House of Commons Could Force Social Networks To Identify Trolls 216
concertina226 writes with this news snipped from Techworld UK: "Websites such as Facebook and Twitter could be forced to unmask so-called internet trolls, under new government proposals in the Defamation Bill. The move comes after a British woman won a landmark case to force Facebook to reveal the identities of internet trolls. On 30 May, Nicola Brookes from Brighton was granted a High Court order after receiving 'vicious and depraved' taunts on Facebook. The bill, which is being debated in the House of Commons [Tuesday], will allow victims of online abuse to discover the identity of their persecutors and bring a case against them. The move also aims to protect websites from threats of litigation for inadvertently displaying defamatory comments."
The process (Score:2, Informative)
I think that this is an early draft text of the bill in question: http://inforrm.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/defamation-bill.pdf
Reports on the bill are quite informative. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/jt201012/jtselect/jtdefam/203/203.pdf
These documents are reasonably short.
Was not just trolling.. (Score:5, Informative)
This lady didn't just get trolled on some random anonymous forum. She was stalked and harassed in a manner that is almost certainly criminal, and without a doubt would be considered criminal if it happened in any other non-internet related forum. There really isn't any need for any special legislation as existing laws undoubtedly cover what happened here.
Of course, this doesn't explain why Facebook dug their heels in. Nowadays I just expect Facebook to do the wrong thing in all cases, so I probably should not be suprised.
Re:No they are not forced.... (Score:4, Informative)
The fact that truth is not a defense is the single most fucked up thing I have ever heard and pretty much destroys any faith I have in the legal system.
It's also shenanigans, because the very first defense listed in the bill is truthful statements:
(1) It is a defence to an action for defamation for the defendant to show that the imputation conveyed by the statement complained of is substantially true.
Re:Troll is in the eye of the beholder (Score:4, Informative)
It's a linguistic artifact. Trolling in the sense of dangling bait in front of a 'fish' was pretty much what the word meant for those examples of trying to lead somebody to a conclusion, perhaps even with a quite decent purpose if you count getting ignorant people to fully expose their ignorance so it could be corrected, or similar purposes. But, when this word also conjured up images of a Troll in the mythological sense, of course it came to mean an ignorant, rude or uncouth lout., or even a monster . Thanks to Phishing, we can't go back to calling the first form 'fishing' either, not without confusion. All that's left is to start calling the first form of trolls "Wishniks", which I propose we start doing immediately.