the situation.

That said, as it comes to Gab/Parler, I think a lot of the problem is technology related, and could theoretically be fixed by social media platforms adopting non-user-antagonistic content-ranking models. If the algorithm behind your platform maximizes time on site, it will maximize anger, outrage, and quick dopamine hits.

If the algorithm (or moderation process) functions differently, that's not the case, and I think we see this to some extent in HackerNews (not saying it could scale to Facebook level though). I hope other "ethical social media" platforms like Okuna (https://about.okuna.io/) will follow.

duskwuff• 5 years ago

Do you think that creating such laws magically solves the problem?

Creating laws has done a lot to solve the related problem of "mugshot sites". They're illegal in enough states at this point that they're approaching impossible to run -- which is a good thing; they were a morally bankrupt extortion scheme.

jkhdigital2• 5 years ago

It’s a bit of a stretch to claim that Gab and Parler were “intentionally” trying to organize white supremacists. But I agree with your point that people will always find a way to be cruel to one another, regardless of the underlying technology.

sunir• 5 years ago

Vigilantism like calling for DDOSing is not the answer.

EGreg• 5 years ago

It seems to be much easier to attack a reputation than to fix it.

Like if enough women accuse Bill Cosby of something, then the court of public opinion will say he’s guilty. (I understand that in a real court he was convicted by a jury based on his own deposition from 2005 though). But on the Web, what does it cost people to just make stuff up and use botnets or GPT?

WaitWaitWha2• 5 years ago

These kind of articles concern me.

Not because what they expose, but what they incite.

I am very concerned that instead of strengthening legal path for defamation, politicians will take the easy (and favored) path of government control of speech.

Do not misunderstand, I am not even remotely suggesting that somehow we need to protect such behavior. What I am suggesting is that the laymen will demand blood, and the easiest and most vocal way to do it is government, or agents of the government (in this case large internet content controlling organizations) will restrict speech. That is already fraught with political vengeance and revenge.

Find the culprits. Prosecute & punish. Force large internet content companies to scrub.

We can demand to force sites to pop up about cookies. Certainly we can demand that with a single quick request "to be forgotten".

(Mark my words - if this gets legs, it will be the speech control, and the control will be handed to companies or quasi-government agencies, made of companies.)

ReactiveJelly2• 5 years ago

What _should_ happen is that people should not believe allegations that have no evidence.

Censorship and defamation law are just patches that we're desperately trying to use to make up for the sad fact that critical thinking was never strong in humans at seemingly any point in known history.

jkhdigital2• 5 years ago

Yes, it’s a wonder these idiotic apes somehow created the modern world...

We are wired to live in groups of a couple hundred individuals, at most. We can “default to truth” in that setting because all of our interactions are repeated indefinitely over time, and the stable solution to such an iterated prisoners dilemma is to be honest because cheating will be swiftly punished.

Mass media, and especially the Internet, breaks all of our social brain circuitry, and that is not a trivial problem to address.

ChrisMarshallNY• 5 years ago

Whenever I see the name “Babcock,” I think of The Passage.

This kind of obsession is nothing new, but, is (thankfully) rare; as is the case for a lot of diseased behavior.

What is new, however, is the modern, interconnected world (air travel, the Internets Tubes, etc.).

This acts as a multiplier for this kind of thing; affording lone actors a powerful gun platform, and allowing extremists that would normally be confined in small, local quarantines, the capacity to band together.

Not sure what the answer is. There’s talk of changing Section 230; not just from authorities, but also, from many mainstream communities.

On one hand, I think that the ability for minorities to band together, and seek strength and support in numbers, is amazing, but you also get stories like this (and it isn’t really unique).

At the risk of “Godwining” the thread, it could be argued that Hitler wouldn’t have been able to come to power without a powerful and efficient propaganda machine, looking a lot like this, so it predates the Internet.

xondono2• 5 years ago

I'm by no means a SEO expert, but how much would it cost to completely drown this search results into oblivion?

Pay someone to set up your own site, your business, etc... Pay for some ads, heck, even pay some click farms if needed.

Because I'd bet it's way less than the cost of the lawyers..

notacoward5• 5 years ago

Having been involved in one such affair (see my other comments on this story), I'd put that in the "true but not useful" category. It still allows a form of blackmail. Why should the target of defamation have to pay to do this? What happens when most people's online reputation is mostly a matter of how much they were willing to pay to a reputation-washing company, and people in the lower economic echelons can't afford to play? These kinds of companies already exist, and make as much money burying genuine misdeeds or making up accomplishments as anything else. How is increasing the size and importance of that industry a good thing?

xondono2• 5 years ago

It’s just a way of breaking the “business model” for this companies.

If you pay up, there’s nothing preventing them from trying to hit you again with more demands (in fact it makes economic sense since they don’t need to generate new “content”). If you go and hire a SEO company, you’ve broken the economic reward for the scammers, or at least you’ve reduce it.

WaldoLydecker• 5 years ago

Get rid of 230. It’s worse than the alternative.

specialist2• 5 years ago

We need to label inauthentic speech. As well as have verified authentic speech.

Not ban inauthentic speech. I'm NOT saying ban trolls, bots, insurrectionists, and vexatious people like Nadire Atas.

I'm simply saying that if we also have authentic speech, people (culture) would have a tool to discern inauthentic speech. And then hopefully wise up a bit.

Nasrudith2• 5 years ago

What exactly is the difference between authenic and inauthentic speech and who is doing the labeling? What is stopping an "authenic" source from taking money to launder authenticity?

The term 'Authenic' is often used as a deep well of bullshit to arbitrarily filter ingroups and outgroups with about as coherent logic as middle school students deciding what is cool.

specialist2• 5 years ago

If you sign your (verified) name, it's authentic.

Not to be confused with factual (truthiness).

LurkersWillLurk• 5 years ago

I feel like this would be the one legitimate criticism of Section 230, but I don't really know how you would "solve" this problem. Maybe a DMCA-esque system for defamation, but on the other hand I feel like that's also ripe for abuse and would hamper online anonymous speech. Is it fair use to post a picture of someone if the text accompanying that picture is libel?

A vast web of vengeance

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