In fact, with the increasing popularity of twitter, many people don’t even try to hide behind a shroud of anonymity anymore. Most recently, with the release of the Hunger Games movie, there was a widely reported instance of apparent dissatisfaction and disapproval with the fact that many of the “good” characters in the movie were black. Of course, as soon as these users became aware that their tweets were being reported on major news sources like the Huffington Post, without their usernames redacted, they either deleted their tweets and made their accounts private or shut down their accounts altogether.

This is a really interesting thread. I may be going off topic (or just on the broader topic of hateful comments on the internet generally) but I wanted to share what I thought. I was wondering how the law figures into all of this, hateful comments on the Internet, I mean. I am aware of a similar problem in Korea, which is where I come from, although race usually never the topic because Korea is an almost entirely racially homogenous society. You cannot read and article or go to an online forum without encountering hateful comments; they are literally everywhere. Sociologists attribute this behavior to a certain dissatisfaction with society and more specifically the economy. People who write offensive comments are predominantly in their teens and twenties. The rise in this offensive activity on the Internet correlates with a rise of youth unemployment rate and a general dissatisfaction with the government. People vent on the Internet because of a vague but overwhelming sense of frustration and desperation. Anyway, I was wondering how law could solve this problem. Defamation suits have worked only marginally in Korea because even those defamed are unwilling to press charged because a) most offenders and young and b) they have a general belief that online comments are somewhat too “petty” to go to court for (or alternatively that words are easier to get over). Also, with race, if comments are not directed at a specific person but a race generally, defamation, or any legal remedy for that matter would not work. I wonder whether there is a more effective legal apparatus to deal with malicious comments on this Internet without curtailing freedom of speech…