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Date: April 30, 2024 Tue
Time: 2:43 am
Time: 2:43 am
Results for first amendment
1 results foundAuthor: Marwick, Alice Title: Online Harassment, Defamation, and Hateful Speech: A Primer of the Legal Landscape Summary: Although online harassment and hateful speech is a significant problem, there are few legal remedies for victims. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act provides internet service providers (including social media sites, blog hosting companies, etc.) with broad immunity from liability for user-generated content. Given limited resources, law enforcement personnel prioritize other cases over prosecuting internet-related issues. Similarly, there are often state jurisdictional issues which make successful prosecution difficult, as victim and perpetrator are often in different states, if not different countries. Internet speech is protected under the First Amendment. Thus, state laws regarding online speech are written to comply with First Amendment protections, requiring fighting words, true threats, or obscene speech (which are not protected). This generally means that most offensive or obnoxious online comments are protected speech. For an online statement to be defamatory, it must be provably false rather than a matter of opinion. This means that the specifics of language used in the case are extremely important. While there are state laws for harassment and defamation, few cases have resulted in successful prosecution. The most successful legal tactic from a practical standpoint has been using a defamation or harassment lawsuit to reveal the identities of anonymous perpetrators through a subpoena to ISPs then settling. During the course of our research, we were unable to find many published opinions in which perpetrators have faced criminal penalties, which suggests that the cases are not prosecuted, they are not appealed when they are prosecuted, or that the victim settles out of court with the perpetrator and stops pressing charges. As such, our case law research was effectively limited to civil cases. In offline contexts, hate speech laws seem to only be applied by courts as penalty enhancements; we could locate no online-specific hate speech laws. Given this landscape, the problem of online harassment and hateful speech is unlikely to be solved solely by victims using existing laws; law should be utilized in combination with other practical solutions. Details: New York: Center on Law and Information Policy, Fordham Law School, 2014. 75p. Source: Internet Resource: CLIP Report: Accessed June 19, 2014 at: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=clip Year: 2014 Country: United States URL: http://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1002&context=clip Shelf Number: 132508 Keywords: Bias-Motivated CrimesFirst AmendmentHarassmentHate CrimeInternet CrimesOnline Victimization |