Proposed NY Ban on Anonymous Commenting So Stupid it Hurts

Proposed NY Ban on Anonymous Commenting So Stupid it Hurts

Damon Poeter
PC Mag
May 24, 2012

It's always funny when clueless do-gooders try to put the Internet toothpaste back in the tube.

This week we learned that New York lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban anonymous speech on the Internet. This is an idea that's dumb on so many levels, it's difficult to figure out where to start dissecting it.

Let's run through the facts, which Wired's Threat Level blog alerted us to earlier this week. It seems there's a bill (S06779) going through both state chambers that calls for the administrators of New York-based websites to "remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post."

The targeted parties would include "any individual who posts a message on a website including social networks, blogs forums, message boards, or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages."

Let's call that a commendable covering of all the bases. Let's also call it an unenforceable, business-killing, First Amendment-violating monstrosity of a brain fart.

Now the motivation for the proposed legislation—stamping out cyberbullying—isn't a terrible thing. Hey, I've got two pre-teen boys who are just now finding out about the perils and pitfalls of the Internet, so I'm sympathetic to any otherwise noble attempt to make it a safer place.

But the lawmakers who came up with this bill are shortsighted at best. They're proposing a scorched-earth solution to a problem that is better addressed with subtler, if less immediately satisfying measures to combat bullying like awareness-raising campaigns and building support networks.

Why not just shut down New York schools and lock kids away until they're 18? That would get rid of childhood bullying, but good.

I really don't want to downplay the problem of cyberbullying here. But we need to understand what's at stake. On the one hand, we've created a wonderful technological advance called the Internet that enables the free and open sharing of knowledge in a way that's unprecedented in human history. On the other hand, sometimes people say mean things on it.

This is not in fact a trade-off. It is fundamental to the structure, value, and efficiency of the Internet that the ability to communicate candidly and without fear of real-world repercussions or censorship be unimpaired. This is one of the foundational struts that the Internet is built upon, if not the foundation itself. Removing anonymous online speech is akin to running elections without secret balloting—maybe you'll still get results but don't be surprised if they always seem to favor the folks with the most muscle on their side.

Such an Internet would become a place where freedom and innovation go to die.

And as Wired's David Kravets points out, there is also a long, pre-Internet tradition of anonymous speech in the United States. Remember the Federalist Papers? How about Common Sense? And let's not forget the friggin' First Amendment of the Constitution, which was enacted to prevent the kind of hare-brained law some of New York's more hare-brained lawmakers are trying to push through.

Kravets figures that "unless the First Amendment is repealed, they stand no chance of surviving any constitutional scrutiny even if [the proposed bill] were approved."

I'll go him one further and say that a Supreme Court composed entirely of Clarence Thomases would toss this turkey of a law out on its ear. (Another benefit of such a hypothetical high court hearing is that we'd be treated to the very first set of oral arguments during which not a single question was asked from the bench.)

What's more, the enforcement of this proposed legislation would be disastrous for websites in New York that allow commenting.

The bill proposes that "a website administrator upon request shall remove any comments posted on his or her website by an anonymous poster unless such anonymous poster agrees to attach his or her name to the post and confirms that his or her IP address, legal name, and home address are accurate."

Never mind that the producers of print publications aren't under similar strictures for running letters to the editor that arrive by post. Let's focus on how difficult and time-consuming it would be for website operators to run their sites this way.

I don't know if the lawmakers who came up with S06779 have commented on a website lately, but there are a whole bunch of digital identity authentication protocols and platforms run by third parties out there that people use to manage comment threads and Web boards. What that means is that a website admin often doesn't have a direct line to somebody who's posted on the site. In many cases, even simply contacting some random anon with a request that they agree to attach their real name to any and all comments they make (let alone getting them to agree to that) would require full-out digital forensics that would likely involve negotiations with companies and individuals well outside of New York state.

Even if site admins decided to just delete anonymous comments rather than try to contact the posters, this kind of nonsense mandate would be time consuming and counter-productive to say the least. It would probably end up punishing smaller Web ventures that might not be able to afford full-time comment thread snoops more than the bigger enterprises which might be able to. And it would make all New York-based Web ventures with commenting services less competitive against out-of-state competitors.

One last curiosity in the bill is the way it proposes that outside requests to remove anonymous comments be handled: "All website administrators shall have a contact number or email address posted for such removal requests, clearly visible in any sections where comments are posted."

Recall that the website admins would be required to honor any such request. Now look for the bit in the bill that requires people making such requests to provide their own IP addresses, legal names, and home addresses. The geniuses behind S06779 left that bit out—meaning, you guessed it, totally anonymous trolls could go around to New York-based websites demanding that other commenters' posts be deleted and the site admins would have to do their bidding.

This dumb, dumb idea isn't going to become a law. It's amazing it has gone as far as it has already, however. Here's a suggestion for New York legislators—how about thinking up ways to incentivize well-run message boards instead of trying to stop the Internet from being the Internet?

And the dumbass who drew up this bill is a Republican. What a turd.