Enough About FOSTA's 'Unintended Consequences'; They Were Always Intended

from the it's-what-they-wanted dept

It feels inevitable that if you’re talking about FOSTA/SESTA (the federal law passed in 2018 that amended section 230), someone, at some point, will mention that it was aimed at combatting sex trafficking that had unintended impacts on folks doing consensual sex work.

Just to provide a few examples, there’s a law review article about FOSTA called “good intentions and unintended consequences.” Or you could look at the 2018 OC Register article called “The Unintended Consequences of a Well Meaning Anti-Sex-Trafficking Law” (complete with cliche sexy legs 🙄). Even Elizabeth Warren, in the announcement for the SAFE SEX Workers Study Act, said “As lawmakers, we are responsible for examining unintended consequences of all legislation, and that includes any impact SESTA-FOSTA may have had on the ability of sex workers to protect themselves from physical or financial abuse.”

But as @cybwhoregology has been pointing out, the narrative of “unintended consequences” is utter nonsense. Negative effects on sex workers (and there were many) were not “unintended.” The text of the law explicitly criminalizes the promotion of prostitution and it’s hard to argue that an interpretation of the law that was clear from its text is unintended. Sex workers and trafficking survivors were very clear about the likely outcome of FOSTA/SESTA prior to its passage. Finally, this narrative is contradicted by what the organizations that supported FOSTA say about their own goals.

1. FOSTA explicitly criminalizes the promotion/facilitation of prostitution that does not involve trafficking.

So the first conclusion I reach when I read these takes is that people have not even skimmed the text of the bill. I don’t really blame them - it’s pretty incomprehensible. But go take a look - the final text is here. I’ll wait.

Okay, do you see why it’s ahistorical to claim that negative effects on sex workers were unexpected? Just in case not, I’ll break it down for you.

Look at 18 U.S.C. §2421A - the bottom of the first page. This is a federal criminal provision, created by FOSTA, prohibiting promotion or facilitation of prostitution. Note that this does not require that any sex trafficking took place. The text clearly says that it is a federal crime to run a computer service with the intent to promote or facilitate prostitution of another person.¹ You can have an aggravated violation under 2421A(b) if the website promotes or facilities the prostitution of 5 or more persons, OR acts in reckless disregard of the fact that such conduct contributed to sex trafficking.

I am going to repeat that point again. You can have a criminal charge under FOSTA, including an aggravated criminal charge, without any trafficking taking place at all. Just promotion or facilitation of prostitution (aka consensual sex work).

This concern is not merely hypothetical. The one criminal prosecution that has happened (US v. Martono, about CityXGuide) under 2421A just resulted in a plea deal where the defendant pled guilty to promotion of prostitution and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. Although the Department of Justice talked about trafficking in their press release, they never ultimately charged Martono with trafficking, likely because they could not prove that he had the level of knowledge required.²

As if that wasn’t enough, FOSTA also changed Section 230 (the federal law that previously had limited internet platform’s liability) to also allow for state criminal charges against platforms based solely on conduct related to sex work, so long as the conduct underlying the charge is based on 2421A.³

You cannot pass a bill that creates additional federal criminal charges and removes immunity from state criminal charges for the promotion/facilitation of prostitution and then claim that negative effects on sex work were an accident! If the people who passed this bill, and those that advocated for it, didn’t want to harm sex workers, they shouldn’t have passed a bill that created additional crimes for the promotion of prostitution.⁴

2. Sex workers were incredibly clear about the likely impact of SESTA/FOSTA before and at the time of its passage.

The second reason that the narrative that the negative outcomes of FOSTA on sex workers was an unintended consequence is nonsense is because it requires erasing (or ignoring) the people who pointed out contemporaneously that the bills were going to harm sex workers.

