Dark Side of the Blogosphere

A por­tion of the blo­gos­phere is abuzz with com­ments relat­ing to the alleged death threats against Kathy Sierra .

To recap, Kathy Sierra is the cre­ator of a pop­u­lar blog called “Cre­at­ing Pas­sion­ate Users.” In a recent post, she asserts that she has received death threats that are par­a­lyz­ing her with fear and left her so ter­ri­fied that she’s can­cel­ing her appear­ance at the Etech con­fer­ence. I do not know Kathy per­son­ally and am only acquainted with some of the peo­ple she men­tioned in her post.

Before I go any deeper into this post, let me state that I do not agree with threats of any vio­lence in gen­eral: one’s free­dom stops when it start inter­fer­ing with another person’s. Hav­ing been on the receiv­ing end of such threat, I know first-hand what effect they can have on an individual’s psy­che (dur­ing my col­lege years, I received death threats (at gun­point, no less) as a result of a polit­i­cally charged satire arti­cle I had writ­ten for a local pub­li­ca­tion.) My thoughts go out to Kathy on this and I hope that the pas­sage of time will help her over­come her fears.

That said, I worry about the cur­rent reac­tion in the blo­gos­phere turn­ing into a mob jus­tice against the alleged guilty par­ties. The court of opin­ions seems to have con­victed the peo­ple Kathy is point­ing to with lit­tle evi­dence as to their assumed guilt. Under the model the blo­gos­phere seems to have taken, car­ry­ing anony­mous com­ments is cause enough for being guilty. I thought we had fought that fight long ago and agreed that car­ri­ers are not gen­er­ally to be held respon­si­ble for what the com­mu­nity posts unless they edit or mod­er­ate the content.

This cre­ates an inter­est­ing conun­drum and one that can­not be eas­ily solved. Remem­ber that the genius of the US found­ing fathers was in ensur­ing that speech, no mat­ter how unpop­u­lar it is, is gen­er­ally broadly pro­tected under the first amend­ment to the US con­sti­tu­tion. This is why neo-nazi groups are allowed to deny the exis­tence of the Holo­caust or why the KKK is still free to oper­ate as long as its activ­i­ties are just com­mu­ni­ca­tion related and do not expand to actions. The prob­lem with speech, in gen­eral, is that you can always find a type of speech you object to and if you want to be fair about free speech, you are forced to defend peo­ple you dis­agree with. It’s not easy but it’s also what makes this coun­try great.

In the mid-90s, I was involved as part of a group that took a law­suit all the way to the US Supreme Court to ensure that free speech would remain pro­tected on the Inter­net. I was a wide eyed ide­al­ist then and still remain one today. And thus, the conun­drum: in order for a free soci­ety to exist, hate speech can­not be con­doned but must be allowed.

The knee-jerk reac­tion from the blo­gos­phere call­ing for out­ing the guilty par­ties and tak­ing them to the gal­lows will not solve the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem and will actu­ally make things worse. A mob, not mat­ter how well mean­ing, is always ugly. As Scoble pointed it, “we have to fix this cul­ture.” But that doesn’t hap­pen overnight and call­ing for jail time is not the answer. While I deeply dis­agree with the premise behind sites like meankids.org, I do not believe that shut­ting them down would solve the prob­lem. If any­thing, it might serve as a way to pour fuel on the fire, allow­ing for such thing to spread at a much quicker rate. Lisa Stone puts it best when she said “My opin­ions aside, we don’t believe that link­ing to and asso­ci­at­ing with sites we don’t like is cur­rently in and of itself a breach of our com­mu­nity guide­lines and edi­tor agreements.”

In the past, I’ve bumped into a few peo­ple who were extremely unhappy (not to the point of death threat but def­i­nitely work­ing through other forms of intim­i­da­tion) about posts I made about the A-list. This is actu­ally part of the darker side of the A-list: what hap­pens if an A-lister breaks the code of civil­ity? In 4 short points, Ross May­field gets to the crux of it: “Being safe is some­thing most every­one can agree is a right… Being anony­mous on the web mat­ters… Being open on the web mat­ters… Being free with speech is both what makes us great and makes us go too far…”

What is dis­heart­en­ing, though, is that few peo­ple are try­ing to pro­vide answers as to how to deal with the sit­u­a­tion. Umair Haque pro­poses a sys­tem that would remove anon­im­ity from the sys­tem. I don’t think that’s the solu­tion but at least he’s trying.

As Doc Searls points out ” Get­ting your facts right isn’t always so sim­ple” and, in this case, it’s not clear what all the facts are. Sit­ting here as an out­sider, I have a hard time under­stand­ing the basic issues at hand (what pro­voked the ini­tial argu­ments?) So maybe, the first thing is under­stand­ing the fact.

The other thing I’d sug­gest the blo­gos­phere look at is how hate speech sites can co-exist with the rest of the web. Hate speech online is not new (I’m sure that a lit­tle research could yield both Zion­ist and anti-semite sites turn­ing their hatred of the other peo­ple into online posts) but it seems it CAN be con­tained. Based on that, here are some prescriptions:

• Don’t link to site that sup­port hate speech: Obscu­rity is gen­er­ally the enemy of hatred as it doesn’t allow it to spread. The more one pays atten­tion to peo­ple speak­ing hate­ful words, the more those peo­ple will post so high­light­ing them has a neg­a­tive effect. Link­ing is a choice the writer makes so it doesn’t vio­late the right of the haters to speak, it just denies them traf­fic flow.
• When con­fronted with hate speech, either con­front it on the speaker’s site itself (hence ensur­ing they don’t get the flow while at the same time, pre­sent­ing your own point of view)
• If hate is fol­lowed through with actions, out the actions. The speech in itself may be dis­agree­able but, as long as it is not fol­lowed through with actions, it is con­strained. How­ever, if it turns into harass­ing phone calls and emails, or worse, it then becomes some­thing that can be taken care of in a court of law.
• Be mind­ful of the dan­gers of mob jus­tice. In this month’s wired, I’m quoted say­ing: “have you con­sid­ered the dif­fer­ence between the “wis­dom of crowds” and “tyranny of the major­ity.” It is some­thing that I haven’t heard too many peo­ple talk about but what hap­pens when the major­ity is wrong?” In this case, I’m afraid the major­ity is wrong in call­ing for jail time due to speech.

I know this post will prob­a­bly result in my los­ing some read­ers and for that I am sorry but I can­not abide let­ting a mob run while so many of the facts are still unclear. I do believe that what hap­pened to Ms. Sierra sounds hor­ri­ble and for that, I send her my best wishes but, at the same time, I want to make sure that the blo­gos­phere does not over-react because the result could be a more lim­ited def­i­n­i­tion of free speech in the blo­gos­phere. Hate speech, because it is so dread­ful, crosses a line that most of us (myself included) would like to see not crossed but it is exactly why it is pro­tected: because it makes us uncom­fort­able, because it goes where none of us wants to go and that is the genius of the US founders: to pro­tect even the vilest indi­vid­u­als from the over­bear­ing abuse soci­ety can impose upon them.

To deny that pro­tec­tion would be deny­ing the genius of the US found­ing fathers and that’s a step that I, for one, am not yet will­ing to take.

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