Jessica, how do we crack down on anonymous comments?

In your Guardian article, you pose the question, "Is this really what people are like?" I can only conclude that yes, this is what people are really like. The anonymity of the web and other online situations really expose how people think.

While the national media are busying scorching Imus for his comments, worse things are said on the web every day. When it comes to racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry, a lot of the easy work has been done. We don't have de jure discrimination or institutionalized racism. Getting rid of prejudice and sexist thinking will be the hard part, if it's possible.

I'm not coming up with good ideas on how to make things better. It seems the most we can do is disallow anonymous comments, but that basically doesn't solve any of the problems. Even I have a fake email address that I use in certain circumstances so that I can keep my personal information private.

What to do?

it's hard to gauge how extensive the problem is. Like terrorism, it only takes a few cranks out of hundreds of emails to scare somebody. they could be sincere threats -- they could be teen pranks. A free society allows people to act irresponsibly, and unfortunately -- too many do.

Given the recent controversy combining Don Imus, rap lyrics and videos, etc you make a good point.
I noted in a prior blog that I hadn't realized until this morning that much of the debate about the treatment of African-American women was being done by African-American men and Caucasians. Imus defenders have (to my knowledge) been all males. Ana Marie Cox wrote in Time magazine about her need to feel accepted as one of the the "guys" by appearing on Imus. Gen Ifill had to wait until Imus was wounded before responding to his cleaning woman "joke".
If women are being marginalized in a discussion about women in the Imus-Rutgers situation and MSM women are under pressure by their male peers, then I'm not surprised that the blogosphere is akin to the scenes in "A Clockwork Orange" or "A Boy and His Dog".
Arianna Huffington made the point that if a 12 year old girl put a video of her signing on You Tube, there would in short order be comments like, "You are terrible. You should kill yourself."
I have no idea on how to change the climate.

I'm don't like misogyny (or misandry) or incivility.  I'm also don't like making up new rules that effectively punish the innocent for the sins of the guilty.  The anonymity of the internet is overrated and death threats are a crime in many places.  Report them to the police.  If they don't rise the the level of prosecution under current law, then try to find some other way to punish the guility -- not the rest of us.

What did kos say about the bloggrrls working for Edwards who were forced to resign by the rabid dog faction of supporters of Bill Orally and his colleagues? Were they just a bunch of whiners? Or were the death threats reprehensible in that similar case?

Or did the fact that they are popular bloggers with a following (willing to be very vocal about how out of touch with reality such a comment makes you appear to be) lead him to temper his remarks somewhat?

A free society allows people to act irresponsibly, and unfortunately -- too many do.

Death threats are not protected speech.  If you mail someone a picture of themselves being hung, or of them being suffocated with lingerie, you're breaking the law.  Post those pictures on a website, as happened to Kathy Siera, same thing.  E-mail someone with explicit death threats, as also happened to Kathy Siera, same thing.  Illegal.  As it should be.

they could be sincere threats -- they could be teen pranks.

I can think of several women of my own acquaintance who have been stalked and/or experienced domestic violence, as well as a friend's mother who was stalked and murdered by someone she didn't know.  It's not something to be taken lightly by anyone, regardless of gender, but I have to say that I'd particularly counsel any woman I knew who was being stalked (so far I haven't known any men who've been stalked), not to dismiss it as a teen prank, not to think that they were making a big deal out of nothing, and not to think that, say, getting a restraining order was an extraordinary enough step in itself to actually protect them.

It's the reluctance to "blow things out of proportion," in my experience, that gets people killed.

I'll add a one more note to this already overlong comment:

Kos has always resisted efforts to make Dailykos into the destination/community site for left-lib activists.

In some ways it tends to serve as such despite him, simply because of it's size. But he has periodically and consistently taken steps to reassert that his is a site about winning electoral fights, and the rest is just frills and context.

The incident described above was, from one perspective, just one of several times this focus has gotten him into fights with the larger community he has attracted. More recently, there was a flap when he reduced and refocused his blogroll to reflect his priorities, thereby apparently depriving many smaller blogs of potential traffic and googleranking. In the end, he instituted a new feature: thousands of decentralized blogrolls (every diary writer can create one), to distribute the linkage more democratically.

