Posted: September 16th, 2017
PHYSICAL ARGUMENT
This article touches on the assassination of John and his brother Bobby by Robert Kennedy the reigning Attorney General in the early 1960’s and his personal assistant John Seigenthaler Sr. his assistant and pallbearer who for a brief time though to be involved in the assassination. John Seigenthaler Sr. disputes the claim that he aided in Kennedy assassinations of both John and his brother Bobby. According to Kirszner $ Mandell (2005), John Seigenthaler Sr. claimed that he had no idea who were behind the malicious information that appeared under his name on the popular online encyclopedia for 132 days whose authors were unknown and hard to be traced. Infarct he had moved to the soviet in 1971, and returned to the United States in 1984 where he started one of the country’s largest public relations firm. He had for weeks heard from teachers, historians and journalist about Wikipedia where millions of people visited for quick references posted by people neither with expertise nor knowledge while others were malicious(2005,p323). In addition to that, the executives of the of three websites (Reference.com, answer.com and Wikipedia) responsible for the false content removed the false facts while two of them(reference.com and answers.com)
were not keen on knowing whether the content published was true or false as their computers were not programmed to checking whether the information copied was factual or false. John Seigenthaler Sr. made efforts to confirm the claims were not factual by sending email to a company that advertised phone numbers in order to report abuse issues so that he could unmask his biographer and let many people know that Wikipedia was a flawed and irresponsible research tool. Fortunately his mails were answered by identical form letters, promising him that the company would conduct an investigation and the results kept confidential or availed to him.(2005, p329). After three weeks wait, he was not able to get feed back from the abuse investigations and the only option was to file a law suit against his biographer and this was going to be an uphill task as the major Communications Internet Companies were bound to protect the identity of their customers and online corporations as stated by federal private laws. Also section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, passed in 1996 (2005, p330), states that “no any provider or user of any interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker.” thus confirming that no online service providers could be sued for issuing attacks on citizens.
Kirszner and Mandell also points out that, Jimmy Wales the founder of Wikipedia website agrees that biographical entries may be accompanied by controversies as someone can temper with someone else’s entry by editing the work thus making it loose the intended meaning. For example some members have been held responsible for furnishing articles about their employees while damaging some of articles written by political rivals.
In my own opinion, I strongly disagree with the article that John Seigenthaler Sr. took was involved in the assassination of John and his brother Bobby because the website responsible for the contents are not responsible for finding out if the contents written are factual or false and in addition to that anyone is allowed to compose an article whether they have knowledge on that field or not. Thus this encourages the composition and posting of malicious information that may damage the image of an individual as in the case above. The advantage of this article is that it will enable the various websites not to allow anonymous people to create any page though they may be allowed to edit contents and also the websites will be responsible for editing work before posting.
Reference
Laurie,G.Kirszner,& Stephene,R.Mandel.(2005). Practical argument: A text and anthology. New York: Bedford/St.Martins Bolton.
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