Jon22: The Website of Jonathan Dobres

There’s been a lot discussion lately about Tim O’ Reilly’s proposed “Blogger Code of Conduct“. He has even gone so far as to create adorable little badges for the sake of the cause.

This all came about because of a terrible incident of cyber abuse. Prominent blogger Kathy Sierra suddenly found herself the victim of a vicious and frightening bullying effort. Derogatory comments quickly escalated into appalling uses of Photoshop and death threats. I’m not exactly clear on why this happened, but then again, what reason could there possibly be for such behavior? In any event, it left Sierra shaken and genuinely scared. The incident raises difficult questions about how we should think about the still developing medium of online communication. There are few if any legal precedents for cyber bullying, and it’s not clear what parts of the libel and slander laws apply to the internet.

Thus, you get O’ Reilly’s well intentioned but poorly thought out call for a code of conduct. His points are generally a mixture of patronizing and unrealistic. Point 1 is, “Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog.” That’s easy enough on my tiny site, but incredibly difficult on a larger one, not to mention the disastrous legal implications of stating in writing that you’d like to be held accountable for someone else’s words.

I do, however, fully agree with Point 7: “Don’t say anything online that you wouldn’t say in person.” This is a rule that I already use, and it’s a good one to learn if you haven’t already. The internet isn’t as anonymous as it used to be, and the mask is cracking all the time. One day your words may come back to haunt you, so you should all be careful about what you publish. Still, it would be foolish to say that this rule should apply to every good blog. You could kiss the catty fun of The Superficial goodbye, were that the case. O’ Reilly’s Code seems to be mostly about policing comments, but there’s also stuff about content in there. He defines abusive content in part as anything that is, “libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person.” I suppose the closest I’ve ever come to this is my series of posts about the Rush Limbaugh/Michael J. Fox incident back in October. I remain very proud of those posts. I compared Rush Limbaugh to Jabba the Hutt and I’m sticking to that. “Rush Limbaugh, you remind me of nothing so much as a dumber, uglier version of Jabba the Hutt.” I would absolutely say it to his face.

No one should ever have to endure the kind of terrifying abuse that Kathy Sierra has. That said, this supposed Code of Conduct is nothing but a nice idea, and even that may be giving it too much credit. Sometimes bad things happen to good people, and awful as that is, no bullet-pointed code is going to change it. I suppose I could endorse the Code as a show of support to Kathy Sierra, but that’s about it. I’d still like to be able to write mean things about Rush Limbaugh, though. The trade-off between playing nice and saying what I really think hardly seems worth it. No badges for me.