Re: 9/25/00 - TheStreet.com: Money and Pageviews Shape Message-Board Rules
TheStreet.com - Wrong!
Money and Pageviews Shape Message-Board Rules
The policy of allowing anonymous postings on stock boards is not about the First Amendment.
By James J. Cramer
One of the more loathsome characteristics of the Web is the so-called right to privacy that individuals have to be able to lie, libel and savage others on the message boards. The current state of law, off the Web, goes like this: You cannot say any libelous thing you want about someone and get away with it. If the person you are saying it about is a public figure, you can't willfully and maliciously make up stuff about them.
Off the Web, libel cases are rarely brought. They are expensive and time-consuming and the only people rich enough to bring them tend to be public figures who have a higher hurdle as plaintiffs. But when they get brought, they include the person who made the charge and the medium through which the charge was made. If you make up something libelous and The New York Times prints it, you get sued but so does The Times, because it is supposed to use discretion in printing known libel. That's why you don't read outright lies every day about people, especially outright lies brought to you by anonymous sources. There is not enough libel insurance in the world for a newspaper company to print known fraudulent charges that it reviews.
Now, what's the standard on the Web? It goes something like the standard that Dr. Goebbels used in Der Angriff, his own paper in Nazi Germany: "We can say whatever we want about anyone we want, because there are no rules and no government to appeal to." The only difference may be that Goebbels was willing to use his name. The people on the Web insist that no names be allowed and they will fight to their deaths to maintain that anonymity. (And the ACLU agrees! Shocker!)
How can this be allowed? What is the difference between something that is on the Web and something that is printed in The New York Times? I say it is readership. The Web is much larger than The Times. Otherwise, it is the same. What could be done about this? Pretty simple. All of this goes away if the purveyors of message boards demanded that the writers clean up their acts. But if they did that, they would be considered publishers instead of just common carriers. That would subject them to the libel laws as surely if they were The New York Times. And they would have to buy big libel insurance and they would end up paying out fortunes in damages. So they have no economic incentive to clean the cesspool. Why not insist that people use their names? Ahh, money again! If they did that, they would lose their volume of posters. That would hurt pageviews. If pageviews get hurt, numbers get hurt. If we hurt stock prices, we hurt our pocketbooks. So forget about! decency; we need pageviews!
And don't I know it. At one point I suggested that TheStreet.com allow anonymous posters because I thought it would help pageviews. I was wrong. The editors were right; they didn't want to turn a pristine, albeit profitless, pool into a lucrative cesspool. Since then, TheStreet.com has decided to partner with Silicon Investor , one of the big message-board providers. Silicon Investor requires users to buy a premium membership in order to post messages on its boards; this results in much stricter rules and fewer anonymous attacks -- and I am grateful that we partnered with them. They do care.
I sure wish it weren't about money. I sure wish that the reason why the big message-board providers don't clamp down was to protect freedom of speech.
But I know the truth: It's about pageviews and money. I gotta go take a shower.
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