If you want receipts, there is the Survivors Against SESTA page from 2018 that encouraged folks to call their Senators to explain how FOSTA/SESTA would harm sex workers. Survivors Against SESTA also produced a one-pager on why sex workers need online spaces. Oh, and here’s their one-pager on how FOSTA and SESTA would harm workers. New Orleans Harm Reduction has a page from 2018 where sex workers outlined materials as part of the social media campaign against FOSTA.

Media even covered these concerns! Here’s a contemporaneous article from Melissa Gira Grant quoting sex workers’ rights experts about the negative impact of either FOSTA or SESTA on sex workers. And there’s a FastCompany article with a tweet from Kate D’Adamo, who said “I was a #sexworker organizer for years in NYC. #FOSTA would undermine almost every single thing I would tell people for how to stay alive. ALL screening, ALL peer references, ALL bad date lists I could send. #SurvivorsAgainstFOSTA.”

It’s also worth checking out the #LetUsSurvive or #SurvivorsAgainstSESTA hashtag, where you can still find many of the posts that people made prior to FOSTA’s passage. (Although the historical record is obviously incomplete because of account deletions, caused in part by platforms’ fear of liability under FOSTA. I believe Alanis Morissette would call that ironic.)

FOSTA and SESTA were two bills that were advocated for by different organizations that were combined into one, giant, bad, law. If SESTA alone was passed, it would have been plausible to argue that anti-sex work effects were collateral damage to efforts to prevent sex trafficking, if not for the accurate predictions about consequences of the bill. In short, sex workers expected these consequences, and said quite clearly that these were the likely outcomes. To quote Bardot Smith, “WHORES TOLD YOU.”

3. Many of the people who advocated for the bill saw increasing the difficulty of engaging in consensual sex work as a feature of the bill, not a bug.

Content warning for language that ignores sex worker agency - skip the next paragraph if that’s harmful to you.

It’s not just that calling the effects unintended erases sex workers’ advocacy and labor. It also ignores the fact that some people who oppose “sex trafficking” often do want to eliminate all sex work. For example, one supporter of the bills was CATW (the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women). CATW explicitly seeks to end what they call “sexual exploitation,” which it defines as possible “only if no woman or girl is trafficked, exploited or prostituted in the sex trade.”⁵ So from the angle of organizations like CATW, as well as the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (formerly known as Morality in Media), and others, the harm to sex workers (who they often do not believe are legitimate stakeholders) is, in fact, a feature, not a bug. If you’re looking for a useful summary of how this dynamic plays out in reporting, I suggest this piece from WHYY Philadelphia. In it, someone who works for CATW and who is speaking from their experience being trafficked makes the claim that “Sex is not work, and work is not sex. And although I recognize that there is a population of people who self-identify as sex workers, it’s really a term that’s used to mask the inherent harms that come with prostitution.” That’s not a statement that is consistent with the idea that harm to sex workers is an unintended result of anti-trafficking efforts.

Of course, this debate goes back far further than section 230 -- it’s a rehashing of a set of conversations that took place during the white feminist sex wars of the 1970s. Far more eloquent people than I have written about how it is true that the binary between sex trafficking and sex work does not do a good job of capturing folks’ experiences, but that’s because it is a product of whorephobia. Whorephobia comes down to the idea that there is something uniquely damaging about work that involves sex, rather than the damage coming from society’s distaste for sex work and the stigma that comes along with that and criminalization.⁶ (Just to be clear -- there is not. Many of the harms that people articulate as coming from this kind of work come from criminalization itself, as well as the lack of affirming health and social services.) Fundamentally, it is impossible to truly respect and listen to sex workers and believe that the goal should be the elimination of sex work, unless you also believe that all work should be eliminated.⁷

To pull us back to FOSTA, I suspect most mainstream technology policy organizations (and reporters, and pundits/scholars) do not want to comment on or engage with the fact that some (but not, by any means, all) anti-sex trafficking organizations believe that all sex work is inherently exploitive or leads to sex trafficking. Thus, the argumentative move seems to be to suggest that the intentions of the people who promoted FOSTA/SESTA were good and the harm to sex workers was unexpected. I understand this from a realpolitik perspective -- the politics of the anti-trafficking space can seem complicated, and no one wants to appear to be pro-trafficking. And admitting you’ve caused harm is hard! However, again, pretending that prostitution was “accidentally included” or that FOSTA was a bill that was only aimed at ending what the law defines as sex trafficking is at best, revisionism.

