Excuse the brevity of this piece, but I've been having massive puter probs tonight:
Here's one piece:
http://blogs.forbes.com/victoriabarret/2011/01/26/yahoo-is-fostering-a-cauldron-of-hate-and-anarchy/Yahoo! Is Fostering A Cauldron Of Hate and Anarchy
This is a guest blog post from Roger L. Kay, founder and president of Endpoint Technologies Associates (
www.ndpta.com)
I find myself commenting on Yahoo! News, of all things. It’s useless. Every article has hundreds, even thousands of comments, most of them totally odious. To even read them is to sink into a mire of uncontrolled Internet.
But I can’t help myself. I read an article and start to try to predict the commenting, which direction it will take, how the poisonous opposition will be cast. Tangents include spam, blatant ads for services, and all manner of ad hominem claptrap.
I want to edit each one, respond to the insanity. So I mark them thumbs up once in a while, but mostly thumbs down, and even report certain of them as abuse or fraud.
Yahoo! responds nicely, with an automatic reply, and assures me that I won’t be hearing from a human being. They say they study them in aggregate, but are closed mouthed about what it is that they learn. So, at whatever flea like level, I register my discontent with the editors, such as they are, at Yahoo!
I wish I could veto egregious posts, though. It pains me that no one edits these forums. I get the idea of maximum eyeballs, but a good editor could let in most and keep out a few based on sound principles. A forum could follow rules such as: a comment doesn’t post if it has nothing to do with the subject of an article, a rule so simple a machine could do it. After a bit of that sort of editing, the human behavior on the other end might actually respond.
The New Yorker still practices a trademark brand of selectivity to set a particular tone. Some may say too particular. A looser standard could easily apply to a more open forum. But racism, hate speech, and bad behavior seem a little much, even for the open airwaves. With everyone an Editor, no one is The Editor. We have chaos instead of an interesting forum.
As another example, literacy could be a minimum standard. But if an editor saw that a post was well meant but badly put, he or she could fix it to make it do what its author intended.
I realize I’m just dreaming, that the spigot of the Internet is now an established fact, but I’m nostalgic for the old days, when some sort of sense ruled. I find that it matters what people are saying. The choruses are appalling. Waves of voices haunting a meme like anti-Semitism, or calling for vengeful violence against women, foreigners, Muslims, liberals. Scary I don’t think would be too strong a word to describe the rhetoric, mostly from the right. What do the twisted faces behind those snarling words look like? I shudder to imagine.
Editing might not be such a bad thing. It would keep the discourse civil, allowing different points of view into the conversation, but not let idiots take over — and it would presume to know what an idiot is. Far from creating an aristocracy of communications, a good edit could hold us all to a higher standard. It’s certainly worth a try.
So I file, “unfounded conclusion” or “hate speech; off topic” on Yahoo!’s “report abuse” link, wearily tapping away at a corner of the flood. It’s like picking up trash on the roadside near where you live. You do it because it pleases you, not because you can stop people throwing things out their car window. The street just looks better, if only for a moment.
I take up the thread here several weeks later. One difference between before and after is that Jared Loughner shot Gabrielle Giffords and others in the meantime. In the Yahoo! comment forums, there was a lot of furious back and forth about whether Sarah Palin had anything to do with the incident. A story posted on Yahoo! for only 36 minutes had, get this, 119,361 comments, most of them typical of the genre.
And so I continue to edit, shoveling sand against the tide. I can’t help myself — category: derogatory speech; specific: homophobic — category: derogatory speech; specific: racist — category: other; specific: not relevant to the topic. And so on. Just a few on the first page, which carries the most recent. It’s a symbolic gesture.
I don’t often have strong opinions, but in this case I do.
Yahoo! should remove its commenting function, at least temporarily, and make a public statement about the misuse of the feature. The company should say that, given the volume of these comments, the forum cannot be moderated, but that consistent bad manners,
hate speech, and ad hominem attacks cannot be tolerated. Therefore, the commenting function is suspended for the foreseeable future. The company can inform the public that at some point commenting will be resurrected, but that it will be moderated and that guidelines for civility will be posted prominently.
