Roger Koopman wrote in a Feb. 10 WorldNetDaily column:
Lies can wreck a business, destroy a career, kill relationships and ruin lives. Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul is right. When an internet service provider hosts a defamatory, fabricated personal attack that accuses the target of reprehensible and criminal behavior, that provider possesses a certain degree of accountability for their refusal to take it down. Not unlike the print media knowingly publishing a libelous letter or op-ed, the internet carrier may, based on the evidentiary record, be found justly liable for allowing the damage and refusing to act. Sort of like deserting an injured person lying in the street, after you helped cause the injury.
After all, the service provider is the essential link, without which the offense would never occur. Claiming ignorance seems a flimsy excuse, considering how often these same providers take down content they find objectionable. Politically speaking, that objectionable content is almost always from the right. Sen. Paul himself has been a victim of Google’s political cleansing on more than one occasion.
Warning: Paul’s liability proposal could have a chilling effect on lying. It might even help popularize objective truth, and nothing is more dangerous to a creative liar than truth itself. To the chagrin of many, Paul’s bill could undermine our entire culture of internet character assassination – leaving the liars with muted microphones and broken clubs. Then what would they do? Responsibility and accountability, to be sure, are scary things. Especially to those who are neither accountable nor responsible.
Unmentioned by Koopman: WND has spread its share of lies and falsehoods. Most notably, it paid a still-undisclosed sum of money to Tennessee car dealer Clark Jones, whom WND falsely portrayed as a “dope dealer,” as well as publishing an apology to him. WND has promoted other falsehoods as well, which we’ve documented.
Koopman went on to write:
Lying about someone is stealing. It is the worst form of theft, that robs from you not physical possessions, but your reputation. And reputation is a sacred, soul-tied thing, and in a very real sense, a property right as well. You own it. No one else. Through court ordered damages and restitution, physical stuff can often be returned or restored. Reputation doesn’t work that way. Much of what is lost never returns to you. People read the juicy internet gossip, and generally believe it.
[…]The freedom to lie is the freedom to steal. One cannot argue that the First Amendment protects malicious lying against innocent victims any more than one would propose that the Second Amendment protects your right to shoot whoever you please, just to hurt them. Freedom and responsibility are inseparable. They can only exist when bonded together. When the bond breaks, freedom turns to rubble.
WND has never disputed anything we’re written about it — including pointing out its lies.