Viewpoint: Internet lies ruin lives

Roger Koopman

Lies can wreck a business, destroy a career, kill relationships and ruin lives. Kentucky Senator Rand Paul is right. When an internet service provider hosts a defamatory, fabricated personal attack that accuses the target of reprehensible and criminal behavior, that provider possesses a certain degree of accountability for their refusal to take it down.

Not unlike the print media knowingly publishing a libelous letter or op-ed, the internet carrier may, based on the evidentiary record, be found justly liable for allowing the damage and refusing to act. Sort of like deserting an injured person lying in the street, after you helped cause the injury.

After all. The service provider is the essential link, without which the offense would never occur. Claiming ignorance seems a flimsy excuse, considering how often these same providers take down content they find objectionable. Politically speaking, that objectionable content is almost always from the right. Senator Paul himself has been a victim of Google’s political cleansing on more than one occasion.

Warning: Paul’s liability proposal could have a chilling effect on lying. It might even help popularize objective truth, and nothing is more dangerous to a creative liar than truth itself. To the chagrin of many, Paul’s bill could undermine our entire culture of internet character assassination – leaving the liars with muted microphones and broken clubs. Then what would they do? Responsibility and accountability, to be sure, are scary things. Especially to those who are neither accountable nor responsible.

Granted. Trolls have rights, too. They’re in the First Amendment. Freedom of expression isn’t limited to expressions that are nice. In includes the vulgar, the vicious, the venal and the vile.

But we’re not talking about your run-of-the-mill, drive-by trolls here. We’re talking about cynically contrived efforts to spread defamatory lies that steal from another human being their possession of greatest value: their reputation. It’s the blind complicity and moral malingering of the internet provider that makes it all possible.

Let’s take a minute to put ourselves in the place of someone who’s been maliciously lied about over the internet and in the mainstream media. At times in our lives, we’ve all found ourselves victims of lies, and the experience can be deeply hurtful. But consider how it would feel to have those lies progressively inflated, and delivered into the minds of millions of people you don’t even know.

You may eventually win a defamation suit, but you’ll never feel fully vindicated by the process, never feel you were made clean, never believe that justice was truly served, and never experience total peace. Why? Because you as the victim can never reel back in all those hurtful lies. You can never truly clear your name. Most of the damage is permanent.

The freedom to lie is the freedom to steal. It is the worst form of theft, that robs from you not physical possessions, but your reputation. And reputation is a sacred, soul-tied thing, and in a very real sense, a property right as well. You own it. No one else. Through court ordered damages and restitution, physical stuff can often be returned or restored. Reputation doesn’t work that way. Much of what is lost never returns to you.

People read the juicy internet gossip and generally believe it. It seems to be human nature to want to believe the worst in people. That’s why a liar’s lies work so well. Moreover, while truth just stands on its own merits, calculated lies can be crafted into the most effective narratives

possible -- more interesting and more believable than truth itself. Yes. Lying is the worst kind of theft. Often directed against the best kind of people. Like Senator Rand Paul.

One cannot argue that the First Amendment protects malicious lying against innocent victims any more than one would propose that the Second Amendment protects your right to shoot whoever you please, just to hurt them. Freedom and responsibility are inseparable. They can only exist when bonded together. When the bond breaks, freedom turns to rubble.

Senator Paul’s plan to repeal the special, government-granted liability protection reserved exclusively for internet providers under Section 230 of the federal Communications Act is in every sense consistent with good government, the Constitution and the principles of liberty.

Roger Koopman is president of Montana Conservative Alliance. He served four years in the Montana House of Representatives and eight years as a Montana Public Service Commissioner. He operated a Bozeman small business for 37 years.