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John McCain: Asshole
You know, I used to like John McCain quite a bit. I can appreciate the guy’s insanely patriotic fervor, excuse the occasionally amusing homophobic or ethnic joke, and even consider forgiving the blatant political posturing.
But, now the man has gone too far, introducing legislation that would basically fuck personal blogs and small commercial websites. Under his proposed law, websites and blogs would be fined $300,000 for offensive statements, photos and videos posted by visitors on comment boards. Moreover:
After child pornography or some forms of “obscenity” are found and reported, the Web site must retain any “information relating to the facts or circumstances” of the incident for at least six months. Webmasters would be immune from civil and criminal liability if they followed the specified procedures exactly.McCain’s proposal, called the “Stop the Online Exploitation of Our Children Act,” requires that reports be submitted to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which in turn will forward them to the relevant police agency …
According to the proposed legislation, these types of individuals or businesses would be required to file reports: any Web site with a message board; any chat room; any social-networking site; any e-mail service; any instant-messaging service; any Internet content hosting service; any domain name registration service; any Internet search service; any electronic communication service; and any image or video-sharing service.
I appreciate the sentiment, here, but it’s honestly asking way too much of bloggers to not only figure out the identities of offending commenters, but to report and ban those people is almost impossible, particularly given the ability of posters to work around banned email address, IPs, or user names. Comment boards, particularly on popular blogs and websites that receive hundreds or thousands of comments a day, are already notoriously difficult to moderate (fark.com, for instance, would be farked). By enacting this legislation, McCain is basically chilling freedom of the speech on the Internet, and — in effect — killing the blogosphere, a domain for which he has already expressed disdain.
John McCain: You’re dead to me.
