Dangerous Double Standards
Averting your eyes away from something is easier said than done. When we drive down the road and see an accident, our natural instinct – as macabre as it may be- is to take a peek at the carnage. The average person will see the accident, stare perhaps for a couple more seconds then they should, and then continue on with their lives. When we see an accident on the side of the road, we may be exposing ourselves to sights or sounds that we would rather not see or hear. When we go on the internet, we may run into websites that contain content that we find abhorrent and then quickly leave the website, hopefully to never see such things again. However, what happens when our eyes are not averted from this abhorrent content, but drawn? There are hundreds
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Perhaps it is impossible to deal with online harassment; prosecutors are not jumping out of their seats to try people from across the world for saying mean things. However, relying on the moderation of content by content providers has failed, and the human costs of such harassment are not mitigated by the medium from which it originated. That Jerry Falwell was said to have had committed incest in a Hustler Magazine parody rather than in Time was an important factor in why he lost Hustler vs. Falwell. Even though Jerry Falwell was gravely offended by Hustler’s assertion and he had, by all intents and purposes, a legitimate grievance to say that the Hustler ad caused him emotional distress, he lost the case because Hustler Magazine was not a serious news publication in which a reasonable person could assume that the ad was factual. If one goes onto a pro-anorexia website and sees advice, photos, and stories on how to acquire and maintain an eating disorder, could we say that that content is not intentionally inflicting emotional harm if it is a parody of legitimate medical websites? The term ‘intentional infliction of emotional distress’ may as well be rendered moot if the standard for meeting it is so astronomically high that no action beyond pure character assassination in what is considered to be a legitimate news outlet by a writer who claims to be serious and not a satirist and featuring a figure who is considered to be a private individual shall meet the
Perhaps it is impossible to deal with online harassment; prosecutors are not jumping out of their seats to try people from across the world for saying mean things. However, relying on the moderation of content by content providers has failed, and the human costs of such harassment are not mitigated by the medium from which it originated. That Jerry Falwell was said to have had committed incest in a Hustler Magazine parody rather than in Time was an important factor in why he lost Hustler vs. Falwell. Even though Jerry Falwell was gravely offended by Hustler’s assertion and he had, by all intents and purposes, a legitimate grievance to say that the Hustler ad caused him emotional distress, he lost the case because Hustler Magazine was not a serious news publication in which a reasonable person could assume that the ad was factual. If one goes onto a pro-anorexia website and sees advice, photos, and stories on how to acquire and maintain an eating disorder, could we say that that content is not intentionally inflicting emotional harm if it is a parody of legitimate medical websites? The term ‘intentional infliction of emotional distress’ may as well be rendered moot if the standard for meeting it is so astronomically high that no action beyond pure character assassination in what is considered to be a legitimate news outlet by a writer who claims to be serious and not a satirist and featuring a figure who is considered to be a private individual shall meet the