Blog: AutoAdmit

The Bush administration has been remarkably successful at spreading false information simply by repeating it over and over. And according to a few recent psychological studies reported in the Washington Post, even if the false information is being labeled false on a flyer or being debunked by a public official, just repeating the statement to rebut it can actually reinforce it in people's minds.

In a nation built on free speech, and where civil libertarians are fond of saying that "the solution to bad speech is more speech," these findings illuminate the difficulty of fighting misinformation. Appropriately, two days ago the Yale Law Journal ran a set of online articles discussing ways to fight Internet harassment such as the defamatory material on AutoAdmit.com that roiled the law school community last year.

Most of the Yale Law Journal articles suggest regulation such as imposing notice-and-takedown rules on search engines, but none of the proposed solutions would really fix the problem, and James Grimmelmann argues against censoring search engines, effectively and rightly in my opinion. The Post article suggests a few better ways to argue without repeating the false information, like "Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11" rather than "Saddam Hussein did not attack us, Bin Laden did", but acknowledges that such transformations may not be possible.

In both cases, we're still stuck with the problem that it's easier to anonymously defame someone than for the victim to clear his or her name, and it's easier to mislead the American public than to stand up for the truth.

The Internet moves very fast. The law moves slowly. But justice has a way of inexorably catching up to wrongdoers. Scooter Libby exposed a covert agent for political gain, and years later, eventually was caught and sent to jail (though Karl Rove probably got away with it).

Now justice is slowly moving against the posters on AutoAdmit.com who wrote that one Yale Law student "clearly ... deserves to be raped" or should be "hate-fucked"; claimed that she has herpes, bribed her way into school, was having a lesbian affair with the Dean of Admissions, has fake breasts, and a host of other nasty and defamatory statements; posted pictures of another student and then stalked her at the school gym to get additional pictures of her, and then wrote about how they would like to sexually assault her. The Wall Street Journal law blog reported that two law professors, at Yale and Stanford, have filed a lawsuit on behalf of the two unnamed students. Here is the full complaint (PDF).

It's hard to believe what terrible people would actually write these things. It's also fairly mind-boggling that they thought they could remain anonymous; hopefully they were wrong and the discovery will unmask these students who surely ought to have their employment terminated at whatever law firms where they may be working. (One of the site administrators, Anthony Ciolli, who deleted posts which unmasked contributors to AutoAdmit but refused to remove the defamatory posts against the women, already lost his law firm job offer over the site.) These people should be revealed and punished, most of all to deter people in the future from hiding behind an anonymous site while psychologically tormenting innocent women for the sheer thrill of it, as they clearly were here.

Those of us who aren't women don't always realize the verbal abuse many receive from asshole men. Here's an example.

At Drinking Liberally on Thursday, Jill made an interesting point: while women can at least walk away and try to forget the harassment (not fun, for sure), when this behavior goes online, the nasty words never go away. A group of juvenile law students ran a contest in February to identify the "hottest" women at "top 14" law schools. (As Jill pointed out: why top 14? Wonder which school they were from?)

The contest organizers posted pictures from the women's online profiles, and posters on the forum quickly started denigrating the students, especially those who asked to have their pictures removed. According to the UVA Law Weekly:

AutoAdmit members continually referred to some of these UVA Law students as "whores" and "sluts," among other terms too obscene to print. In other representative threads, an anonymous AutoAdmit poster wrote about performing sex acts on them, while another told them to "[g]et raped." What's more, nearly all of these threads are accessible through any Google search that includes the students' names.

Jessica Valenti, one person who has been subjected to completely undeserved humiliation online, wrote a terrific article about sexist conduct online.

Is this what people are really like? Sexist and violent? Misogynist and racist? Alice Marwick, a postgraduate student in New York studying culture and communication, says: "There's the disturbing possibility that people are creating online environments purely to express the type of racist, homophobic, or sexist speech that is no longer acceptable in public society, at work, or even at home."

While the obscenity thrown at bloggers like Jessica and Jill is completely inexcusable, at least they have chosen to be public spokespeople and are, sadly, used to this sort of abuse. Not so the other women on the AutoAdmit contest, whose names have been withheld from press accounts but for whom an online search brings up pages of postings with titles calling them "bitches" by name and making claims about the size or genuineness of their breasts.

The women most suffering from this search-results besmirching are those who have little online presence and who have unusual names, because there are fewer conflicting pages that might beat out the defamatory ones on a search. Civil libertarians (with whom I almost always agree) like to say that the solution to bad speech is more speech, and so in this case one effective remedy is to go public (leading to news stories that will outrank the abusive posts) or write a blog.

However, all of these remedies make the subject an even more public person, and this means that privacy is often a one-way trap door. Once lost, privacy can never be regained, and some people have it taken from them in what clearly a violation of these women. Friends who have avoided making Facebook or Friendster profiles, particularly women, often cite the fear of losing this privacy. Will we read a trend story in the New York Times one day of couples giving their children common names in a deliberate attempt to create some privacy in a world where that is increasingly difficult to preserve?