Like I said, a complicated organism.

Jessica,

So dissapointing to hear that Kos is mouthing some kind of 'tough guy' macho crap. One wonders what kind of 'heat' he's gotten in his inbox.

Why can't he be supportive instead of offering tough guy bromides?

I've been stalked by some mysterious cabal of psychos, and it nearly drove me to the brink.

Our sociey is going to hell. Every body fancies himself the new Hannibal Lechter. Our standards are going down and we have a coarse and endlessly vulgar culture of death and violence to thank for it.

Kos is blinkered. He thinks that all bloggers are political bloggers, and thus behave according to the rules of political blogging, which allow for a lot more bare-knuckle dealings than elsewhere. In that mileu, macho crap is the order of the day.

Kathy Sierra is not a political blogger.

It's time to stop feeding the line that there is One Big Blogosphere, whose rules and culture are dictated by big political bloggers.

Kos speaks for the mileu of tech blogging the way he speaks for cat blogging.

Yeah, a Clockwork Orange seems a bit much.  But then I have to admit, I am that rare person who has never read the book *or* seen the movie (don't tell anyone!), so what do I know. 

Isn't the issue here, really, more about our society and the celebrity spectacle?

And misogyny (coupled with racism in the cases of Gwen Ifill and the Rutger's team).

It's a disturbing book, and a disturbing movie. The movie's definitely worth seeing, at least once. (You'll never listen to Beethoven's 9th the same way...)

Dissent Protects Democracy.

What we really need is to get at the root of why some people are so freaking violent, and toward women, even if only in emails or postings. Violence against women is a longstanding social ill that I believe we haven't overcome because as a society we've decided sexism and mysogyny no longer really exist. But then I ask, where does the urge to threaten a woman with rape, hanging, and suffocation come from? Is it a territorial issue--she's entered the tech world and stepped on some toes? Or is it just a general disgust with the female sex? Either way, we've got big problems.

We've discussed this before, and I doubt we are any closer to a conclusion. Given I go way back in pre-Internet networks, when most users were researchers, non-anonymity, and for that matter usually no pseudonymity, worked for several reasons. On the one hand, users valued their reputations. On the other hand, the academic-research culture was quite tolerant to distinguishing between the personal and public spheres. Oh, someone might use a cryptic ID for technical reasons, but everyone knew AD03 at the Department of Labor Computer Center was Howard Berkowitz. Indeed, up until the early 90s, a lot of people had their email IDs larger than their "wetware" names on convention badges, because we often thought of one another by email. Ham radio operators still do the same thing.

Industrial and government researchers were responsible for not revealing proprietary or classified things, but their management was pretty tolerant of personal opinion, especially with disclaimers. The only time I made any use of pseudonyms was in chat rooms, especially for gaming.

USENET was perhaps the earliest widespread equivalent of blogs, not counting some of the less scalable dialup and linked bulletin board systems. I separate USENET from BBSs also because it took relatively more technical skill and personal connections to get onto USENET, so, again, personal reputation was important. Just having looked back at some historical articles, the first significant use is later than I remembered it: the Canter & Siegel spam flood was in 1994, and AOL giving the first access to general consumers was around then.

Canter & Siegel were not anonymous, and indeed got threats. Still, given they were self-promoting immigration lawyers, shall we say their plight did not get much sympathy? Their offense was denial of service through massive spam, not personal attacks. Not long after AOL connected, allowing pseudonyms, there started much more hostility.

I still do use newsreaders with strong filtering, and there's an interesting balance between blogs and USENET. Blog clients rarely allow much filtering, which is the only way of dealing with massive noise on many USENET groups. I often wonder what the use of strong, user-defined filtering would be on blog civility. It's hard to threaten someone if they've set up filters such that they don't see you.

My general feeling is that pseudonymity will scale well only if:

1. For blogs with any kind of rating or banning scheme, there need to be protections against gaming it, especially by new users. Slashdot, the Well, and Wikipedia, among others, all have some mechanism of this type.


