Abusing the WWW

The World Wide Web is making me worried, wary and wistful.

By providing seemingly boundless access to information, some of us are getting a harsh lesson in reality, learning that the Internet could be one of the most helpful, or damaging, resources in our lives.

Last week, The Washington Post reported that when a Yale law student couldn’t land a summer job, her astonishment caused her to do a little web research. That research led her to AutoAdmit.com, a message board run by University of Pennsylvania law student Anthony Ciolli and insurance agent Jarret Cohen.

To her horror, she found someone had taken her photo off Facebook.com, posted it on the site and threatened to sexually violate her.

Even worse, she wasn’t the only one.

Another student found someone else used her name in a particularly distasteful discussion, implicating her participation. Photos were also taken off other sites and used in a contest to choose the “hottest female law student at top 14 law schools.” There were offensive comments about women, gays, blacks, Asians and Jews, and even one crude note about a holocaust victim.
The self-proclaimed “most prestigious college admissions discussion board in the world” has posts with titles like “I am getting all A’s and I lay all the hottest [expletive]” and “rate this hot girl.”

There are, however, some insightful comments that you would expect from any lawyer: “We’re lawyers and lawyers-in-training, dude. Of course we follow the law, not morals.” And another thought out defense: “Rape is a crime. Ridiculing on a message board is not.”

According the site operators though, there is no reason to judge them, because this is after all, a “forum for free speech.”

“In fact, one finds overall a much deeper and much more mature level of insight in a community where the ugliest depths of human opinion are confronted, rather than ignored,” Cohen said.

As a journalist free speech is certainly a right that I hold near and dear, so excuse me as I exercise my right in saying they are severely abusing their privileges.

I’m not sure our founding fathers would be happy to hear that one person’s blatant abuse of this right is violating another’s right to the pursuit of happiness.

A December survey by the Ponemon Institute found that about half of employers use the Internet when looking through job applications. What worries me is that the Internet could be the single force preventing someone from landing that dream job, and they would have no idea. It has the ability to destroy reputations and a person’s dignity, all with a few clicks of a mouse.

So many of us have personal blogs and photos on sites like Facebook.com. Just a quick search for my name, and anyone could find photos from my summer vacation, learn that my favorite food is hot dogs and that I am a 21-year-old college female. I’m sure we can all imagine how those three things could be used against me.

I do give the Internet credit though. It has brought us all together in ways I could never have imagined. People use it to find future husbands and wives, they talk with relatives living on the other side of the world and share cultures and information. It’s an incredibly empowering tool.

But perhaps some of that power is getting to our heads. The anonymity that the Internet allows
does foster an uninhibited “forum for free speech,” yet the right to free speech is no defense for malice. When reputations and careers are at stake, such comments are hardly contributing to the “marketplace of ideas.”

I hate to think that people’s efforts to use the Internet for good, to communicate with friends and family and share their lives with them, can actually be used against them. Used to destroy reputations and with no chance to defend themselves.

I can’t help but be wistful for the days when the tools at our fingertips weren’t used to exploit free speech.