If a person isn't willing to put their name behind a statement, then we shouldn't lend it any credence. As lurid as the statements were, I don't think its any different from what went on behind closed doors fifty years ago. Barring wishful thinking, people didn't really believe third-hand rumors, so why should it be any different now?
I wonder, though, if this story would even be a blip on the radar if the two girls' names were replaced by some pop star. Maybe it's just that the bar for celebrity has been lowered to the point that all it takes is to be an attractive girl at a prestigious law school.
This has always been a problem for human society, but the ease with which information spreads on the internet has heavily increased the amount of damage that it can do.
But it's just plain dumb to give self-important law students a chance to flex their legal muscles. I don't think the fallout was warranted, but it was obviously coming.
I don't really think that most of what they said is anything special, no--you're right, it's bullshit. But I think you're underestimating how many people take this kind of bullshit seriously, and I think that's a problem in and of itself.
This is what confused me most about the whole case. As the article says: "Many other websites control extremely salacious material either by using special coding to keep it to themselves (so that Google doesn’t pick it up)..."
The major issue wasn't merely that there were false statements being issued, but that they were high on the Google results for the laywers' names. Why didn't the website merely turn off Google indexing for the problem forums?
Six months later, you're sorting through a pile of 50 resumes and find 18 seriouly negative results. What do you do?
These two girls were not posters on the board, and the things that were said about them were beyond repugnant. Although there are some good discussions and some really, really smart people on XO, the board's generally a cesspool. An educated cesspool, but a cesspool nonetheless.
I think both sides went too far. I don't have any sympathy for the trolls, and "Pauliewalnuts" I know offline and he's a sociopath. But ruining Ciolli's career, because he was one of the few "outed" targets, was out of line. They hit him hard to pressure him into outing the real offenders, who were anonymous. Hence the countersuit.
Historically information in publicly broadcast mediums has been trustworthy, but that's simply not true anymore. We need, as a society, to realize that the signal to noise ratio has dropped precipitously in the last decade, and that this trend will only continue.
That being said, it's astonishingly stupid to spend your free time making fun of the most litigious group of people on the face of the planet. The members of the forums pretty much deserve whatever they get.