Posted: Feb 03, 2012 11:50 pm
Mojzu wrote:Things like defamation and libel laws are just nefarious ways of subverting freedom of speech. What the blogger was doing was awful and reprehensible, but nothing that was (or should be) illegal to my mind, unless we want to make lying and posting stupid things online against the law.
Actually, disseminating lies in this manner is already illegal. That's what libel and slander laws cover. Their original purpose consisted of preventing the erection of malicious falsehoods resulting in material damage being suffered by the recipients. That said laws have been abused by rich people with nasty little secrets in their closets, secrets that they want to keep hidden from the rest of the world, doesn't alter this basic fact.
I don't think you'll find much support here, for the idea that people who fabricate malicious lies for the express aim of inflicting material harm upon the victims, should be allowed to do so in a consequence-free manner.
Mojzu wrote:In fact the most common response to these situations is increased awareness and support of the people/business that the blogger is trying to defame, I wouldn't be surprised if the lodge owners get a ton of new business over this.
And if the malicious lies spread by this blogger result in a homophobe deciding to firebomb their business, what then? Just shrug your shoulders and say "tough, that's the price of free speech"?
Mojzu wrote:We should regulate news companies and other businesses so that they are prohibited from maliciously misleading the public through any medium. But we shouldn't monitor and regulate what every individual has to say and how factual or appropriate they are, as you would pretty much kill the internet (at least the legal part of it) overnight.
No one is suggesting this for a moment - you're erecting a manifest red herring here. The facts of the case, are that the individual in question mounted a campaign of hate against his victims, accusing them falsely of complicity in criminal offences (despite the fact that Canadian law enforcement never saw any reason to investigate them), and in addition disseminated some nasty instances of hate speech, of the sort that would have led to action far sooner had he uttered such sentiments against, say, African-Americans. Would you be so happy to support this blogger, if he had, for example, posted about two African-Americans, referring to them as "welfare parasite niggers"?