Conclusion:

Most people who talk about FOSTA’s unintended consequences are not bad people, nor are they trying to erase or ignore sex workers. But the narrative that sex workers were “collateral damage” of an anti-trafficking bill is ahistorical and compounds the harm. Please, please, stop saying that the effects were unintended.

Did you find this post useful? Please throw some money at Hacking//Hustling, who has been working to cultivate a better understanding of the impacts of FOSTA. You can donate here.

Thank you to Danielle Blunt and Riana Pfefferkorn, who provided very helpful feedback on this post! All mistakes are my own.

Notes

Originally posted to Kendra's personal blog.

Filed Under: consequences, fosta, section 230, sesta, sex trafficking, sex work

Professional Assholes Equate Consequences With 'Cancel Culture' To Obscure That They're Finally Being Held Accountable

from the don't-let-them-get-away-with-it dept

You may recall, last summer, there was a big dustup regarding a letter published in Harper's Magazine about cancel culture (though it didn't use that term). I pointed out the irony of a bunch of very famous writers whining about being silenced and even took a shot at what a much better letter could have said. Harper's even asked me to pen a response to the letter which it published (though, it only gave me a limited amount of space, and complained about some of what I originally submitted, which I -- at least -- found amusingly ironic).

Since then these debates have continued to flare up, as people keep screaming "cancel culture" in many situations where it simply does not apply. There are some who argue that there is no such thing as "cancel culture," which possibly takes things too far. I do think what can be said is that there are some cases where someone loses their job for questionable reasons, often having to do with a bunch of people online overreacting. And it's reasonable to point out those cases and to highlight the unfair response. However, the focus on "cancel culture" and the willingness to expand that phrase to cover just about any consequences is very much being abused by the powerful to try to shield themselves from consequences.

Two recent pieces help drive this home. The always insightful and brilliant Margaret Sullivan at the Washington Post has an excellent piece about how being held accountable is not "cancel culture." This article drove home a key point for me: even if there are cases of cancel culture, the people who are whining most loudly about it are really trying to use those few legitimate stories of overreaction as a whitewash shield to argue that they should never be held accountable for their own behavior or assholish behavior.

As Sullivan points out, most of what people are complaining about as "cancel culture" is really people exercising their 1st Amendment rights to call out bad behavior and ridiculous arguments. And that's a good thing. We should want bad behavior and ridiculous arguments to be called out. And, yes, we should recognize that sometimes people overreact. And sometimes there's more nuance and the bad behavior maybe isn't bad, or the ridiculous arguments aren't so ridiculous. But often they are. And that's where people speaking out and debating these things makes sense. As Sullivan notes, having people push back on nonsense is a good thing. It's called responsibility:

It would help if journalists pushed back more effectively. CNN’s Pamela Brown gave a master class in her devastating interview with Madison Cawthorn, a Republican congressman from North Carolina. By the end, he had no defense left for his election denialism.

But, even if that sort of pushback becomes the norm, news organizations should be wary of handing these charlatans a megaphone.

You can call that cancel culture if you want. I call it responsibility.

The good news is that, in America, we get to argue about it.

The other piece comes from Will Wilkinson, who was recently let go from a job he had at the Niskanen Center, after a very disingenuous Trumpist online troll took what was an obvious joke from Wilkinson and pretended it was not a joke, trying to whip up faux outrage and comparing it to outrage that was more legitimate (I'm not going to get into the specifics, because it's really stupid). Unfortunately, the Niskanen Center (whose work I often appreciate) decided to get away from the controversy and let Wilkinson go. And then some people turned up a tweet he had made from last year suggesting that cancel culture isn't real. This resulted in a bunch of "well, what do you think now?" kind of takes.

