Meeting on identity protection versus freedom of speech on the internet

We had our meeting a few days ago on internet freedom versus reckless identity smears on the internet.

Cyber bullying was raised as the predominate issue and how teenagers cannot get away from the continuous cruel comments on Facebook and the preoccupation with counting the number of "likes" on people's comments even if they are cruel comments.

Some said they will never get on Facebook.

Richard proposed that we should look at each of the application providers as the equivalent of a state or country that we treat the physical world.

Every application provider has their rules of how they want to control their content just like every country have their laws on how their nationals can behave under their laws.

Facebook will stop a post upon a complaint and investigate.  YouTube will not show any pornographic videos, and so on.

While all the application providers strive to be as "free" as they can make it,  there are rules of privacy and engagement involved. 

We decide to join each of these cyber groups by using them with implicit agreement and knowledge of their operations.

From this perspective, we have the freedom to choose which cyber "country" with its rules to join,  much easier than having to emigrate from one country to immigrate into another just to change the rules of the game.

We also have the freedom to join multiple application providers with different identities although more and more there is a trend to verify the physical human behind these identities and place more importance to those where a human can be confirmed.

This perspective is also expressed in Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen's book "The New Digital Age" (The Ideas Book Club current book) where they predict that the virtual population will outnumber the population of the earth in the next decade.

But what of all the scams and lies floating around?  Where is the policeman?

Dan thinks there is a business case for someone to set up a for profit enterprise with the express purpose to checking out the authenticity of information on the internet.  Kind of a consumers report type organization helping consumers to separate the good products from the bad.

Dan also thinks that in a crowd sourcing type of community like the internet,  it is up to all of us to speak up when we see inappropriate content.  Much like the bullying cases where the bully gets bolder because the bystanders do not step in,  if we do not take on the lairs on the internet, the silence will give them credibility.

No one wants the controlled environment such as in China where the state controls the content on the internet and have walls to stop their citizens from accessing Wikipedia, pornography, and other content that the state deems inappropriate.

I can remember the early days of the internet when AOL take the position that their content is filtered and "safe" as a reason why people should get on line through them rather than just the completely open access through other providers.

History have shown that just about all of us prefer the open access.  We just have to deal with judging the content ourselves some other way.

Bullying and character assassination have been around before the internet.  Like a lubricant and enabler, the internet made everything easier and faster, including the bad stuff.

Our habits and attitudes have not changed fast enough to keep pace with the change and the cyber criminals have been able to take advantage of border limitations of law enforcement agencies and our habit to believe what we see in print.

http://www.factcheck.org/  is a website that supposedly checks on claims by politician.  Maybe we need more websites like this to help us deal with the internet?

If you know of other websites that can help us verify content and sources on the internet, please share them with us.  We need to promote truth and dispel myths if crowd sourcing is going to work!