Antidemocratic forces rely on intimidation tactics to silence criticism and opposition. Today’s intimidation playbook follows a two-step pattern. We surface these tactics so their costs to public discourse and civic engagement can be fully understood. We show how the misappropriation of the concept of online abuse has parallels in other efforts at conceptual diversion that dampen democratic guarantees. Democracy’s survival requires creative solutions. Politicians and government workers must be able to operate free from intimidation. Journalists and researchers must be able to freely investigate governmental overreach and foreign malign influence campaigns that threaten the democratic process. Surfacing the two-step strategy is a critical start to combating it.
Telecommunications
My work on this paper began while I was a Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School, and it benefited there from the support of the Milton and Miriam Handler Foundation. It also received support from the Dean’s Research Fund at Brooklyn Law School as well as a summer research grant from Boalt Hall. Patricia Bellia, Jon Michaels, Chris Slobogin, Stephen Sugarman, and Frank Zimring offered helpful suggestions.
The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone. All three authors received their JD degrees from Yale Law School in 1985.
I thank A.J. Bellia, Susan Freiwald, Nicole Garnett, John Nagle, Ira Rubenstein, and Paul Schwartz for helpful comments and discussions, and research librarian Christopher O’Byrne for expert research assistance.
I greatly benefited from a presentation of this Review to a faculty workshop at UCLA School of Law. Many thanks to the faculty there for their helpful comments, and to Jon Michaels and the faculty colloquium committee for the invitation. Thanks as well to Viktor Mayer-Schönberger and Frank Zimring for their suggestions. In the interest of full disclosure, I wish to note that Professor Solove and I are coauthors on a casebook, Information Privacy Law (Aspen 3d ed 2009).
The author thanks Faisal Alam, Jelena Kristic, Brad Reid, Chris Vidiksis, and Eugene Weber for expert research assistance. Thanks for helpful suggestions and discussion are owed to Marvin Ammori, Miriam Baer, Katherine Barnes, Scott Boone, Annemarie Bridy, Ellen Bublick, Robin Effron, Kirsten Engel, Tom Folsom, James Grimmelmann, Rob Heverly, Dan Hunter, Margo Kaplan, Rebecca Kysar, Brian Lee, Lyrissa Lidsky, Sarah Light, Tom Lin, Gregg Macey, Irina Manta, David Marcus, Toni Massaro, Milton Mueller, Thinh Nguyen, Mark Noferi, Liam O’Melinn, Jim Park, David Post, Christopher Robertson, Simone Sepe, William Sjostrom, Roy Spece, Nic Suzor, Alan Trammell, Greg Vetter, Brent White, Mary Wong, Jane Yakowitz Bambauer, Peter Yu, Jonathan Zittrain, the participants in the IP Scholars Roundtable at Drake University School of Law, the participants in a workshop at Florida State University College of Law, and the participants in a workshop at the University of Arizona James E. Rogers College of Law. The author gratefully acknowledges the Dean’s Summer Research Stipend Program, Dean Michael Gerber, and President Joan G. Wexler at Brooklyn Law School for financial support. The author welcomes comments at derekbambauer@email.arizona.edu.
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