I tried to engage Yahoo! on this subject, but you can be sure it is a conversation they are not anxious to have. So, I take to the blogosphere directly in the hope of getting a meme started. Yahoo! has a responsibility to get this right.
***
And here's an earlier piece:
http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2007/1015/074.htmlAnonymity & the Net
Victoria Murphy Barret 10.15.07, 12:00 AM ET
On Halloween last year, 18-year-old Nicole Catsouras had the urge to go out. She had just started college but her father had confiscated her car keys earlier that day, after a spat. So she sneaked out of the house, grabbed the keys to her dad's Porsche 911 convertible and sped off. Fifteen minutes later Nikki lost control of the car and crashed into a freeway tollbooth at what witnesses said was 100 miles per hour.
She died instantly. The pain of her parents and her three younger sisters continues, deepened by a malicious, masked mob on the Internet. Gruesome police photos of the carnage, her mangled remains still in the driver's seat, showed up online at Google (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people ), Yahoo (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ), News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people )'s Photobucket and at more than 1,500 other outposts. In chat rooms and on fetishistic car-crash forums, anonymous assailants called Nikki a "spoiled rich girl" who "deserved it."
One post urged cohorts to harass her family, providing the Catsourases' home address in Ladera Ranch, Calif. On MySpace, one member calling himself "Hell Fire" posted the morbid photos laced with his own jeering commentary. Another put up a new Nikki profile with a ghastly closeup: "What's left of my brain here: As you can see, there wasn't much." When a high school friend uploaded a touching memorial on YouTube, ghouls flooded the page with images of the accident scene.
A month after his daughter died, Christos Catsouras, a real estate agent, clicked on an e-mail from a Web sitwhee, hoping for a sales lead. Instead it read: "Whoooooooooo I am here daddy." It came from an anonymous Yahoo account: Im Alive[sic]. He quit his job to avoid the Net and now works as an office manager at much lower pay. "Have these people ever loved? Have they ever cared?" he asks. "If they had, they wouldn't be doing this to us." Lesli Catsouras had avoided the photos for months, but in February she ran a Google search for an article on their daughter's death--and one click later was horrified to see one. "I've spent 41 years seeing good in the world. Now I see the bad," she says.
The Catsourases have filed a $20 million lawsuit in Orange County Superior Court against the California Highway Patrol, which admits a staffer wrongfully leaked the photos. The CHP says it has taken "appropriate disciplinary measures" but won't provide the details--because, it says, this would violate employee privacy.
As for the Catsourases' privacy, they couldn't find anyone else to sue. They struggled to wipe the painful photos from the Web--and they were all but ignored. Dozens of pleading e-mails to Google and MySpace went unanswered, the family says (MySpace insists it replied; Google has no record). Tracking down the anonymous haters proved to be all but impossible. One relative spent a month of 13-hour days lobbying chat rooms, but each time one site took down a photo it emerged elsewhere. Some obligingly removed a picture--then added a link to other sites where onliners could see it.
"Nobody seemed to think it was a big deal, except for us," Lesli says. "These people knew anonymity was their salvation."
Anonymity was built into the Internet's design from the days of its progenitor (Arpanet) in the 1960s. Since then it has become a hallowed birthright synonymous with digital freedom--from oppressive dictators, criminal corporations and book-burning crazies, from judgmental neighbors who abhor a person's sexual preferences or religious beliefs. (A FORBES writer turned anonymity into a game in the parody site the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, until he was outed in August by the New York Times.)
Question this right of Net anonymity and you risk an unmitigated thrashing (anonymously, of course). So maybe we are asking for trouble when we dare to say that Internet anonymity is out of control. Today the Net still protects the abused and the disenfranchised, people who go online for help because they can do so in secret. But it also shields creeps, criminals and pedophiles. It emboldens the mean-spirited and offers them a huge audience for spewing hatred and libel. Caustic cowards are free to one-up one another in invective and vitriol--haters who would tone it down if they had to identify themselves.
