If you haven’t heard by now, a number of Google executives were convicted in absentia by a court in Italy for failing to police some videos posted by users. In this case, the video was a home movie of several teenagers bullying a peer with Downs Syndrome. The video was anonymously posted to Google Videos where it stayed for several months. Eventually, some adults noticed it and contacted the police who investigated and then asked Google to take the video down. By all reports, Google did so within two hours of receiving the notification.
The Italian prosecutors felt that this was not fast enough and argued in court that Google had an affirmative responsibility for the content even though it was posted by others and even though Google does not exercise any control over the content. One self-appointed consumer advocate is proclaiming this a “victory for individual privacy over corporate interest”.
I am an avid privacy activist but I’m not buying it here for several reasons. First, it’s not possible to evaluate all the content that users are posting. About twenty hours of video content are posted to YouTube alone every minute. Add in all the other Web 2.0 sites and you’d need literally armies of people doing nothing but watching what other people are posting. Nobody could afford that. And even if you tried, that many people just couldn’t do the job without making mistakes. Second, there’s no easy way to tell inappropriate content (like real bullying) from certain types of performance art. That kind of stuff is not to my taste but other people … well, I won’t say they necessarily enjoy it, but they do it. And heaven help you if you censor their artistic content. Third, which set of standards will you apply? Granted, beating up a kid with Downs Syndrome is bad in pretty much every culture but there’s nothing philosophically different about this case and the Chinese suppression of political dissent. There is no way to draw the line about what is or is not acceptable.
Some commentators on this case have argued that other users added comments to the site that the video was inappropriate and that should have been enough to require Google to act. Again, I don’t buy it. User feedback and ratings can have a place but they are remarkably susceptible to abuse. False reports are rampant, either as pranks or as retribution for negative ratings on other users’ content. Remember that the Internet is an inherently pseudonymous environment. That is, even if you have to create a username to use a site, you can still create as many usernames as you want and they don’t necessarily have to have any connection to your real identity. If you want to tank a site or skew a vote, just create a thousand or so accounts (often called “sockpuppets”) and have them all paraphrase your original opinion. If you are careful to change your tone and word choice a bit, it’s very difficult to identify this kind of abuse.
It seems to me that the real culprits are the bullies who 1) abused the victim and then 2) posted the video. Google appears to have been a good corporate citizen, acting quickly and responsibly once notified of a problem by the proper authorities. Attempting to require Google or any other host to actively police ever bit of content on their site would kill the very idea of user-generated content. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Wikipedia, … all would be run out of business by this social policy. And we would all be much poorer as a result.
I hope this case gets overturned on appeal. It’s hard to predict, though. European law is far less deferential to the idea of free speech than we are used to in the US. They also have not been very successful at grappling with the implications of applying local standards to global operations. If you expect others to kowtow to your local foibles, you have to be equally ready to defer to all of theirs – a standard that very few communities will tolerate in practice.
As a closing thought, I can’t help wondering if this court case was a smoke-screen. It is suspicious that this case comes right as Google is being sued by the state-run media companies for alleged tolerance of copyright violations on the same site. I feel for the kid who was being bullied but this smells to me more of political grandstanding and strong-arm negotiations than it does of a legitimate privacy case.
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