This wednesday, the Israeli Parliament will host a discussion about the anonymity in user comments which are [sic] the worst problem ever in Israel. a parliament member from the Extreme right party, “Israel is Our House” offered to moderate and block all websites which allow user generated comments to be posted anonymously.

Here are my comments, taken from my (belated) seminar about Service Providers’ Liability:

“Anonymity is a state of detachment of a person’s name from the action he committed, like giving in secrecy, anonymous sperm donation, anonymous exams, anonymous medical examinations, and other actions alike, all positive which were meant for a desired cause”¹. Anonymity is desired not only in order to create a hideout for law violators², but ,also. and/or maybe mostly, in order to protect a creator of content from some of the harms on the Internet³. Exposing personal details of a person as a general rule on the internet may lead to major harm – both by presenting a person’s name and affiliation, and by requiring people to disclose, for example, their address and subject them to the random lunatic which dissents with their opinion. Though public interest is not to protect criminals, a prima facia approach to deny anonymity is a method that will harm the public discourse⁴

Helen Nissenbaum described in her article the meaning of anonymity: “In all these cases, the value of anonymity lies not in the capacity to be unnamed, but in the possibility of acting or participating while remaining out of reach, remaining unreachable. Being unreachable means that no-one will come knocking on your door demanding explanations, apologies, answerability, punishment or payment. Where society places high value on the types of expression and transaction that anonymity protects (aluded to in the previous paragraph) it must necessarily enable unreachability.”⁵. Nissenbaum’s approach is different than other researchers, since she explains that in the information age there is actually more private information than before it, and anonymity has weakened.

A Contradicting approach was presented by Eli Hacohen⁶, the head and founder of the Internet Research Centre in Tel-Aviv University. He performed an online experiment and requested commenters to identify. Even after his request, and maybe under protest, over a hundred comments were posted pseudonymously⁷. Again instead of the many references to popular sources reference to scholarly journals would produce a much better description and analysis (j.k -add one)

Hasson’s Proposal⁸

The Israeli surfer is known⁹ to be ultra violent¹⁰ in speech, as is the Israeli society. therefore, as a mean to restrain them, several regulatory actions were requested. First, Parliament member Israel Hasson proposed to mandate commenters to identify prior to writing comments¹¹. This proposal, obviously, started an attack on Hasson; His website was flooded with anonymous greetings¹² and various comments were left against Parliament Member Hasson’s nature. Dr. Michael Birnhack, for example, stated¹³ that the draft “Annuls the basic constitutional rights of the surfers for privacy. It harms the right of private site owners to run their business. The goal to promote the conversation culture is welcome, but this is not the way.” This constitutional right for speech¹⁴, where the US Courts have decided that “Accordingly, we must adopt a standard that appropriately balances one person’s right to speak anonymously against another person’s right to protect his reputation.“

However, in my humble opinion, Hasson failed to understand that the Comments in Israel are closer the old “Letters to the Editor” columns published in newspapers and published only after moderation¹⁵ (and the liability generated from this moderation will be discussed later), The Comment is the writer, he represents the problem. The Israeli society is a flash mob: violent, faceless and disgusting. Hasson also forgot that real “Letters to the Editor” do not require real identification¹⁶. These are just letters which were sent in print and published. The Internet, on the other hand, presents some sort of solution, where it enables (without any intrusive mean) to have some data regarding the origin of the writer.

The request to register any commenters may be redundant if websites hold IP addresses of the commenters and hide them from the other readers, in order to prevent hacking attempts with that IP address and to allow nonpopular opinions to float¹⁷ in that article; and release this information against a court order if needed or comply with a takedown process as stated in the statute draft. The Comments represent the old town square, where all people are allowed to present their opinions and no one is forced to listen. However, in the old city square – no person is required to identify prior to stating an opinion.

Indeed, the center of data research in the Israeli Parliament researched the implications of Hasson’s proposal, and decided to advise Hasson to withdraw his proposal, only three months after it was drafted¹⁸. The said research, prepared by Roy Goldschmidt, mostly commented on the severe measures proposed by Hasson, claiming that most comments are only as violent as the society they exist in¹⁹ and that most of them are living-room conversations²⁰. Goldschmidt concludes his research by saying that the draft is “Inadequate with the common conceptions of the Internet, which is characterised by the delicate balance between democratic potential and anarchy and with attempts to enforce regulation by the participants themselves and not outside supervision.”.

The main conclusion of Goldschmidt’s research was the Self-Regulation, by the means of setting an independent Ethical Code would be the optimal solution to reduce the violence in user generated comments and not enforcing the commenters to disclose their identity²¹.

Technorati Tags: internet, anonymity, Israel Hason, Freedom of Speech