Except, Will then responded and pointed out that what he experienced is not cancel culture, and rightly notes how the phrase is not just meaningless, but it collapses any of the important nuances and arguments into a mindless slogan (which is what allows dishonest brokers and assholes to hide behind it):

In my experience, tendentious question-begging is the point. Slogans like “cancel culture” and “political correctness” are used again and again to short-circuit debate, avoid the underlying substantive controversy, and shift the entire burden of justification onto advocates of the rival position. The person who believes that the transgression is serious enough to merit severe consequences isn’t given a fair chance to make her case for this position. Instead, she’s forced to earn the right to make the case by acquitting herself of the implicit charge that she is a petty tyrant policing mind-crimes in the name of stultifying ideological conformity. Good-faith discussion of the gravity of racist jokes never gets off the ground.

That’s why “cancel culture” tends to strike me as more of an evasive maneuver than a coherent idea with determinate content.

And that's exactly right. The phrase rarely seems to be used by those who actually are a victim of true overreaction. Even when unfair, they seem to recognize the nuances and uniqueness of their own scenario. Instead, those who scream about cancel culture the loudest seem to be the very type of people who are most afraid of any consequences for being an asshole.

Let's put it this way. Bad judgment doesn't call into question good judgment. The prevalence of unjust and unmerited censure, sanction, and ostracism should not suggest to us that censure, sanction and ostracism, as such, need a hard second look. The problem is the imposition of undeserved or disproportionate penalties. Penalizing people for flouting rules, norms or the terms of agreements is no more worrying than rewarding those who faithfully hew to them. Without the distribution of approbation and disapprobation, without a functioning economy of esteem, human civilization would crumble to dust and blow away.

People should get what they deserve. Duh. But what do people deserve? We’re never ever ever going to agree about that. We will always disagree about the bounds of acceptable speech and behavior. Even when we can manage to agree that somebody's crossed what we agree is the line, we may nevertheless differ sharply about the gravity of the transgression and the price they ought to pay for it. Pluralism is hard. But we should steer into these disagreements, the real ones, and not evade them by fighting over the application of a dumb catchy term somebody made up six months ago to shut down constructive debate about whether the social opprobrium they’re trying to shield themselves and their friends from is deserved.

Exactly that.

Filed Under: cancel culture, consequences, free speech, responsibility, trolls, will wilkonson

Not Easy, Not Unreasonable, Not Censorship: The Decision To Ban Trump From Twitter

from the there's-a-point... dept

When I started writing this post, it was about Facebook's decision to suspend Trump's account indefinitely, and at least until Joe Biden is inaugurated in a couple weeks. I had lots to say on that... and then Friday afternoon, Twitter decided to ban Trump's Twitter account permanently. This is a bigger deal, not just because it's permanent, rather than indefinite, but because so much of Trump's identity over the last four years (and before that) is tied up in his Twitter account and followers.

Certainly, all of this has kicked off a whole new storm from across the political spectrum. You have Trump supporters who are furious and (falsely) claiming that this is "censorship" or unprecedented and heavy handed (it is none of those things). Then you have Trump haters who are screaming about how this is all way too late and is trying to close the barn door after the horses have long since bolted. I think neither argument is accurate. Will Oremus has a long (and very interesting!) look over on OneZero about how Facebook supposedly chucked out its own rulebook to come up with an excuse to suspend Trump's account:

Yet Facebook’s “indefinite” ban on Trump marks an overnight reversal of the policy on Trump and other political leaders that the social network has spent the past four years honing, justifying, and defending. The unprecedented move, which lacks a clear basis in any of Facebook’s previously stated policies, highlights for the millionth time that the dominant platforms are quite literally making up the rules of online speech as they go along. As I wrote in 2019, there’s just one golden rule of content moderation that every platform follows: If a policy becomes too controversial, change it.

