In the past, threats to individuals have been excluded from this protection, rightly so in my opinion. But we get into trouble when we try to extend this analogy to the World Wide Web. The Oregon ruling indicates that naming an individual on a hate site constitutes a threat, and others seem to agree. Fisher has his own lawsuit, still undecided at this writing, against another hate group publishing threats on the Web. Both the Oregon and Pennsylvania cases spell trouble for corporate Webmasters.
Most corporations have more than one individual posting information to their Web site.
Few have any formal policy to educate these Internet authors as to what is and isn't appropriate information to distribute. And it's getting stickier to determine what is and isn't appropriate. For example, several years ago a Webmaster was fired because he included at the bottom of the corporate Web page a link to his personal site. The entire link consisted of a single period at the end of a sentence - you had to look really hard to find the tiny blue line underneath that period. But by and large, the vast majority of corporate Web sites are thankfully far from the Sturm und Drang of most hate sites.