Australian media opens new front in Facebook wars

The issue of policing Facebook raised its ugly head again in Australia this week after the tribute sites to two murdered Queensland youths were defaced by pornography, bestiality and statements about one of the alleged killers that could be prejudicial to a fair trial. It didn’t help that the two crimes were extremely emotive. 12-year-old Brisbane student Elliott Fletcher was killed after being stabbed in a school playground brawl with a 13-year-old charged with his murder. And 350km north in Bundaberg, 8-year-old Trinity Bates was found murdered near her home after being abducted from her bedroom.

With an estimated eight million Australians (over a third of the population) now on Facebook, it was only natural the social networking site would be a central point of communal grief over the murders. Thousands of well-wishes and sympathisers flocked to the tribute sites of both children. However it wasn’t long before they descended into grubbiness. On the page dedicated to Fletcher, photos and messages started appearing of murder, child porn, race-hate and bestiality forcing the removal of the page. A similar thing happened to the Bates tribute page where posters also called for the death of the man accused of Trinity’s murder.

The incidents caused Queensland Premier Anna Bligh to write a letter to Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg asking whether he could do anything to prevent a recurrence of these types of incidents. Bligh said the posting of pornography and illegal messages on tribute sites for Bates and Fletcher had compounded the grief over their deaths. "To have these things happen to Facebook pages set up for the sole purpose of helping these communities pay tribute to the young lives lost in the most horrible way adds to the grief already being experienced," Bligh wrote. "And it is something no parent should have to deal with when coming to terms with the loss of their child."

Facebook have yet to formally respond to Bligh. But Facebook’s Director of Communications and Public Policy Debbie Frost said the site had rules to check content and reviewers were quick to respond to any reports of hate or threats against an individual, pornography, or violent photos or videos, and would remove the content, and either warn or disable the accounts of those responsible. "Facebook is highly self-regulating, and users can and do report content that they find questionable or offensive," Frost said. In the Fletcher case, the most Facebook could do was remove the groups and disable the accounts of the people responsible. “It is simply not possible to prevent a person with a sinister agenda from undertaking offensive activity anywhere on the Internet where people can post content,” said Frost. “Nor is it really possible in real life.”

Meanwhile News Ltd’s The Punch pointed out inconsistencies in the calls for the death of the person charged for the murder. “If this happened in a newspaper or on a major news website,” The Punch’s editor Paul Colgan wrote, “the editor would be at risk of going to jail.” Colgan was alluding to the vexed issue whether social network entries can be considered as publications under the law. He also raised several questions related to “the ongoing safety of general Facebook users and what the company is doing to protect the public from being exposed to unsolicited pornographic or obscene material”.

But social networking maven Laurel Papworth launched a vigorous defence of Facebook today and said they cannot be held responsible for the actions of people using the site. Papworth told the ABC she was “actually quite scared of Facebook starting to act as censors of our discussions.” She said other people created the pages and with 400 million members worldwide it is similar to asking Australia Post to be responsible for letters that they deliver or telcos to be responsible for dodgy SMS messages. "It's not their responsibility to be the police of humanity,” she said. "We still get spam, but we have learnt now to put it into the spam folder and move on.”

Papworth is right. Attitudes and the law will adapt to the way people use new technologies. A moral panic against the technology will sell newspapers but it won’t solve the problem highlighted by the Fletcher and Bates cases. That’s not to say Facebook are blameless. Their tendency to treat privacy issues in cavalier fashion will come back to haunt them as the worldwide user base rapidly approaches saturation point. The final word should go to Daniel Solove who wrote about the issue in his seminal text The Future of Reputation

“Although the internet poses new and difficult issues, they are variations on some timeless problems: the tension between privacy and free speech, the nature of privacy, the virtues and vices of gossip and shaming, the effect of new technologies on the spread of information, and the ways in which law, technology and norms interact. New technologies do not just enhance freedom, but also alter the matrix of freedom and control in new and challenging ways”

Twitter and the norm police

This blog post is inspired by an online discussion I had with Julie Posetti, Jason Wilson and others today. A conversation that began about Posetti's question on how to deal with corrections in the online world evolved into a discussion about defamation on Twitter. It was Wilson’s contention that when we tweet we publish and we should therefore consider our words with great care before sending them out in the world. I agreed but didn’t see it as a huge problem. Wilson saw it as an issue of how to resolve tensions between online behaviour and community standards expressed in laws. He may be right. The growth in cases such as the Facebook Six shows that online life is increasingly affecting life away from the computer. (photo by Derek Barry)

The conversation with Wilson reminded me of remarks he made earlier this year in relation to Internet indiscretions in the Quadrant hoax affair. Wilson said that bloggers and commenters who discussed the identity of the hoaxer could have ruined the reputation of someone if they happened to be wrong in their very public opinions. At the time, he recommended a book called The Future of Reputation by a US legal scholar Daniel Solove which discusses some of the problems in this area. Tonight I finally got around reading the opening and last chapters of Solove’s book which is available as a free download.

The Future of Reputation is informed by issues at the boundary of privacy and free speech. The evangelists of the Internet would have it that free speech trumps everything. This is arguable perhaps in the US with its First Amendment provision but certainly not supported by the law of defamation in Australia. Here if you say something that damages a person’s reputation you better be able to prove what you are saying is true because the presumption of innocence does not apply to publications. If you write something down in a public context, then you are liable for your actions.

The Internet has the ability to enforce social attitudes of approval or disapprovals, or norms, as they can be called. The enforcers are the “norm police” who confront errant behaviour in order to keep the norm strong and effective. With a billion and a half online, there is as much a need to be as accountable for actions in cyberspace as there is in meatspace. But the ease in which moral outrage can spread across the Internet can create a mob-driven police state.

Because blogs have not been around for long there is a double danger. There is unprecedented power to spread messages compounding an underdeveloped set of norms to keep people in check. Journalists have ethical codes that act as restraints but bloggers generally do not. Google has replaced the private investigator as a way of finding out everything about people. Fragments of public data about us are strewn across the Internet (btw should anyone go Googling me, I am not to be confused with “Derrick Barry”, an American gentleman who is apparently the world’s best Britney Spears impersonator. I lack his singular talents).

The Internet is a cruel historian. The social practice of gossiping, spreading rumours and shaming have all moved to the Net. There they transform from “forgettable whispers” to the scarlet letter of permanent memory. But protecting people’s reputation may mean curtailing other people’s free speech. The law needs to take a wise middle path that does not chill speech but still prevents people from injuring others online. Social networks are a marvellous invention of creativity and connection but they redefine what is meant by private lives. We grapple with reputation, gossip, shame, privacy, norms and free speech and weave them into social tapestries of immense complexity.

Solove recommends lawsuits as a way of seeking redress if reputation is sullied but the law should encourage informal attempts at resolution. Privacy needs to be re-defined for its properties of accessibility, confidentiality and control. Free speech can be reconciled with privacy by allowing anonymous stories. But Internet authors should remove defamatory material if requested. Often this is all that is required; there is no additional financial impost.

There are downsides. Products like Reputation Defender act to “clean up” an online reputation but also could be used to whitewash inconvenient truths. According to Solove, the law is “a subtle instrument but not quite a violin”. It is puny compared to norms and these will largely determine how privacy will be protected in the digital world. As President Obama recently reminded American school students, individuals who write on blogs and Twitter and Facebook should always think about the impact of the words they use. Some day they may come back to haunt the person who wrote them.