Zuckerberg’s claim that Facebook has allowed Trump to use its platform in a manner “consistent with our own rules” is laughable. The only thing that has been consistent, until now, is Facebook’s determination to contort, hair-split, and reimagine its rules to make sure nothing Trump posted would fall too far outside them. The Washington Post wrote a rather definitive account of the social network’s yearslong Trump-appeasement campaign earlier this year. Among other Trump-friendly measures, the Post noted, “Facebook has constrained its efforts against false and misleading news, adopted a policy explicitly allowing politicians to lie, and even altered its news feed algorithm to neutralize claims that it was biased against conservative publishers.”

And Twitter is also justifying its decision by saying that the reason was a rules violation:

We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

This determination is based on a number of factors, including:

I don't need to post the factors. You can take a look yourself if you want. So, Oremus is mostly correct that they're making the rules up as they go along, but the problem with this framing is that it assumes that there are some magical rules you can put in place and then objectively apply them always. That's never ever been the case. The problem with so much of the content moderation debate is that all sides assume these things. They assume that it's easy to set up rules and easy to enforce them. Neither is true. Radiolab did a great episode a few years ago, detailing the process by which Facebook made and changed its rules. And it highlights some really important things including that almost every case is different, that it's tough to apply rules to every case, and that context is always changing. And that also means the rules must always keep changing.

A few years back, we took a room full of content moderation experts and asked them to make content moderation decisions on eight cases -- none of which I'd argue are anywhere near as difficult as deciding what to do with the President of the United States. And we couldn't get these experts to agree on anything. On every case, we had at least one person choose each of the four options we gave them, and to defend that position. The platforms have rules because it gives them a framework to think about things, and those rules are useful in identifying both principles for moderation and some bright lines.

But every case is different.

And no matter what you think of Trump, his case was different.

The regular rules could never apply to Trump because Trump is not a regular person. And, no, not even comparisons to foreign leaders are apt, because as silly as American exceptionalism is, the United States is still different than nearly every other country in the world. And, it's not just the position he's in (for the next few days anyway), but also Trump's willingness to use his account to make pronouncements unlike pretty much any other world leader (or at least, world leader of consequence).

Trump is, perhaps, the perfect example of why demanding clear rules on social media and how they moderate is stupid.

As for the question of why now? Well, clearly, the context has changed. The context is that Trump inspired a mob of goons to invade the Capitol building this week, and there remain legitimate threats that his cultish followers will continue to do significant damage. Certainly some people have insisted that this kind of violence was always a risk -- and it was. But it had not actually erupted to this level in this fashion. Again, we're talking about context. There's always more context.

And given that the situations are always edge cases, that the context always matters, and that things are always shifting, you can totally see why it's a reasonable decision to ban Trump from their platforms right now, based on everything else going on, and the likelihood that he might inspire more violence. I think it's worth reading Ben Thompson's analysis as well. He's long explained the risks associated with banning Trump from these platforms, and suggested why they should not have in the past. But the thing that changed for him, beyond even just the threat to democracy, is the threat to the rights of both individuals and companies to make their own decisions on these things:

Remember my highest priority, even beyond respect for democracy, is the inviolability of liberalism, because it is the foundation of said democracy. That includes the right for private individuals and companies to think and act for themselves, particularly when they believe they have a moral responsibility to do so, and the belief that no one else will. Yes, respecting democracy is a reason to not act over policy disagreements, no matter how horrible those policies may be, but preserving democracy is, by definition, even higher on the priority stack.

Turn off Trump’s account.

But here's the more important point -- especially directed at the people who will falsely claim that this is somehow censorship: President Trump is not being censored. He is not being limited. At any moment of any day (certainly for the next two weeks, and likely beyond) he can walk out of his office and have every major TV news channel (and every internet streaming platform) broadcast whatever he wants to say, and people will see it.

