Texas judge orders website to ID anonymous users

Kenneth Hynek • 11th Feb 2009 • World News, American News, Society, Freespeechery, The Sciences, The Interwebs
freedom of expression, freedom of speech, Internet, Mark Lesher, Rhonda Lesher, sexual assault, Texas, Topix.com

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This has all kinds of troubling implications for freedom of speech, and I would expect that the ruling will be struck down on appeal.

Possibly. I suppose one can never be certain in this era of hope and change.

A Texas judge has ordered an online news site to unveil identifying details about 178 anonymous commenters on the site. The order came after a couple, Mark and Rhonda Lesher, sued the numerous anonymous commenters posting to Topix.com for making what they considered to be “perverted, sick, vile, inhumane accusations” about them.

The Leshers were originally thrust into the Texas spotlight in 2008 after being accused of sexually assaulting an unidentified former client of Mark Lesher. That’s when thousands of comments began piling up on the community news aggregator Topix to discuss the sexual assault charges. As with most things on the Internet, many Topix users felt free to let loose with nasty comments about the Leshers.

There’s an argument here to be made that this falls under the realm of e.g. defamation or libel laws, which I agree are a reasonable restriction on speech and expression. I’d have no objection to seeing libel charges brought against the people who devised this nasty and false rumour.

The problem is, this ruling has wider implications in regard to things like proposed methods of dealing with cyber-bullying (since the distinction between trolling, which the Leshers experienced, and bullying is very…translucent), the more draconian of which would involve implementing various methods of preventing people from establishing anonymous online personas entirely, and which would also often involve heavy levels of content filtration.

There’s a lot of bad stuff out there on the Internet. Yeah, the world might be a better place — morally speaking — were a lot of it to disappear or be severely curtailed. But in this imperfect world in which we live, the right to freedom of expression must be protected, because its loss is almost always the precursor to the loss of other rights and freedoms as well.