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December 15, 2005
Character Assassination on Wiki
Someone posted a malicious, false biography of John Seigenthaler on Wikipedia. After some effort, Mr. Seigenthaler convinced Wiki to remove the false content, but efforts to learn the identity of the entry's author were fruitless. Wikipedia gave him an IP address that led to a customer of BellSouth Internet. Repeated requests to BellSouth's Abuse Team generated no information:
"Major communications Internet companies are bound by federal privacy laws that protect the identity of their customers, even those who defame online. Only if a lawsuit resulted in a court subpoena would BellSouth give up the name."
Read the whole thing at USA Today.
The big question here is, of course, what happens when anonymous sources can publish anything, without consequence, on a worldwide public forum? How do we preserve the character of the Web while protecting legitimate interests from slander? Good grist for an MIS class discussion, I think.
Posted by DavidK at December 15, 2005 04:13 PM | Permalink