Motherboard

A lawsuit important enough to be heard by the New York State Supreme Court began, commonly enough, with someone being a prick on the internet.

Back in December, a poster named BETonBlack published a rant against VIBE magazine editor Jermaine Hall on a site called LipstickAlley. BETonBlack’s rant was pretty nasty—he called Hall an “Uncle Tom” and a “house negroe” (sic) for marrying a white woman, referred to his wife as a “wilderbeast” (sic) and a “hideous wet dog,” all because, um, Hall wrote some joke about how cornrows are lame.

Hall and his wife took exception to these insults and, being 21st-century Americans, decided to sue BETonBlack, but first they needed to sue LipstickAlley to get them to reveal who BETonBlack was. A judge initially ruled that the anonymous asshole’s identity would have to be revealed, but then Public Citizen, a nonprofit consumer advocacy organization got involved and filed this brief, which says that the case should be thrown out because the suit should have been brought in Michigan, where the company that owns LipstickAlley is located, and more importantly, the Halls don’t have a case anyway.

The legal arguments get a little thorny and involve the difference between “hostility” and “malice,” but in essence, the idea is that Jermaine is more or less a public figure who should expect a certain amount of smack to be talked about him online.

A ruling is supposed to be handed down any day now, but it’s likely that BETonBlack’s identity will be safe, like a superhero with the power of making misspelled, misogynistic, sorta-racist comments about women he’s never met—and that’s as it should be.

Internet commenting isn’t quite like ordinary speech. Individual sites and blogs can monitor and moderate comments however they like—that way, forums about speedboat engines don’t turn into centers for racist white-power hate speech, and white power forums don’t turn into highly technical discussions about speedboat engines.

Some blogs require comments to be approved by administrators to weed out spambots and idiots. Some sites even (stupidly) try to charge commenters and force them to reveal their real identity. Every corner of the internet has its own spoken and unspoken guidelines for sharing opinions and ideas, and sites are generally free to do as they wish with content that the great unwashed masses choose to post. (You may not like it, but Facebook is totally within its rights to delete your account if you put up a bunch of pictures of your cock.)

LipstickAlley is the kind of forum where another anti-Jermaine Hill post by BETonBlack gets a bunch of responses that are just “funny” animated .gifs that imply that Hill’s wife is indeed ugly; it’s not exactly a bunch of think tank wonks discussing the validity of the Laffer Curve. Another forum might have deleted the nasty comments, or banned BETonBlack, but forums have the right to police their threads—or not—as they wish.

The arguments for staying anonymous online should be pretty obvious: political dissenters and corporate whistle-blowers need to have their identities protected, and employees need a way to voice opinions independently of their employers. But there’s a more fundamental, less noble reason to hide one’s identity: people need the freedom to be weird.

You might want to post a photo of you putting a dildo in your ass to Reddit’s “gonewild” section, or tweet that Will Smith is made out of rubber, or tell a bunch of strangers all about your crack-dealing days on a forum—that’s what the internet is for. It’s a platform to express whatever’s on your mind, even if whatever’s on your mind would disturb and alarm the people that know you.

The internet is the global id. It’s where you can ask, “Hey, everybody, does everyone else secretly like the smell of their own ball sweat?” It’s where you can find communities of freaks just like you, and share your strangeness with others without fear of reprisal.

People’s ids aren’t always pretty, and free speech isn’t always intelligent. If we want a safe place to share our own craziness, we have to put up with other people’s craziness, even if that means tolerating posts on trashy forums that viciously insult people for no good reason.

And if you’re a public figure in any way—heck, if you produce any work that appears online ever—you have to grow a thick skin. As unfamous as I am, I’ve had people tell me in comments that I had a tiny penis, that I didn’t know anything about music, and that they “ripped out [my] mom’s dick off and shoved it down [my] throat.”

There is a useful debate to be had about when commenting crosses the line into cyber-bullying, and what constitutes hateful speech. Jermaine Hall has to take his lumps because he’s a public figure, but a 16-year-old shouldn’t have to bear the same insults.

Recently, a judge in Texas ruled that Topix.com had to release the information of 178 people who made defamatory comments about a couple that were accused of sexual assault and then found innocent, and that’s alright with me—attacking anonymous innocent people who didn’t put themselves on the web on purpose seems to cross some kind of internet etiquette line.

Ultimately, it should be up to individual online communities to decide where those lines should be drawn. Websites need to make their posting standards clear, and have zero tolerance policies for certain kinds of behavior, like distributing child pornography or conspiring to blow up a building.

Other than those examples, there’s something to be said for letting our baser, dumber selves rage and troll to our hearts’ content. Jermaine Hall should have just logged onto LipstickAlley, called BETonBlack a cock-sucking, racist son of a bitch and left it at that.

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