If I were sitting in a Starbucks sitting at a table having a chat with friends/family, and some loudmouthed assholes walked up and said things that are the equivalent of what the trollies on Twitter say in that space, the manager would punt them fast. I’d be fine with that, and I really wouldn’t want law enforcement showing up. Nobody would wring their hands over their freedom of speech.
Twitter’s a created space for people to get together chat. They barely deal with harassment in a space they made for people to get together to chat. It’s their job, but Twitter happens to have weak rules, minimal enforcement of the already weak rules, and a tolerant attitude towards harassment. They’re incredibly terrible at their job. Even reddit does better.
The forum here has mods. They do a great job and I can’t praise them enough. When creeps show up and start being belligerent they disappear and I’m not only not troubled by this, I am delighted to see them getting banned since it protects the atmosphere here to be one where all sorts of people can be open and interesting and not have to worry about abuse. Facebook/tumblr/everywhere else does things far, far better. Pretty much everywhere does better than Twitter in that domain.
First, on the internet you aren’t dealing with one country, but a vast number of them, so jurisdiction is a nightmare, and the idea of making laws to regulate harassment is effectively impossible.
Second, even if there were some universal jurisdiction, regulating it would be impossible since you’re need laws and law enforcement, and that enforcement would require agents with powers nobody would ever want to grant them.
Third, it’s sort of insane that because Twitter’s bad at their job that we would write laws to deal with Twitter being bad at their job. That’s, I just, no, I can’t even.
Between the two, I’d rather have the businesses at least try to do their job rather than throw their hands up after they create a giant mess. Somehow most online spaces with lots of users have sorted out how to manage what Twitter hasn’t.
The EU has tried some kinds of net regulations for some domains and the results have been a mess. Given their track record of writing bad laws about things they simply don’t understand I don’t trust them.
As an American, at this point in time I don’t trust our legislature(s) to write a law that wouldn’t be an absolute piece of garbage in this domain. The Congress has a tiny handful of people who even have a loose understanding of the technology they try to write laws about, and it shows. Some laws they’ve written have put kids in prison for trivial newly defined crimes, and others have been useless messes. I know a guy who went to prison as a felon for years for doing things related to his work since he did them the wrong way. My democratically elected government wrote a law that put a smart, productive citizen in prison and took away his voting rights because he broke a badly written law for what should be been a firing offense at most. Beyond the question of competence, while they may be democratically elected, the houses of Congress don’t represent their constituencies very well at all.
I’m not a libertarian. I’m all for regulating industry in all kinds of domains (ideally by regulatory bodies paneled by experts, rather than through the Congress). But no, I don’t want to see laws regulating online harassment, since I do not trust them to be written well, be enforceable, or make things better.
