(Originally posted at Greater Democracy)

It has been many years since I read Rousseau’s Social Contract. It was back in college and I didn’t read it as closely as I should have. Yet it often comes to mind as I read discussions about the role government in the age of Internet technology, and how to handle trolls, spam and scamsters.

Recently, Craig Newmark wrote a message to a mailing list that I am on talking about issues that craigslist has had. “Starting in early October 2004, in our discussion boards, we saw a very large surge of disinformation. Specifically, we saw a lot of new people who were posting information that had already been discredited ..., and who also posted highly abusive personal attacks”

He goes on to say, “These folks seem to be organized as a decentralized network and are very persistent, a problem to this very day.

On our site, they're an annoyance; on Wikipedia, they're a societal problem, given the importance of Wikipedia.”

One person responded, “Why make your workload higher worrying about it? Especially since one person's ‘discredited lie’ is another person's ‘truth.’”

The discussion shifted to legal issues around defamation online, especially surrounding articles written in Wikipedia. Who is liable? What role should the government have in addressing issues of defamation online?

As I read this, my mind drifted to back to Rousseau. Book IV starts, “AS long as several men in assembly regard themselves as a single body, they have only a single will which is concerned with their common preservation and general well-being… A State so governed needs very few laws; and, as it becomes necessary to issue new ones, the necessity is universally seen.”

Unfortunately, the assembly of people online do not regard themselves as a single body, and trolls and scamsters do not seem to be concerned with common preservation and the general well-being. This leads us to the role of censorship.

Rousseau starts section 7 with, “AS the law is the declaration of the general will, the censorship is the declaration of the public judgment… The censorial tribunal, so far from being the arbiter of the people's opinion, only declares it”.

I guess this gets to my objection to efforts, whether by the government, ISPs, or people running sites like Craigslist or Wikipedia to censor content. If Rousseau is right, then these efforts are bound to fail.

How then should we deal with trolls and scamsters? Censorship is unlikely to succeed, and despite the “country wisdom about ‘hog rasslin'’ and how the pig likes it”, it may well be that the best approach is to rassle the hogs and try to find a move that the pig doesn’t like.

As an example, during Gov. Dean’s 2004 presidential campaign, a common phrase on the Dean blog was “Feed the goal, not the troll”. Any time a troll came along, people would write posts about contributing more to the Dean campaign. It was a fairly effective deterrent to trolling.

Rousseau ends the section on censorship with the observation that “A man of bad morals having made a good proposal in the Spartan Council, the Ephors neglected it, and caused the same proposal to be made by a virtuous citizen. What an honour for the one, and what a disgrace for the other, without praise or blame of either!”

This seems to be an argument for tracking who is contributing and ranking their contributions. Yes, such systems can be gamed, but they generally seem to be fairly effective.

As much as the Internet presents a new world, many of the old rules still apply and it seems as if we can find better ways of managing behavior and shaping opinions online by referring back to Rousseau as well as to country wisdom.