Cyber Civil Rights, by Danielle Keats Citron wrote:Some website operators function as crowd leaders, influencing the mobs’ destructiveness.389 Deterring websites devoted to abusive attacks on individuals plays a crucial role in inhibiting a destructive mob’s coordination and efficacy. Thus, holding accountable the operators of websites which facilitate anonymous attacks may hold the key to protecting the civil rights of the women, people of color, and others set upon by online mobs.
Kenneth Paul White, Popehat.com, Just How Demeaning Is It To Be A Lawyer? Just Ask The One Working For Meghan McCain wrote:What can you do?
1. Do your part to publicize instances of censorship on social media, blogs, and forums. That raises awareness of censorship and encourages public support of anti-censorship legal reforms. Better yet, through the Streisand Effect, it deters censorious thuggery like this: if lawyers know that their threats might result in several orders of magnitude more attention to parody or criticism of their clients, they may have second thoughts about legal threats.
2. Do your part to call out censors by name for what they are. There is no reason that Albin Gess should not be reviled in public for such a censorious threat. Censors — particularly lawyers who use frivolous legal threats to censor — are worthy of contempt. If more people call them out, they will realize there is a cost for such conduct. It will, and should, also cost their self-respect and peace of mind. Gess probably sleeps by telling himself, "hey, I'm not a censor, it's my client. I'm not like the child molester; I'm only like the guy who sells the child molester a panel van and an array of colorful and delicious candies." Society ought to encourage him to revisit his thinking. Vigorous advocacy of unpopular clients is to be admired, but frivolous and thuggish censorious threats are not. Write about censors, but do not harass them — we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys.
3. Educate yourself about anti-SLAPP statutes, find out if your jurisdiction has a good one, write your legislators supporting anti-SLAPP legislation, and agitate for it. Support some appropriate version of the federal anti-SLAPP statute.
4. If you are able, donate to legal defense funds. If you are able — I'm talking to you, lawbloggers — offer pro bono services. I disagree with a lot of what gets published on Red State, and the folks there probably disagree with a lot of what we write here. But I would have been happy to step up and defend them — and in California, under our strong anti-SLAPP statute, I wouldn't have had to do so for free, because after I stomped on the roaches the court would have awarded my fees. I love getting my fees for curb-stomping a censor.