20 May,2011 07:43 AM IST | | Arindam Chaudhuri
Web logs are the prized platform of an online lynch mob spouting liberty but spewing lies, libel and invective.
Their potent allies in this pursuit include Google and Yahoo, so wrote Daniel Lyons some years back, in the Forbes cover story titled 'Attack of the Blogs'. As the Senior Editor of Forbes then, Dan was simply expressing his extreme frustration at the utter nastiness of the Internet community, which seem to have a super-majority of commentators, who thrive on the faceless protection that the net provides and leave shamefully slanderous and defamatory comments.
Cut to the present, and the situation has worsened. Take a quick 'surf' across various pages of the Internet and it would not be hard for one to realise that every fourth or fifth page is filled up with some or the other pejoratively aberrant content against respectable individuals and companies posted by untraceable, incognito and spiteful writers. From four-letter words to bigoted slanders to racist attacks, the net is now full of criminally damnable statements that one starts wondering why the authorities haven't woken up to act on this issue with the greatest speed.
When a person talks negatively and falsely about you in public, the law provides for such a person to be immediately pulled up by both law enforcement and judicial authorities. Then why cannot the same rules be applied over the Internet. One of the reasons is the hand-in-hand conspiratorial connivance of Internet companies like search engines, social networking sites, blog site hosts and even ISPs (intermediaries, in summary) that refuse to delete or block out the execrable comments and links and also refuse to confirm the identities of the anon-posters.
It's no secret now that Google marketing heads vying for advertising forget that 'newmedia' ought to be responsible and should not hide behind falsely promoted aspects of freedom of speech. Freedom of speech has never meant freedom to slander others through the public media. Even when one finds child porn links on Google or other trash products, Google still claims to be the high-ground innocent party that has no idea that such stuff is being archived in their search engine links.
But Google is only one side of the story. There are others in the same league and perhaps as worse. Wikipedia, Twitter, pages on social network sites et al are overlooking the fact that freedom to express should doesn't mean freedom to defame. Citizen journalism is not about promoting gossips, displaying profanities in words and making biased mockery of humans and organizations. But its easier said than done.
