Introducing the new kid on the block in the world of extreme social media: Chatroulette.The concept is simple. You click "Play" and are immediately connected with a random stranger. You can either choose to chat (via video, audio or text) with that person or click "Next" to be randomly connected to a new person.
The thing that makes Chatroulette so intriguing is also what makes the site nerve-wracking: you never know what you are going to get. I entered the fascinating Chatroulette world, purely for research purposes (ahem), and in 30 minutes I was connected to beatboxers, a guy in a Richard Nixon mask, a lovely couple in New York state, a college freshman, and enough genitals to make me quit halfway through the hour I alloted for research. My venture into the world of Chatroulette was typical; in an initial study, The Web Ecology Project, an interdisciplinary research group, found that clicking through Chatroulette yields 80 percent people, 9 percent altered images or people wearing masks, 7 percent nothing, and 5 percent genitals.
In his article on NY Mag, aptly titled The Human Shuffle, Sam Anderson discusses the potential dangers of using the site:
[T]here are privacy issues—-people taking screengrabs of other users in the half-second they happen to be looking at a pornographic image, then spreading them around the web. (I’m sure there are at least 300 images of me wincing at a masturbating stranger.) Sexual predators have never had an easier way to expose themselves, potentially even to children (the site has no apparent age limit). And then there’s the threat of violence. One popular shock image, a picture of a man who’s hanged himself, is terrifying even after you realize it’s fake: It makes you think about the possibility of someone actually hurting themselves, or someone else, in the unmappable ether of social-media space.
Certainly, there are significant risks associated with interacting in a world of 20,000 anonymous strangers. The concerns are particularly potent when children join the fray. Although the Terms of Service mandate that users be over the age of 16, there is no process by which people validate their age before clicking "Play." And, anyway, as we've seen with similar social media outlets, these requirements are easily bypassed by savvy children and teens. Child protection advocates are calling the site a "predator's paradise" and I have to admit that, even as a liberal thinking thirty-something, I felt shocked and violated by some of my (brief) interactions. It is certainly not a site I would want my younger sister to participate in--and she's 19.
But, the legal environment surrounding Chatroulette is complicated. Ryan Calo, an attorney and residential fellow at Stanford University's Center for Internet and Society, admits that it's difficult to know if the website violates any laws.
Surely broadcasting oneself masturbating, which by many accounts is a significant Chatroulette hobby, could run afoul of public indecency laws and/or spottily enforced (and constitutionally suspect) federal laws banning the use of electronic communications to harass. I suppose it's conceivable that, in some jurisdictions, successful use of the service in an effort to find unlawful material might trigger criminal liability, but this would very much depend on the level of intent required under the statute (ordinary curious users should have nothing to worry about).
Our very own Professor Anupam Chander said, in an interview with FoxNews.com, that while it is easy for authorities to suggest that the site is contributing to public indecency, it is considerably more difficult to hold the site liable. According to Chander, the Communications Decency Act of 1996 may exempt Chatroulette from civil liability. The Act has been interpreted to immunize operators of Internet services from liability for the acts of third parties using the service.
Clealy, Chatroulette raises a number of serious questions: Who would be responsible, legally, for any of the content on the site? How would it be proven that somebody intended to cause harm? How would prosecutors get copies of indecent actions broadcast on the site? And how would they go about finding the users, when registration is not required to participate?
In other words, as Calo puts it, "Chatroulette would make a good cyberlaw exam."
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2 comments:
Thanks for a usual, terrific post.
This site seems tailor-made for exam hypotheticals--or better yet student notes!
Should the CDA hold ChatRoulette immune from civil liability? What about holding its proprietors liable in a criminal case? Would there be sufficient mens rea?
I'll have to keep professor Chander's comment in mind when studying for his e-Commerce exam!
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