2. There needs to be a means of validating signatures even under a pseudonym, to avoid forgery. Cryptographic verification technology has evolved to provide better alternatives than anonymous remailers like penet.fi. When I say "better", I mean both harder to trace to the true owner, but also easier to block a specific identity that is causing problems.


3. Encourage the use of names whenever possible, and implement anti-threat procedures that can be done. It is reasonable to restrict private messaging with more transparency to public posts.

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

After reading about Ms. Sierra's blog-difficulties, I went to read her site. It's all about writing *software*. The *ultimate* boring affects-very-few topic. (I believe this because I've been doing it for 35 years, and while it's interesting to me, it just doesn't have much pizzazz outside our fairly small world.)

If Ms. Sierra were blogging about holding Corporate America or government leaders accountable for their acts, she should expect to receive hate mail from the self-centered among us.

She is talking about writing software! And she's very nice about it, too. (It may be her insistence on appropriate language that pissed off some mouth-breathers.) If/when she returns to blogging, then I expect to go back to reading her work as it reminds us to think about our customers, and the effects of our work on the daily experiences of real people who depend on it.

I'm afraid I never quite got into the language of Finnegan's Wake or Clockwork Orange, and only have a scant few words of Klingon. I can, however, fake the latter with south German and a sore throat.

Geekish or not, I'm idly wondering if a discussion topic of dystopias might be of interest. Especially since Kurt Vonnegut died today, I'll offer an online version of one of my greatest fear expressed in dystopic story, "Harrison Bergeron". Orwell's 1984 is another nightmare, given I know how primitive was its surveillance technology.

Sometimes Brave New World scares me. Sometimes it's even more scary to deal with hanging out on an Island there, as a rather pleasant existence.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- for ever" [Inner Party Member O'Brien, 1984]

Is the Apple 1984 Super Bowl commercial the bright side of 1984?

Without the affair, or the boiling stuff, or the knives.  No wonder nobody optioned my screenplay.

What?

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

As I'll freely admit, I am conflicted about public and private spheres, and where to draw the line. Perhaps if I feel masochistic, I might resubscribe to a mailing list about a certain concept of "netizen", the owner of which believes in Internet-enabled direct democracy for everything, blissfully and deliberately unaware of little things like secure voting. Does anyone want anonymous networked Diebold?

Even if voting were secure, I simply don't see many forms of network-enabled communication, without controls, scaling to infinite size, any more than a New England town meeting will scale to infinite size. Mind you, for the record, I'm living in a New England town and I actually will go to a town meeting. Previously, though, the County Board of Arlington County, Virginia, had to give up on its open mike policy, as 2 or 3 individuals would monopolize it for hours.

Over the years, I have found developing a perhaps idiosyncratic writing style is one of the best ways of identifying myself. If push came to shove, there are quite sophisticated means of language analysis that aren't quite a fingerprint, but make it very, very hard to get away with continued forgery.

Seriously, I think a general blog filter, which could be individualized as are newsreader or mail filters, could add quite a bit of civility. The more juvenile forms of insult are easy enough to filter, although I will give some slack to someone doing Monty Python, Mel Brooks, Winston Churchill, or John Wilkes impressions.

Hmmm. After a frightening number of years of networking, I can go quite comfortably knowing that I do not have to read certain posts, other than to design a filter. There are some technical challenges in creating effective filters; one annoying individual kept morphing his name to block the simpler (but complex to nonprogrammers) regular expression filters that many newsreaders use.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Anyone can ignore, but artistically ignoring is a rare gift.

Some associates were putting together a website not long ago -- and then ended up taking all pictures down.  It was, after all, the only prudent thing to do after someone developed a fixation on one of those depicted.

I'd guess Max doesn't think Kos is progressive.

Kos once said he used to be Republican, more Libertarian really. 

Jessica,

I have hesitated to post this account because i am not a woman and can only guess the terror a woman might feel when being stalked by anonymous creeps. Yahoo didn't know that when the Yahoo Sheriff told me to go to the police if I was concerned about years of threats of death and dismemberment by a Colorado daytrader, leader of the pack, who regularly posted my address complete with maps for other psychos. Though I always post under my own name, the Yahoo Sheriff had no way of knowing my gender as you can see.

