Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?
The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.
So, yeah, I woke up this morning with a severe headache and found this on the front page of the Times.
I guess NYT has officially stepped up its policy from "Then they laugh at you" to "Then they fight you".
We saw earlier this week on Daily Kos that free speech can still be a scary concept to some people. Someone posted an anti-Semitic cartoon in the diaries, and Little Green Footballs jumped all over it, somehow deciding that it represents the official opinion of all Daily Kos readers. What they didn't seem to be capable of understanding is that we allow all sorts of speech here; we allow people to make one-sided, racist accusations about Israel, and we allow other people to criticize them. It might be a little frightening to encounter such a variety of speech at first, but really we are just becoming a more open society with a free marketplace of ideas, to be adapted by rational or irrational people as the case may be.
For the New York Times, on the other hand, any story that looks at blogs in a negative light is one to be boosted to the front page... and the idea that they're reporting neutrally on new developments in cyberspace is countered by the headline, "Nasty Blogs".
In an interview, she dismissed the argument that cyberbullying is so common that she should overlook it. "I can’t believe how many people are saying to me, ‘Get a life, this is the Internet,’ " she said. "If that’s the case, how will we ever recognize a real threat?"
Ms. Sierra did not receive any real threats. She was on the receiving end of a sarcastic joke, a Photoshop showing her wearing a brassiere over her mouth, and a single annoyed reader.
Menacing behavior is certainly not unique to the Internet. But since the Web offers the option of anonymity with no accountability, online conversations are often more prone to decay into ugliness than those in other media. [...] the same factors that make those unfiltered conversations so compelling, and impossible to replicate in the offline world, also allow them to spin out of control.
Women are not the only targets of nastiness. For the last four years, Richard Silverstein has advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace on a blog that he maintains from Seattle.
People who disagree with his politics frequently leave harassing comments on his site. But the situation reached a new low last month, when an anonymous opponent started a blog in Mr. Silverstein’s name that included photos of Mr. Silverstein in a pornographic context.
"I’ve been assaulted and harassed online for four years," he said. "Most of it I can take in stride. But you just never get used to that level of hatred."
Get the message here? Maybe not, since it's aimed at the Times' aging readership. They're telling them, "Blogs are scary, stay away." But angry people have always existed. You need to know that you might make people angry with what you write. If there's a place for them to immediately express their anger before they calm down, that's what they're going to do. That's not the same as actual death threats, which hardly ever happen online.
That may sound obvious, but many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor’s comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech. It is too early to gauge support for the proposal, but some online commentators are resisting.
Of course people are resisting. Proposals to fix the Internet are not news and they will never work. The bill of rights of the Internet is limited to two, irrevocable rights:
- The right to free speech.
- The right to vanish.
In essence, the two things you can do on the Internet are yell "fire!" and run away. Nobody is allowed to infringe on those rights. Individuals can voluntarily put a message on their blog saying, "Don't be mean or I'll do my best to make you go away," but that's totally up to them. You can't pass an Internet Law saying that you have to be nice from now on. So in case you're listening, New York Times, this is not front-page news.
Tim O'Reilly does not speak for me. Jimmy Wales does not speak for me. There is no "voice of the bloggers," and "high-profile figures" are bound to be hated somewhere on the Web, especially if you are talking about Dave Winer.
Robert Scoble, a popular technology blogger who stopped blogging for a week in solidarity with Kathy Sierra after her ordeal became public, says the proposed rules "make me feel uncomfortable." He adds, "As a writer, it makes me feel like I live in Iran."
Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. "That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech," he said. "Free speech is enhanced by civility."
Cleaning up ugly comments is something I've had to do before. That's the job of a filter. Here's a surprise: newspapers have a filter too, it's the editors who decide which letters to print. Just because most blogs allow comments by default doesn't mean blogs are necessarily chaotic. Making your comments page intelligent is simple: make people e-mail you to add a comment, the way Boing Boing does, and only print the useful ones. You'll get far fewer comments, though. If you don't mind the full spectrum of chaos, like Scoble, just leave things the way they are.
The New York Times still talks about the "blogosphere" as if it were one community responsible for all this nonsense, rather than a large group of unrelated individuals. This sort of reporting-- "the world of nasty blogs, havens of vitriol"-- does what other kinds of profiling have done in the past, attempting to fault the whole for the actions of the few. They're getting desperate over there.