Today is Stop Cyberbullying Day
Yesterday, Neonatal Doc announced he was putting his blog on hiatus...because of a troll and threatened legal action.
This is a shame. Not as much of a shame as the destruction of Alan Herrell's reputation, or the vile things written about Kathy Sierra*, or Eliot Stein's shameful treatment of Cathy Seipp, but a shame nonetheless.
I've been looking for an image to illustrate what I feel the underlying message of l'affaire MeanKids / UncleBobism to be, and found this at Andrew Heenan's Guide to Flaming, specifically the troll pages.
I don't agree that blogging as a whole "needs a code of conduct", as Tim O'Reilly has suggested. Nor do I agree with Sam Sethi:
“It could be that the time has come to professionalise what bloggers do,”.... “It is up to the community to agree the rules and then it would simply be a line at the top of the blog to say only show me sites that adhere to this conduct.”
I do agree with Denise Howell:
"I think anyone who enjoys any aspect of the Live Web would celebrate this fact, and agree its vitality would be impaired if the law expected or required these ordinary people to envelop themselves and their sites in elaborate legal provisos and conditions if they hope to be shielded from potential responsibility for the bad acts of others," she said.
The Kathy Sierra situation is, she said, "forcing bloggers to examine their moral compasses on a number of fronts". But, ultimately self-regulation is the only way forward, she believes.
I met Lisa Williams at BlogHer2005, and listened to her talk about her blog principles, which I later adopted to my own blog.
I have time to weed my comments on a regular basis. But Neonatal Doc makes an important point: blogging is a hobby, and the day job prevents ND from quickly monitoring comments. Troll- and flame-wars break out while ND is in the NICU...so what is a blogger to do?
In a follow-up post at a different venue, Howell elaborated upon how she was quoted:
What I'd hoped to get across, but expressed too clumsily and obliquely, was there have been movements in favor of blogging codes of conduct for quite some time. However, there has been fragmentation and no widespread resolution on the issue to date. For the record, I agree with Tim O'Reilly that accepted conduct standards are a good idea, and completely in keeping with the message of the talk I just gave at VON. The reason I don't think a code of conduct would suffice to put to bed all the issues raised by this sort of situation is that psycho- and/or sociopaths don't follow codes. They could care less about codes. So we're back to the question of whether and when indirect legal responsibility is appropriate. A subset of that question is whether group blog administrators and loosely joined co-bloggers are expected to promulgate proactive rules and policies concerning potential bad acts, and then enforce them, in order to protect themselves legally. As I posted earlier, while such proactive measures are good for potential victims, they may well be beyond the resources and foresight of real people, and the burden of requiring them thus will chill beneficial speech by discouraging and overwhelming the would-be speakers.
The medblogosphere started thinking and writing about blogging ethics in December 2005. Here's Hsien Hsien Lei's post on the subject. While I am not a medical blogger, I thought the answers were important enough to put in my about statement.
Kathy Sierra was also quoted as follows:
Ms Sierra also offers that now is perhaps the right time for a thorough re-examination of the entire blogging community in terms of its existing censorship free ethos. “There is an unwritten rule in the blogosphere that it is wrong to delete nasty comments. It suggests that you can’t take criticism, but now there is a sense that this is nonsense,” she said.
Hmmmn. That may be Kathy's unwritten rule, but it is not universally applied. There's a clear line separation between "nasty comments" "abuse" and "criticism". There are thousands of blogs that have published comment policies. For example, the good people at Making Light disemvowel and ban folks who don't speak appropriately in their comments. I've been editing comments for language I don't allow for several years now.
*note: I am not linking to the specific post in Creating Passionate Users at this time, as it portrays false images of Alan Herrell. I believe that Alan Herrell's identity was stolen and used to defame him. I hope Kathy Sierra will remove that particular image from her site that purport to be Allan Herrell's words, and most surely are not.
Resources:
Wikipedia Troll (Internet)
CSI Working Paper: Managing Trolling in a Feminist Forum
The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly of the Internet
Cyberbullying Resources at Stop Cyberbullying
Previous Posts
Blogs Can Talk Past Each Other
Blog Civility
Blog Civility: Online Integrity Pledge
Rudeness
Craig Weller's Civility in Conflict
The Death of Civility
How To Disagree Online Without Being Disagreeable
Smart or Happy?
Laura at Apt 11D: Disagree or Attack?
Polarization and Moving the Middle
My Blogging Principles
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