Courtesy of www.largefm.com

In retrospect, I felt that Kevin Goldberg’s presentation was a humbling experience. His message was a grave reminder of the dangers of shoddy journalism. The “Seven Deadly Sins” approach was  a simple, evocative means that set the tone for that message.

Goldberg also crafted a dense PowerPoint for his presentation, which can be found in our course shell on Blackboard. One particular nugget of information from that PowerPoint intrigued me: Section 230 of the Communication Decency Act. It reads as follows:

“No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”

This legal jargon imbues website operators and other such internet providers with a legal immunity from the liabilities of their users. The protection “covers defamation and privacy claims, as well as negligence and other tort claims associated with publication,” according to the Digital Media Project.

Upon further research, I learned that section 230 is particularly beneficial for bloggers such as ourselves.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, bloggers are considered users in the sense that they edit and post content through a ISP. They are also providers, however, in that they allow third parties to comment on these posts and add content of their own.

“Your readers’ comments, entries written by guest bloggers, tips sent by email, and information provided to you through an RSS feed would all likely be considered information provided by another content provider,” according to the EFF website. “This would mean that you would not be held liable for defamatory statements contained in it”

So there you have it, bloggers. While section 230 of CDA doesn’t create an immunity from all of the legal troubles blogs can be fraught with, it does give us protection from the malice of those pesky trolls commenting on our content.

As evident by the following Goldberg example (which he appropriately categorized under “Lust”), those comments can be truly venomous:

“These sluts from sigma kappa are an absolute joke. They stole first place in bar night from us last night, god knows what they did to bribe the judges because they looked like a bunch of cracked out whores dancing at a rave, that girl who was hypmotized at speaker night danced better than those bar night girls. We all know they cheated last year and rumor is that the two girls from Sigma Kappa on GWLT tried to rig banner so they would get first and got called out, haha what a bunch of jokes. But in the end of the day if I was in a house full of butter faces and a bunch of overweight strippers I would try hard in greek week too, because thats all they have going for them…”