NEW YORK—Must be nice to be a legislator. When you see something you don't like, you get to introduce a bill to stop it. Like anonymous speech online. Who doesn't hate it when some nameless troll starts ranting online about something or other, making claims without supporting evidence to back them up, or just starts spouting opinions without at least providing research in support? As if they have the right to being full of shit and anonymous at the same time!
For most of us, there's little we can do except post up retorts that proclaim the anonymous poster a "retard who still lives in his mom's basement," but even then we're just posing. Short of hiring a lawyer, there's nothing we can do but take it out on the wife and kids.
Well, someone finally has our back. A couple of New York legislators have had enough of anonymous speech online and have introduced complementary bills in the New York Assembly and Senate that would outlaw the practice.
No name, no post. No like? Too bad. These two are out to strip the mask off of online cowards who think it's okay to express an opinion without also providing your name, and they are not fooling around.
The purpose of the bill is to "amend the civil rights law, in relation to protecting a person's right to know who is behind an anonymous internet posting."
Anonymous posters are defined as "any individual who posts on a web site including social networks, blogs, forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the forum of posted messages."
In terms of the meat of the proposal, the bill states, "A website administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate."
The bill would also require that a contact number and email address for the site administrator be clearly visible where all comments are posted. Most such sites already have mechanisms by which to report offensive posts, leaving it up to the community to decide which posters have crossed the line, but for the two New York Republicans sponsoring these bills, that is not enough. Individuals cannot be left to to make those sorts of decisions on their own.
As Wired noted, "Oddly, the bill has no identification requirement for those who request the takedown of anonymous content," but is it really so odd?
We all know who the bad guys are; we just need the tools to deal with them. Sure, these measures apply just to New York, but it's a start. It's time for speech to stop hiding behind the First Amendment. After all, if the internet had existed in post-revolutionary America, who knows whether "Publius," the author(s) of so many of the Federalist Papers, would have had the fortitude to reveal "himself" to the world?
The author has declined to identify himself (or herself), just in case.
