The AP reports:
New Jersey prosecutors have subpoenaed records of JuicyCampus.com, a Web site that publishes anonymous, often malicious gossip about college students.
Language on the site ranges from catty to hateful and offensive. One thread, for example, on the "most overrated Princeton student" quickly dissolves into name-calling, homophobia and anti-Semitism.
JuicyCampus may be violating the state's Consumer Fraud Act by suggesting that it doesn't allow offensive material but providing no enforcement of that rule -- and no way for users to report or dispute the material, New Jersey Attorney General Anne Milgram said Tuesday....
The attorney general has also subpoenaed the Web site's advertising agency, Adbrite, to determine how JuicyCampus represented its operation and what advertising keywords the site requested....
Can anyone tell me, please, just what JuicyCampus has been saying that is supposedly a misrepresentation?
I agree that speakers and service providers are bound by their contracts, including contracts not to say or host certain things. They may also in some situations be bound by explicit promises they make in their advertising. But it would obviously be dangerous to have them be liable for broadly "suggesting" certain things. Imagine a state Attorney General prosecuting the New York Times for "suggesting that it" is fair and accurate, and investigating whether they've defrauded consumers because of supposed bias and error. (No, seriously, that sort of prosecution would be bad.)
Likewise, imagine an attorney general going after us for "suggesting" with our comment policy that we'd delete offensive comments, but then not doing a good enough job of deleting them. Of course, we don't say we'll delete offensive comments (we try to discourage such comments, and we may delete them, but we never say we will), but who knows what someone might think we suggest? So can anyone report on what exactly JuicyCampus said that might have been false or misleading?
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If they purport to moderate the board but don't moderate the board, that sounds like a misrepresentation.
So, if the site basically presented that to their advertisers, the NJ AG really has nothing to stand on here, even without getting into the larger issues that EV points out.
On the other hand, if the site, for some strange reason, sold itself to advertisers as a clean, family friendly website, then I guess that could be misrepresentation. But there is no suggestion the AG knows they did that, so he's clearly fishing here.
I think the site is vile. But as I said yesterday, I think the remedy for its vileness is (1) Googlebombing the founder and his henchmen, (2) using inventive internet research to identify as many rude posters as possible, then expose them at their respective schools, and (3) if schools have warned students that their school network internet traffic is not private, expose scummy posters through that method. (Arguably harsh. But want to be anonymous? Then don't use an institutional network when you've been warned your traffic is not private.)
But the governmental responses strike me as both dangerous and embarrassingly pretextual.
This is New Jersey we're talking about. It's INHERENTLY CORRUPT.
Flith, fudge, golly gee, dang, son-of-a-gun, pickles, fart, snot, booger, gosh, heck, and dag-nab-it.
There. To a preschooler, this post contains all of the banned words.
and this:
and it was never deleted.
- Yogi Berra
Hmmm.
Seems to me that every business or government office that posts "no guns" signs but does nothing to ensure that the rule is followed is guilty of the same thing...
It reminds me of that murder and subsequent civil case involving a talk show -- Jenny Jones, I think. The murderer felt himself humiliated when the victim (another man) revealed a crush on the murderer on the show. During the civil suit asserting that the show was partially culpable for the murder, the plaintiffs pointed out that the show's producers had told the murderer that if he participated in the "find out who has a crush on you" show, the person with a crush might be a man or a woman. In fact, the producers already knew it was a man. The plaintiff argued that this statement was knowingly false; the producers argued that it should be interpreted as a "be prepared for either" statement.
I think context strongly influences the plausible interpretation. In the context of the internet, I expect moderation to be arbitrary and capricious. (That's not a slam on any particular site).
This is almost completely clearly a "we do what we want" clause.