Internet and Accountability

The internet has certainly played its part in making the people’s fear of globalization a thing of the past. Now, not only do our native products share the same market space as those of other country’s, but our locals have been given the opportunity to become “internet celebrities” as well. Local bloggers such as Bryanboy (www.bryanboy.com), Marketmanila (www.marketmanila.com), and Happyslip (a video blogger on youtube) have enjoyed cult followings both from here and in the international community, so much so that now, everyone with access to a computer now has a blog to air out mundane rants and raves about anything and everything.

A new trend with the internet is its creation of online “vigilantes” such as Brian Gorrell (an Australian who is trying to recover a sum of money from infamous society boy DJ Montano), and Tricia Walsh-Smith (a woman who is trying to defame her millionaire husband one youtube video at a time).

These “trends” that I mentioned above seem to depict a pattern that is now emerging, in that the internet is now no longer used merely to facilitate transactions (as most of our laws aiming to govern internet activities pertain to), but are used to “market” not commodities, but themselves. And on that particular aspect of the playing field, how can we make internet authors accountable, when the very scope of their activities, let alone their true identities are outside of what our laws can police? What comes to mind right now is the growing internet Media Mogul Mario Lavandeira (of Perez Hilton fame), who publishes borderline libelous material in order to generate hits for his website? In his case, his victims are lucky that they can at least trace the libelous statements to an actual person, but what of victims on a much smaller scale? An example of that, for instance, are people who create fake internet profiles on community sites such as friendster or myspace in the hopes of tricking people into thinking that the people they pretend to be are shallow, stupid, cruel, and these actions result in the damage to the personalities of these people without anybody to be held accountable for the same. And what of anonymous people who go the way of Mario Lavandeira, such as the now defunct Soozyhopper gossip blog and the creators of chikatime.com? True, they do put “disclaimers” on their sites by stating that “everything on these sites is pure gossip”, but the information they put out, once out there is not easily undone. And at the end of the day, there is no one who can be held accountable for them. Everyday, there are new methods being created allowing people to be even less liable for their actions and statements towards others online. Guerillamail type websites (which allow you to create an email account that lasts a day) keep on popping up, making it harder and harder for victims of this kind of internet “crime” to track down who is accountable for releasing them.
Furthermore, those who wish to remain anonymous use false addresses, mirror other people’s addresses, or even tap into other computer systems in order to release libelous or otherwise harmful messages without having to be held accountable for the same. What is sadder is that sometimes it is the owners and operators of online services who are held liable for the content of the material placed on their services.

The idea that the Internet can be policed by its users has been put forward several times. Internet accountability websites are slowly gaining ground. But time works both ways. Now, users are not only put in danger of libelous material, but, as the movie “Untraceable” suggests, users may even be made parties to a crime without them knowing it. It gets more dangerous everyday. One can only hope that internet users are smart enough to separate the good from the bad, but hidden under the anonymity that is provided by the world wide web, they are certainly aware that no one really expects them to. What a tangled web it is.