How could even my wife be frightened when we have a German Shepherd who had some Jehovah's Witness contemplating their own entry into Paradise because of one mean bark by the world's largest chicken. They drove off and Rosie ate well that night. I worry lots more about those trying to save my soul than terrorists who intend to free it from its bondage.

Yahoo did do something later. The Sheriff deleted my name and account for annoying the stalkers. Got to give him credit for something.

Seems to me there should be some accountability by Yahoo.

Guess not.

Best, Terry

With Rand, I'm much more comfortable recommending Anthem to adolescents than Atlas Shrugged. The latter, perhaps no longer, is something of a rite of passage. While taking summer courses before my first college year, I spent 48 hours or so of essentially continuous reading to get through it. At a comparable time, I think hippies called it a Happening.

When the Unabomber was publishing his manifesto, I shared a number of emails that suggested he sounded like John Galt. On detailed examination, there were major substantive differences, but the stylistic similarity of the monologues was eerie.

It's entirely possible that if Ayn Rand had had a draconic but competent editor, Objectivism would have triumphed. Alternatively, had Ayn Rand had a word processor, it might take several trucks to lift her magnum opus.

More seriously, some of my remarks tonight, on political correctness, come from several haunting literary memories. As you point out, there are similarities between "Harrison Bergeron" and Atlas Shrugged, although they are more about egalitarianism gone berserk than the idea of thought. 1984 and Anthem, in different ways, approach the premise that suppressing certain ideas or words will eventually sear them from humanity.

That is a somewhat different terror than conditioning gone wild, either in Brave New World, The Manchurian Candidate, or the less polished reality of Communist reeducation, especially Asian before the Soviets discovered punitive psychiatry.

As you mention, sometimes one can forget details but never a message. Rand did have some gems. As I think about one, the scene is clear and the words, I think, are coming back. In the world being abandoned by creators, the Faustian scientist, Dr. Robert Stoddart, asks Dagny Taggart if he could see the wreckage of the so-promising, so-enigmatic motor. He examines it in silence, and comments something to the effect that it was so wonderful to see a brilliant, creative, idea that was not his.

As I remember, Rand stated first what I've heard more commonly as a rule of management: first-raters hire other first-rate people. Second-raters hire third-raters.
--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

Should I admit here to geekhood?

Markos is a sexist asshole. I'm a former frontpager (by popular request) who got bounced for the sin of being female. There are a few other female bloggers around who have had the same experienc.

Just goes to show you: just because you experienced it as horror doesn't mean that you shouldn't write it as comedy!

=== It's all about writing *software*. The *ultimate* boring affects-very-few topic. ===

Actually, it is about writing (and learning, and using) *good*, *user-centric* software, which is one of the most diffcult jobs on the planet IMHO. And in the modern era one which affects more people than just about any other except water, sewer, and trash operations.

sPh

Yeah. I think that words and actions have a way of bleeding into each other. Wack jobs tend to fantasize and talk about their obsessions before acting on them.

C'mon, it's not 'free speech' for me to threaten to kill you and rape you.

Nobody who's criticized Kos has done anything to debunk his main point, because Kos is right. This will always happen as long as 1) we have an Internet and 2) people can comment anonymously on blogs. There's nothing we can do about it and no way to stop it, except for the one way a woman (or man, since it is indeed possible to violently threaten a man) CAN stop it: by shutting down their blog.

So, get upset over Kos' tone if you want, but he's right on the facts.

I have a photo of myself with my son on my blog's About Me page and I can't tell you how many times right-wing nutcases have copied the image & posted it at 3rd party sites in order to mock both me & my son. Once they even called my then 2 yr old son (who'd never had a haircut) "simian like." Imagine calling a 2 yr old child an ape. It takes a certain low class of human being. And does Kos think we should have to stand for this s(*t???

My wife really doesn't like me doing this. But I don't want bullies running my life or determinging the decisions I make at my blog.

DMCA notices have gotten the images taken down relatively quickly.

Richard Silverstein
Tikun Olam>

I have posted a rather lengthy blog entry in response.

May I encourage you to read it?