And to those who think that Twitter should have done this earlier, or that it would have made a difference, recognize that your concern is not so much with Twitter, but with Trump himself. Remember that while Trump might not be able to send a tweet right now, he still (literally) has the power to launch nuclear missiles at Twitter's headquarters. And, really, that's the problem. Trump is obviously too toxic for Twitter. But he's also too toxic for the White House. And the real complaint shouldn't be about Twitter or Facebook acting too late, but about Congress failing to do their job and remove the mad man from power.

Filed Under: adaptability, censorship, consequences, content moderation, donald trump, free speech, platforms, rules, section 230, social media
Companies: facebook, twitter

Police Realizing That SESTA/FOSTA Made Their Jobs Harder; Sex Traffickers Realizing It's Made Their Job Easier

from the who-could-have-predicted dept

For many months in the discussion over FOSTA/SESTA, some of us tried to explain how problematic the bills were. Much of the focus of those discussions were about the negative impact it would have on free speech on the internet, as the way the bill was drafted would encourage greater censorship and more speech-chilling lawsuits. But as we heard from more and more people, we also realized just how incredibly damaging the bill was going to be to those it was ostensibly designed to protect. Beyond the fact that it was passed based on completely fictional claims about the size of the problem, those who actually were victims of sex trafficking began explaining -- in fairly stark terms -- how SESTA/FOSTA would put them in greater danger and almost certainly lead to deaths.

While supporters of the bill seem to insist that because the bill puts legal liability on platforms that are used for sex trafficking that it will magically make sex trafficking disappear, the reality is more complex. While we can argue about Backpage's complicity in what happened on its platform, for years it was used as a tool to protect sex workers, giving them more control over their lives and who they worked with. As we've pointed in the past, a recent study found that Craigslist, back when it had its "erotic services" section, appeared to decrease female homicide rates by an astounding 17.4%. Backpage picked up the slack when Craigslist was bullied into closing that section, but now it's gone too.

And stories are already coming in about the damage done. A recent episode of the Reply All podcast all about SESTA/FOSTA had some scary stats at the end, noting that there are already many stories of sex workers who have gone missing or been killed since the bill became law.

Motherboard has a story with much more details, noting that the passing of SESTA/FOSTA has emboldened pimps to take advantage of more victims of sex trafficking. As many sex workers had explained, Backpage actually allowed them to have more control themselves, and helped them get away from pimps. But without Backpage?

“Pimps seem to be coming out of the woodwork since this all happened,” Laura LeMoon, a sex trafficking survivor, writer, and co-founder and director of harm reduction nonprofit Safe Night Access Project Seattle, told me in an email. “They’re taking advantage of the situation sex workers are in. This is why I say FOSTA/SESTA have actually increased trafficking. I’ve had pimps contacting me. They’re leeches. They make money off of [sex workers’] misfortune.”

The Verge also has an excellent deep dive into how SESTA/FOSTA has put more women's lives at risk.

What about the claims that SESTA/FOSTA would help law enforcement (many of whom pushed for the law)? Yeah, about that: police are now realizing that it's more difficult for them to find sex traffickers without Backpage. I mean, it's not like people were explaining this a decade ago.

Meanwhile, given how many SETSA/FOSTA supporters insisted that the bill was necessary to prevent the sex trafficking scourge, you'd think that sex trafficking prosecutions and arrests would show an upswing, right? Instead, we see things like how a special court in Delaware set up specifically to focus on dealing with sex trafficking cases is shutting down due to the lack of actual sex trafficking victims. The reason the court was shut down according to the judge who shut it down?

... there was "little evidence to suggest the defendants of this court are the subjects" of sex-trafficking enterprises.

So, I'm still wondering why all of the supporters of SESTA/FOSTA seem to have disappeared off the face of the earth in the last couple months as all of this has happened. Can one of them step forward and actually defend what they've done as the evidence is showing they're literally getting people killed and making it more difficult to stop sex trafficking?

