Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) is clearly lining up institutional support in advance of his presidential campaign, but he doesn’t seem to know quite what to think of the blogosphere. On the one hand, he’s bashed blogs. On the other, he’s reached out and started contributing to a handful of far-right sites directly.
Rhetoric and posturing aside, though, McCain is highlighting just how little he thinks of blogs by championing legislation that would make bloggers responsible for all activity in the comments sections and user profiles.
* Commercial websites and personal blogs “would be required to report illegal images or videos posted by their users or pay fines of up to $300,000.”
* Internet service providers (ISPs) are already required to issue such reports, but under McCain’s legislation, bloggers with comment sections may face “even stiffer penalties” than ISPs.
* Social networking sites will be forced to take “effective measures” — such as deleting user profiles — to remove any website that is “associated” with a sex offender. Sites may include not only Facebook and MySpace, but also Amazon.com, which permits author profiles and personal lists, and blogs like DailyKos, which allows users to sign up for personal diaries.
The point is to combat online child pornography, which is obviously a laudable goal. The question, of course, is how best to achieve the goal without undue burdens on law-abiding citizens.
McCain’s proposal is a step (or two) too far.
Red State, a leading conservative blog, helps make the case against McCain’s latest attempt to score some cheap points with the GOP base.
Through a vaguely written last-minute piece of legislation, scrawled on a napkin by a staffer who could’ve used an extra Red Bull, McCain would solve the problem of online child pornography by regulating the heck out of the internet in the form of massive fines for sites that allow any obscenity to slip through. The target area includes everything from message boards to MySpace to (if the smart lawyers who don’t work for McCain are right) Redstate and other membership-based blogs.
This is exactly the reason why McCain has such little support from social conservatives. Either this misguided legislation is completely honorable, and McCain’s just that naive, or it’s another sloppy attempt to throw a bone to the socon base. We think it’s a blatantly crass attempt, insultingly so, with the implicit assumption that right wingers are suspicious of internet freedom. As John Cleese would say, it’s irritating but obvious — like setting Julie Andrews on fire.
The more you dig out of this piece of legislation, the more frightening it becomes. Bloggers could be forced to pay fines for not regulating the amount of spam on their blog — any links that make it through the obscenity filters could spark regulation and punishment — and in addition, according to the smart folks at the Center for Democracy & Technology, any membership-based site that allowed a sexual predator to register could be subject to penalties:
“The bill would also require sexual predators to register their email addresses and Instant Messaging ids with law enforcement, and social networking sites, blogs and other chat sites would have an obligation to monitor and prevent predators from becoming members of the site.”
Let’s translate: if you’re a blogger who wants people to register on your site, you don’t just have to keep an up-to-date spam filter or link blacklist, you have to actively block people from registering with your site based on the email addresses they’ve sent in to the online sex predator patrol.
Given the obvious problems of blog spam, why anyone would continue to use a commenting system if McCain’s bill passed and risk a fine that could bankrupt most bloggers is a real question. For your average 400-hit count mommyblogger, monitoring spam and user registration is an irritating task. With a site the size of Redstate, we’d have to hire someone fulltime. With a site the size of MySpace … well, Juan from MySpace IT just stabbed himself in the eye with a fork.
James Joyner, a conservative whose opinion I respect, said McCain’s plan isn’t that bad, but concedes larger blog communities would likely find it difficult to police their sites. “I’m not sure how Markos Moulitsas would know whether some schmoe with a Diary has posted something objectionable, let alone whether a commenter on said Diary did,” Joyner noted. “Indeed, even on comparatively small group blogs like [Outside the Beltway], the site owner is unlikely to keep up with the comments in posts made by other contributors.”
In other words, it’s a problem. Just how far will McCain go to improve his far-right bona fides? Apparently, pretty far.