New York Times Stanley Fish - Anonymity and the Dark Side of the Internet

Professor Stanley Fish in the New York Times...


In McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission (1995) the Supreme Court overturned a statute requiring any person who prints a notice or flyer promoting a candidate or an issue to identify the communication's author by name. Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, grounded his opinion in an account of meaning he takes from an earlier case (First National Bank of Boston v. Bellotti): "The inherent worth of . . . speech in terms of its capacity for informing the public does not depend upon the identity of its source, whether corporation, association, union, or individual." Or, in other words, a writing or utterance says what it says independently of who happens to say it; the information conveyed does not vary with the identification of the speaker.

There are at least two problems with this reasoning. First, it is not true that a text's meaning is the same whether or not its source is known. Suppose I receive an anonymous note asserting that I have been betrayed by a friend. I will not know what to make of it — is it a cruel joke, a slander, a warning, a test? But if I manage to identify the note's author — it's a friend or an enemy or a known gossip — I will be able to reason about its meaning because I will know what kind of person composed it and what motives that person might have had.

Read more at http://legalboadcastnetwork.com

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• New
• York
• Times
• Stanley
• Fish
• Anonymity
• Dark
• Side
• of
• the
• Internet
• supreme
• court
• ohio
• john
• paul
• stevens
• justice
• law
• legal
• news
• politics