As this article discusses, with today’s social media popularity, reputations can be destroyed via defamation in a matter of hours, if not minutes. This is true as we see everyday not only for the younger teen ages, but for adults and business owners and corporations. Anything with a keyboard and an internet connection can get a person online instantly which opens up the world to unfiltered digital chaos.
At no time in our history has it been possible to do so much damage to a person’s or a company’s reputation with literally a few keystrokes and no expense. Who would ever have imagined that a keyboard could be used as a weapon? With the amount of activity that takes place online everyday regarding defamation, slander, and libel the laws and local and government agencies are working overtime to stay on top of it all.
While this article mentions a few notable cases, what the general public doesn’t realize is that this happens every 24 hours a day to thousands of people. These are not few and far, this is becoming an international problem that NOT only affects social media sites but millions of other sites. It’s NOT only the public persona’s or celebrity that this is happening to, its everyday average people.
Unfortunetly, in this day and internet savvy age, defamation is being used to destroy lives and companies including; false reviews, scam reports, blogs, and even websites totally dedicated to specifically harming a certain business. The list goes on and on and most people would be absolutely amazed at the amount of damage and compensation that’s happening.
The most important issue to realize is that our regulators are way behind in addressing these problems. But we know for a fact, that no simple solutions exist when you are trying to curb these types of issues without restricting freedom of speech.
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/opinion/news/article.cfm?c_id=466&objectid=10794938
