Israel: Talkback Law for Censorship on Web Commenting Passes Initial Knesset Voting

[Scurrilous]

<snip>

"Israeli web culture is known for having an active talkback (web commenting) scene. Every major news site allows users to submit comments for every single one of its stories. Israeli culture at its best and worst thrives through discussions held within these spaces; discussions which are planned to fall under future censorship, according to the Talkback Law, proposed by Knesset member Israel Hasson. The proposal passed initial voting in the Knesset yesterday, January 16th.

According to the proposal, a popular site, defined as one with an average of 50,000 hits or more per day, will be considered a “newspaper” and thus liable for the damage or harm caused to a person as a result from its user generated content (i.e. - comments). Ironically, the web post describing this case, published yesterday on the popular ynet news site, has already received over 200 comments.

Hasson's reasoning for the importance of such a law:

"It is unreasonable that a response, possibly anonymous, sent to a newspaper, will be held under the editor's responsibility, but a response submitted to the online portal of that same newspaper will be under nobody's authority… We must not turn the network into a vandalizing, evil tool."

more

[peacetalksforall]

1. A numeric (50.000) equates to a newspaper? Sounds like the logic

of our Homeland Security folks. Unless someone can explain the logic.

[bemildred]

2. So they want to punish successful web sites, but the little ones get away?

This is stupid.

[eyl]

4. Well, I suppose it makes a certain amount of sense

The damage caused to the "libelee" from slanderous comments is proportional to the number of people who read said comments, so a successful site has more potential for damage than a small one.

Still, while the talkbacks generally contain a lot of crap, I can't see this law being anywhere near justified; among other things, the fact that the talkbacks are known to contain a lot of "noise" means that they're not usually taken very seriously, limiting the damage caused by slander.

And whoever wrote that headline should be flogged.

[bemildred]

5. The thing is it won't work.

The criteria for inclusion is not stable, and it will just push the blather to other sites. It is an employment act for lawyers. It is naive. It's not that I don't understand the motivation. And the parties that it is contemplated to punish here are not the actual offenders. You could wind up with campaigns to get sites in trouble by posting libels on them.

[eyl]

6. No disagreement here n/t

[madrchsod]

3. the site is self editing