A backlash has begun, and it could gain support in Congress and in the courts unless the Internet industry itself finds new fixes. In Pasadena, Calif. a federal appeals court in May reinstated a lawsuit that could make Roommates.com liable for want ads that mention gender and sexual orientation preferences. In Connecticut two women at Yale are suing the AutoAdmit chat board in district court. They want the identity of "Stanfordtroll," who started a mean discussion thread ("Stupid **** to Attend Yale Law") saying that one of the women would be sodomized, had herpes, had a lesbian affair with the admissions dean and had botched admissions tests. Another unknown poster wrote of the second student: "I hope she gets raped and dies." One of the plaintiffs says it prevented her from getting jobs.
Meanwhile, attorneys general in all 50 states have allied to push MySpace to begin verifying members' ages. This, after Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal got the site to turn over names of 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up. "Those are the dumb ones who used their real names. Who knows how many falsify their information?" he says. "The Web has a real libertarian mind-set. Individual freedom should be prized and protected so long as no one is harmed. But the question is: What happens when there is harm?"
His answer: a bit less freedom.
This is anathema to Webheads. "People are cruel," says Hemanshu Nigam, chief security officer at MySpace, which requires no ID data for any post. "Anonymity doesn't inspire this, but it does remove the fear to think, to act and to explore." Still, MySpace, in June, launched a phone hotline for complaints about content. "This industry has to work together to find solutions. I hope this can be a call to action," he says.
On the Net, anonymity saves lives. In Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe has made it illegal to criticize the government. An underground activist group called Sokwanele has an anonymous blog that 1,420 other sites link to. It has been cited in the New York Times and in the Guardian in Britain. "Without the protection of anonymity, we would be arrested," says one Sokwanele contributor. The charge could be treason, the penalty death.
In Illinois a mother of four children, who is bipolar and in an abusive relationship, tells FORBES how she was ready to try suicide by jumping from her third-floor balcony. Then she paused, stepped inside and logged on to a site that had consoled her before: Experience Project. "I can see my children's smiling faces because of EP. Here I could speak freely. No one judged me," she says. At Ivescrewedup.com, run by the Flamingo Road Church in Cooper City, Fla., anonymous posters put up 100 items a day on abortion, eating disorders, drug abuse and more.
Anonymity is key to "renewal and forgiveness, and these are all things that happen online now," says Michael Godwin, a former counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Democracy requires faith that "even at our self-interested worst, we're basically pretty good. The Web would be un-American without that belief." He adds: "Unfortunately, some people will be genuinely hurt by this."
Godwin now is general counsel for the parent of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, which itself got fooled by anonymity. In July 2006 the New Yorker profiled the site and quoted an administrator who referees disputes over entries. Wikipedia knew him only as "Essjay," a tenured professor with "a Ph.D. in theology and a degree in canon law." But Essjay actually was a 24-year-old poser who holds no advanced degrees and doesn't teach, according to a correction published by the magazine. He quit, but Wikipedia still doesn't check the credentials of contributors.
Even some Net insiders fret over this. "The Web is just too wild," says Kim Cameron, identity czar at Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ), which, like other vendors, is rolling out products aimed at bringing more identity to the Web. Timothy O'Reilly, a publisher and one of the Web's biggest cheerleaders, now calls for guardrails: "The perception right now is that standing up for good things is wussy, but a lot of people want more civility."
Katherine Sierra is one of them, and it was her case that prompted O'Reilly's view. An expert on online communities, she was stunned in March to read an anonymous post on her blog that began: "i hope someone slits your throat. …" Yet she didn't delete it--that would undermine free speech. This emboldened others. On a Web site called Meankids a user posted her photo alongside an image of a hangman's noose. "The only thing Kathy has to offer is that noose in her neck size," wrote a poster calling himself "joey." She contacted the site--yet didn't directly ask to remove the threatening fare, fearing such a request would "only make it worse." The owners of Meankids later took the entire site down. On the Unclebobisms site, a doctored photo had her gasping for air with sheer panties stretched across her face. Caption: "I dream of Kathy Sierra … head first."
