The Medium is Not the Message: Reconciling Reputation and Free Expression in Cases of Internet Defamation
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper the author critiques the approach to defamation over the Internet taken to date by the Canadian common law courts. In the emerging jurisprudence, the courts have relied upon untenably broad generalizations about Internet technology, repeatedly equating it with traditional broadcast media and expressing grave concerns about the corresponding threat to reputation posed by online defamation. This has led the courts to hold that when defamatory words are transmitted using the Internet, this will vitiate the availability of any qualified privilege that would otherwise have immunized the defendant from liability under traditional defamation principles, and substantially increase any resulting award of damages. The author argues that this approach results in a failure to strike the appropriate balance between free expression and the protection of reputation. The jurisprudence can also be seen as a product of a longstanding and unfortunate analytical tendency in defamation law – primarily apparent through the libel/slander distinction – whereby common law courts attach extremely divergent legal consequences to impugned statements based on indefensibly broad generalizations about the degree of danger to personal reputation posed by the medium in which the statement was communicated. Drawing inspiration from a comparison to defamation under the civil law of Quebec, the author proposes a new approach that eschews reliance upon unhelpful analogies and generalizations about particular media including the Internet, and involves the examination of impugned statements on a case-by-case basis, paying careful attention to the context in which these were actually made.Dans cet essai, l’auteur critique l’approche adoptee par les tribunaux de common law canadiens sur la question de la diffamation sur Internet. Dans la jurisprudence emergeante, les tribunaux se sont bases sur des generalisations indefendables quant a la technologie de l’Internet. Ils l’assimilent a de nombreuses reprises aux medias electroniques traditionnels et expriment de graves preoccupations quant a la menace correspondante que pose la diffamation en ligne pour la reputation. Cette approche a mene les tribunaux a statuer que lorsque des mots diffamatoires sont transmis sur Internet, les privileges qualifies qui auraient autrement immunise le defendeur contre toute responsabilite, suivant les principes de la diffamation traditionnelle, sont vicies. Le montant des dommages-interets accordes augmente aussi de facon substantielle. L’auteur soutient que cette approche ne permet pas d’etablir l’equilibre approprie entre la libre expression et la protection de la reputation. La jurisprudence peut aussi etre vue comme le produit d’une fâcheuse tendance analytique de longue date en matiere de diffamation, tendance qui ressort surtout dans la distinction entre diffamation orale et ecrite. Suivant cette tendance, les tribunaux de common law attachent des consequences juridiques extremement divergentes a des declarations en litige, selon qu’elles soient orales ou ecrites. Ces consequences sont basees sur des generalisations larges et indefendables quant au degre de menace pour la reputation personnelle que pose le medium par lequel la declaration a ete communiquee. En s’inspirant d’une comparaison avec la diffamation en droit civil quebecois, l’auteur propose une nouvelle approche qui evite les analogies et les generalisations peu utiles au sujet d’un media particulier, dont Internet. L’approche proposee implique un examen au cas par cas des declarations contestees, pretant une attention particuliere au contexte dans lequel elles ont ete enoncees.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it