How about those that stirred up by inflammatory blog posts and articles on digg and elsewhere, send death threats and drive people from their homes?
http://thomashawk.com/2008/08/simon-blint-director-of-visitor.html

An internet mob is a frightening thing, many of the participants have little restraint, and have no regard to the truth of what they are responding to.

The software add-on was developed by paid Wikimedia Foundation coders, taking several months to make it functional. What is does is essentially put any new edits to an article in a “holding pen” (not shown to the average visitor to Wikipedia) where the edit is kept until it can be “approved” by a longer-term, “trusted” editor of Wikipedia.

This functionality has been in place for years on the German Wikipedia; but on the English Wikipedia, it still has not been implemented, because the “people of good faith” who run wild on Wikipedia have repeatedly rejected its implementation. They would rather have every article at risk of libelous commentary, because they believe in the power of the crowd to prevent long-term damage.

Just about every week, we see another news headline showing how Wikipedia has been abused to defame someone, so I think we can see that “good faith” isn’t working very effectively.

I’m unhappy to play the role of “that guy”, pointing out all the horrible libel implications of Section 230, or mobbing. It does not benefit me, especially among the social-media business backscratching. But the logic here is flawed – “by enlisting people of good faith …”. That’s ineffective preaching. There’s all sorts of massive systematic incentives for bad faith, sensationalism, even outright lying, and so on. An *effective* overall response to bona-fide libel would have take this into account. That means legal mechanisms may need to compel large corporations and involved individuals to do things they don’t want to do.

While prescreening everything is absurd, that extreme shouldn’t be taken to be a dispositive argument against any sort of take-down system and retraction requirement. I know there’s many of issues here – but there’s similar issues with copyright. People who have infringement claims are NOT fobbed off with reliance on “good faith”. Currently, one has far more power against trivial copyright infringements than devastating defamation. And that strikes me as the best refutation of the sufficiency of “own the ethical dimensions of what we do online”.