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Senior Manager of Communications of Google Inc Bill Echikson after a court convicted three Google executives in Milan - Source: Reuters -
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The internet was built on freedom of expression.
Society wants someone held accountable when that freedom is abused.
And major internet companies like Google and Facebook are
finding themselves caught between those ideals.
Although Google, News Corp's Facebook and their rivals have enjoyed
a relatively "safe harbour" from prosecution over user-generated
content in the United States and Europe, they face a public
increasingly more inclined to blame them for cyber-bullying and
other online transgressions.
Such may have been the case when three Google executives were
convicted in Milan, Italy on February 24 over a bullying video
posted on the site - a verdict greeted with horror by online
activists, who fear it could open the gates to such prosecutions
and ultimately destroy the internet itself.
Journalist Jeff Jarvis suggested on his influential BuzzMachine
blog that the Italian court, which found Google executives guilty
of violating the privacy of an autistic boy who was taunted in the
video, was essentially requiring websites to review everything
posted on them.
"The practical implication of that, of course, is that no one will
let anyone put anything online because the risk is too great,"
Jarvis wrote.
"I wouldn't let you post anything here. My ISP (Internet Service
Provider) wouldn't let me post anything on its services. And that
kills the internet."
A seemingly stunned Chris Thompson, writing for Slate, said simply:
"The mind reels at this medieval verdict."
Legal experts have been more sanguine, saying the verdict in Milan
will most likely end up an outlier - unable to stand the scrutiny
even of the Italian appeals courts, never mind setting legal
precedents elsewhere.
Policemen of the internet
But in sentencing the executives to six-month suspended jail terms,
the court may have seized on a growing desire to hold internet
companies responsible for the content posted by users.
"I actually think that this is probably not a watershed moment
because the Google convictions violate European law and ultimately
they will be overturned," said John Morris, general counsel for the
Washington, D.C.-based Center for Democracy and Technology.
"Having said that, yes we are quite worried about the trend in
other countries to suggest internet service providers and websites
should be the policemen of the internet," Morris said.
If the trend takes hold, it could put the companies on the
defensive, forcing them to spend more time defending such cases or
fending off calls to restrict content in some way.
China polices the web and demands cooperation from web companies,
while the United States has stuck up for internet freedom in the
face of censorship by more repressive governments.
But social pressure often comes from the ground up, as Facebook
recently found out in Australia.
In that case Facebook pages set up in tribute to two children
murdered in February, eight-year-old Trinity Bates and 12-year-old
Elliott Fletcher, were quickly covered with obscenities and
pornography, prompting calls for the social network to be more
accountable for its content.
"To have these things happen to Facebook pages set up for the sole
purpose of helping these communities pay tribute to young lives
lost in the most horrible ways adds to the grief already being
experienced," Queensland Premier Ann Bligh wrote to Facebook
founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg in a letter released to the
Australian media.
The MySpace Suicide
"I seek your advice about whether Facebook can do anything to
prevent a recurrence of these types of sickening incidents," Bligh
said in the letter.
A Facebook spokeswoman responded that the popular social network,
which has more than 400 million users worldwide, had rules to check
content and that any reports of hate or threats would be quickly
removed.
"Facebook is highly self-regulating and users can and do report
content that they find questionable or offensive," the spokeswoman,
Debbie Frost, said.
Calls for prosecution of cyber-bullying first reached a peak with
the case of a suburban mother accused of driving a lovelorn
13-year-old girl, Megan Meier, to suicide in 2006 by tormenting her
with a fake MySpace persona.
Lori Drew, the mother of a girl with whom Meir had quarrelled, was
found guilty of misdemeanour federal charges in a case dubbed the
MySpace Suicide in the US media, but a judge later dismissed her
conviction on the grounds that the prosecution was selective the
law unconstitutionally vague.
But Meier's death and a series of child exploitation cases linked
to MySpace brought pressure on the site to increase its security
measures and may have cost it in its apparently losing rivalry with
Facebook for social network dominance.
Such issues point to the business risks for the likes of Google and
Facebook as they seek to reconcile demands for accountability with
the impossibility of monitoring everything posted on their
sites.
"We are a society that expects companies and people of authority to
take responsibility, not only for their own actions but for the
actions of those beneath them," said Karen North, director of the
Annenberg Program on Online Communities at the University of
Southern California.
"The difficulty is, we've created an internet culture where people
are invited to put up content, but the responsibility falls in both
directions," North said.
"(On the internet) we all share the responsibility to monitor the content that we find and for our societal standards to be maintained."
