Governing Babel by John P. Wihbey

Author:John P. Wihbey [Wihbey, John P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: social media; Technology; Tech regulation; Technology policy; Communications platforms; Misinformation; Disinformation; Internet studies; Human rights; Internet freedom; First Amendment; generative AI; artificial intelligence; AI; genAI
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2025-10-07T00:00:00+00:00

Overt Acts and Actors

The online world presents and facilitates novel types of harms. As with Fishman and his focus on network organizing and groups—actor-based analysis for content moderation purposes—there is a more general puzzle about when online platforms become what some have called “tactical spaces,” allowing violent conspiracies and terrorism to be organized and where the venue itself becomes weaponized, even where individual messages or speech acts may be mundane.31 Issues such as doxxing—maliciously disclosing someone’s address, location, and personal details online with the purpose of encouraging targeting—also creates conundrums. Then there is the question of civil law. Can someone be sued for taking an action such as releasing someone’s home address into a chat group, even if no harm eventually comes to them? Can someone be held liable for encouraging others to take action online, including through doxxing—what lawyers call a theory of “vicarious tort liability”? More such cases with similar fact patterns are bound to come into the courts, in both the United States and abroad, in the years ahead. Questions around the legal liability for organizing and inciting online mobs and aggressive patterns of networked behavior—and who is responsible, both criminally and civilly—are becoming more pressing with each year.

The overarching issue of incitement has taken on new dimensions, as algorithms, networks, and encryption change the game. Speed, scale, and the permanence of speech also change the nature of the problem. The issue of whether President Trump’s actions on January 6, 2021, constituted incitement has been the topic of endless legal and political debate. While that issue may never be fully resolved, it raises a more general issue about how to understand ambiguously inciting speech and what might be justified in terms of curbing or filtering it. Legal scholars Alan Z. Rozenshtein and Jed Handelsman Shugerman have argued that courts should take into account whether the speech was correlated with an “overt act,” or concrete activities that are “designed to increase the imminent risk of such lawlessness and violence.”32 The scholars make this case in order to establish the standard for legal liability in the courts—they argue proof of overt acts could be a requirement for charging people for otherwise ambiguously inciting speech acts. (In the case of the Capitol riot, they point to “Trump’s order to remove the magnetometers that were preventing his armed supporters from joining the rally crowd; and Trump’s attempts, as evidenced by Secret Service emails, to personally lead the mob at the Capitol.”)33 But analogously, social media companies might make similar assessments, confident that such analysis is consistent with First Amendment traditions. Further, any regulatory rules that urge and validate such action by the companies can be seen as well aligned with general free speech principles. Such a claim is deeply historically rooted, as Rozenshtein and Shugerman note:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.