As more and more consumers, employees, managing directors and big government politicians embrace blogs, wikis and public pages on social utilities like Facebook; there will always be a task force or activist group of people who have no faith in the emergence of transparency and have only intentions to restrict OR limit the nature of free speech in a Network based Economy.
An article on the Sydney Morning Herald today caught my most divine attention this morning and raised some quite peculiar issues which I believe thealphaswarmer project can address.
For starters, the Washington lobbyist from Facebook is immersed in a conception that they are allowing “too much, maybe, free speech” and that despite the compliance hurdles Facebook is trying to entertain in alignment with China’s privacy law; personally I believe everyone should just take a breather and a chill-pilll and consider my proposition.
We (thealphaswarmer project and its members/fans and its professional affiliations) generally agree that there definitely is some “tensions” around the regulation of media (specifically Social Media) with the impetus being on the protection of free speech and another competing interest. In the federal courts here, we do not have an overriding protection of free speech like the United States First Amendment and therefore when governments are making the laws and the courts subsequently applying and administering them; all parties are required to balance different interests against each other.
The most common form of free-speech transgression on the internet falls under what mainstream society would attribute as “Defamation”. Kimberly Heitman, on this very issue, wrote a paper entitled ‘Free Speech Online: Still Shooting the Messenger’ UNSW Law Journal Vol. 11, No 2, Dec 2005 (p62-64).
In this paper, Heitman identifies an apparent micro-trend eclipsing into a mainstream system of where “plantiff lawyers are advising their clients not to engage with the content provider, but, instead to threaten defamation proceedings against the Internet Service Provider”.
Wow – this surely does bring into perspective the liability of internet content hosts and internet providers under State and Territory laws. More specifically, this is rather paradoxical to the outcome of the case between the Media Companies and Australias No 2. ISP (iiNet) – based in Western Australia.
In this case, what I remember (quoting Heitman) is that The Broadcast Services Amendment (Online Services) Act 1999 purports to exempt ISPs from any State and Territory laws – including defamation – which require monitoring of users’ content or impose liability for content made available by the ISP’s customers without the ISP’s knowledge”.
This makes total sense! No wonder iiNet won the legal battle and they are not liable for the behaviours of their users. To me, personally, monitoring internet activity of your customers is like a totalitarian government in a ‘The Minority Report’ type of system – where they need measures as a pre-cursor to identification of breaches of various laws, which is not only limited to defamation but also extends to piracy and the proliferation and uptake of the “Torrent Culture”.
Now I am no law professional and having only done one law subject at University (UNSW – Law In The Information Age); All I can perhaps suggest subjectively is that everyone concerned i.e interest groups and Facebook start looking into open-licensing deed systems for a) cases of privacy and b) try to shape an international framework that underpins the Creative Commons Deed Licensing System as a benchmark to define the evolution of the precedents relevant to freedom of speech and anything of that sort.
The main problem that will arise is that politicians, through cultural variance, will require a ‘behavioural framework’ that entertains the dissemination of laws to reflect the concerns of free speech in Network Economies.