Filed Under: consequences, fosta, intermediary liability, pimps, police, sesta, sex trafficking

Good Debate On The Unintended Consequences Of 'Rogue Website Crackdown'

from the timely dept

I recently was able to attend an interesting Cato/Techfreedom/CEI debate on the unintended consequences of the rogue website crackdown. The specific focus (not surprisingly) was the debate over SOPA/PIPA, but thankfully some of the debate went further back, to discuss how the government and private actors were already using existing law to do questionable things to sites they declared "rogue." This became even more timely with the Megaupload takedown... which happened about the same time that this panel ended. It was especially nice to see some discussion over the problematic seizures around Dajaz1 and Rojadirecta, as well as the fact that Veoh went bankrupt defending a bogus copyright lawsuit under existing law. These are not "hypotheticals." These are real problems with today's law already. Many of the things people are worried about under SOPA are already possible. SOPA just took them to the next level. Anyway, the debate -- which includes Julian Sanchez, James Gatusso, Ryan Radia, Allan Friedman and Dan Kaminsky -- is well worth watching:

Filed Under: collateral damage, consequences, rogue websites

Could Cutting People Off From The Internet Be Dangerous?

from the three-strikes-and-unintended-consequences dept

With the entertainment industry pushing hard for "three strikes" type laws that would kick people off the internet based on three accusations (not convictions) for online copyright infringement, it may be worth asking if there could be some serious unintended consequences associated with doing so. Reader Pickle Monger points us to a story, not about three strike disconnections, but about people taking the extreme step of cutting themselves off, and it quotes psychiatrist Jerald Block who who warns that a sudden disconnection can be quite harmful:

"If you are heavily active [on the internet], by disconnecting you are losing a significant relationship. Those 30 or 40 hours of time now have to be filled with real life."

Dr Block says some people can find it very gratifying, while others find they are not capable of staying disconnected.

However, he believes the worst case scenario is when the decision to disconnect is made by a third party. "It can be a disaster and can even lead to suicide."

It's worth noting that Dr. Block is the same psychiatrist who, a few years ago, suggested that the Columbine tragedy may have been caused not by the two kids playing violent video games, but from being cut off from those games by their parents:

When Klebold and Harris are kicked off their computers, few, if any, would recognize just how important their virtual lives were to them. Most people wouldn't even know they were in trouble. That would make the punishment much more severe...

For heavy computer users, cutting them off can free up 30 or more hours a week. That is a lot of time to fill, especially for an enraged teen with limited social skills. Unwise. The second issue is to recognize that computer users have a relationship with their computers... As silly as it may sound, being cut off from the system might feel something like being cut off from your best friend...

Frankly, this theory sounds just about as extreme and unsupportable as the opposite one that blames video games for violence. If you're going to go on a rampage and kill people because you've lost your internet access, you've got bigger problems and issues than too strong a relationship with your computer. However, it does raise a point that is worth discussing: cutting people off suddenly from the internet may have serious unintended consequences. I don't think we'll see a wave of suicides or anything, but it does seem like an extreme response to something like file sharing, and it's at least slightly worrisome that no one pushing for such three strikes laws is even thinking about what impact cutting people off might have.

Filed Under: consequences, three strikes

YouTube-Using Russian Police Officer Fired For Whistleblowing

from the careful-where-you-whistleblow dept

One of the great things about the internet these days is that it gives a platform for people who had no voice before to speak out. Of course, there are certain risks associated with that. Apparently a police officer in the Russian port of Novorossiisk put up a YouTube video accusing his superiors of corruption. The video got lots of attention (over 200,000 views) leading Russia's Interior Ministor (who is responsible for the police) to start a probe. That probe apparently lasted all of two hours before it ended and the police officer who made the video was fired. Of course, many will assume that this was punishing a whistleblower, which certainly sounds plausible -- though, an argument could also be made that if the guy really was making stuff up, that's pretty bad as well. Either way, it is a reminder that just because you have a platform to speak out (whether legitimately or not), it doesn't mean there aren't consequences for doing so (as unfair as those consequences might be in some cases).

Filed Under: consequences, free speech, police, russia, whistle blowing, youtube