Setting the Wayback Machine to 1995: “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do”: A Few Words About the New Media and the First Amendment: Existing Flashpoints
[This is an excerpt from my 1995 Yale Law Journal article “Cheap Speech and What It Will Do,” written for a symposium called “Emerging Media Technology and the First Amendment.) Thirty years later, I thought I’d serialize the piece here, to see what I may have gotten right—and what I got wrong.]
The proto-infobahn of today—the Internet, bulletin boards, and various commercial services—has already generated quite a few First Amendment controversies. Professor Anne Branscomb has ably summarized many of them in another Essay in this Symposium.
Some of these may only be transplants of conventional questions into a new but essentially similar environment. For instance, there’s already a lively debate about the propriety of regulating sexually harassing speech; harassing speech on electronic bulletin boards should just be a special case of this. The mens rea requirements imposed by the Supreme Court on libel actions may be adequate for protecting bulletin board operator
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