Poe in Cyberspace: The $5 Billion Question

On July 23, 1846, after months of hostilities, Poe sued Thomas Dunn English for libel, charging him with falsely claiming that he had obtained money under false pretenses and had committed forgery. Curiously, Poe's legal suit named both Hiram Fuller and Augustus W. Clason, the publishers of English's remarks in the New York Evening Mirror, but did not name English himself.

The suit arose out of the incessant warfare in the newly empowered literary media of magazines and newspapers in the 1840s. Thanks to three major inventions—the steam press, the telegraph, and the daguerreotype (all treated wittily by Poe in "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade," of which more later)—the press entered the modern age, running faster and cheaper, reaching over greater distances, and including more visual elements than ever before.

One of Poe's media models was Charles Dickens, who spanned its entire spectrum with unprecedented popularity. When chapters of his novels were serialized in magazines, they were pirated as soon as installments reached the United States and were hawked like newspapers on the street.

In November 1844, ignoring Pym, Poe described to George Anthon his mastery of the changing media scene: "Thus I have written no books and have been so far essentially a Magazinist" (CL 1:469–70). Afterwards Poe made it a general principle, proclaiming in Graham's in December 1846, "the whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward" (312).

Poe's libel suit was an outgrowth of his hostile sketches of English and Charles Frederick Briggs in "The Literati" series in Godey's. In their replies in novels serialized in the Evening Mirror, English sketched Poe as Marmaduke Hammerhead in 1844, or the S. F. and Briggs satirized him as Austin Wicks in The Trippings of Tom Pepper. (Later gathered in book form, these newspaper novels became the first two premiums to be offered to subscribers of the Evening Mirror.) Poe expressed his desire for revenge in his tale "The Cask of Amontillado," published in Godey's in November 1846, midway between English's sketch of Poe in the Mirror on September 5, 1846, and Briggs's satire of him on February 27, 1847.

The libel laws in 1846 had permitted Poe's lawyers to sue the assets of the two publishers, perhaps not suing English himself because of his limited assets. By contrast, contemporary libel laws may grant publishers legal immunity—if they publish online—while holding authors responsible.

The unexpected legal distinction today between publication in print and publication online was created by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996 (CDA). In an earlier era of the web, a "safe harbor" or special protection was granted to nascent internet sites. In legal language, Section 230 states that no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.

Although the CDA was intended to support free speech, resulting in liberty of expression in personal videos uploaded to YouTube, unfettered user reviews on Yelp, and uninhibited personal postings on Twitter, the explosive growth of media technology in the years since 1996 has also produced serious unintended consequences: the CDA has not restrained the growth of hate speech, extremist incitement, or fake political advertisements on the internet. Some urgent modifications were made in 1998, when the Federal Trade Commission protected privacy for children through the Children Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), which limits the mining of information from children and requires warning labels for potentially harmful information; it was followed in 2000 by the Children's Internet Protection Act (CIPA).

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fined Facebook a record-breaking $5 billion in 2019 for violations of rules to protect the privacy of children under the age of thirteen. Curiously, Facebook had reportedly already set aside $3 billion for this purpose, apparently regarding it as a routine cost of doing business. In response to public pressure to do something about the undesirable promotion of hate, fakery, and terrorism on the internet, the social network Twitter has promised to end...