Download - Future of the Internet – And how to stop it.

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Solutions
be to allow those who are characterized within it to augment the picture provided
by a single snippet with whatever information, explanation, or denial
that they think helps frame what is portrayed. Civil libertarians have long suggested
that the solution to bad speech is more speech while realizing the difficulties
of linking the second round of speech to the first without infringing the
rights of the first speaker. 134 Criticisms of the “more speech” approach have included
the observation that a retraction or amendment of a salacious newspaper
story usually appears much less prominently than the original. This is particularly
true for newspapers, where those seeing one piece of information may
not ever see the follow-up. There is also the worry that the fog of information
generated by a free-for-all is no way to have people discern facts from lies. Generative
networks invite us to find ways to reconcile these views. We can design
protocols to privilege those who are featured or described online so that they
can provide their own framing linked to their depictions. This may not accord
with our pre-Web expectations: it may be useful for a private newspaper to provide
a right of reply to its subjects, but such an entity would quickly invoke a
First Amendment–style complaint of compelled speech if the law were to provide
for routine rights of reply in any but the narrowest of circumstances. 135
And many of us might wish to discuss Holocaust deniers or racists without giving
them a platform to even link to a reply. The path forward is likely not a formal
legal right but a structure to allow those disseminating information to
build connections to the subjects of their discussions. In many cases those of us
disseminating may not object—and a properly designed system might turn
what would have otherwise been one-sided exchanges into genuine dialogues.
We already see some movement in this direction. The Harvard Kennedy
School’s Joseph Nye has suggested that a site like urban legend debunker
snopes.com be instituted for reputation, a place that people would know to
check to get the full story when they see something scandalous but decontextualized
online. 136 The subjects of the scandalous data would similarly know to
place their answers there—perhaps somewhat mitigating the need to formally
link it to each instance of the original data. Google invites people quoted or discussed
within news stories to offer addenda and clarification directly to Google,
which posts these responses prominently near its link to the story when it is a
search result within Google News. 137 Services like reputationdefender.com
will, for a fee, take on the task of trying to remove or, failing that, contextualize
sensitive information about people online. 138 ReputationDefender uses a broad
toolkit of tactics to try to clear up perceived invasions of privacy—mostly
moral suasion rather than legal threat.