When they were just verbal assaults on female conservatives like Michelle Malkin and Debbie Schlussel the MSM didn't want to consider the issue of sexually-based attacks on female bloggers. Now that it has hit more bloggers outside of the political Right -- and outside of political blogging as a whole -- it is being treated as a crisis.

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms -- a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.

I agree with Michelle Malkin -- where have you all been?

Posted by: Greg at 10:19 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Most of the bloggers I deal with on a regular basis are pretty ethical people. They exercise responsibility in their posts, allow great latitude in their comments but clamp down on/ban obscene, racist, or defamatory commenters, and generally try to engage in reasoned political debate/discussion. They do this without being held to standards by some outside body -- which is, in my eyes, a good thing. And yet some wish to establish some sort of "ethical gold standard" for bloggers.

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.

Last week, Tim OÂ’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.

Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.

A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.

Mr. OÂ’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.

“If it’s a carefully constructed set of principles, it could carry a lot of weight even if not everyone agrees,” Mr. Wales said.

But here comes my concern -- with the amount of censorware out there on the net, how long until some of the filtering companies begin filtering any blog that does not formally adhere to one of these sets of standards -- and until there ctarts being a fee for receiving that badge declaring that one is an ethical blogger? And how long until anonymous political speech -- you know, like that engaged in by the Foundingn Fathers when they wrote the Federalist Papers and other early American political classics -- is strangled by the "ethics mavens" out there as somehow unacceptable?

And let's be honest about matters -- there is good reason for anonymity -- or at least semi-anonymity -- out here on the web. There is, effectively, a record of every word one says, and it is there forever. A pseudonym is therefore not a bad thing. Similarly, I've seen one blogging buddy pull down his website and delete all archives because of a threat of termination by his employer -- and I had a group of local Democrat bloggers prove their commitment to freedom of speech by exposing my name and attempting to get my school district to fire me (don't think I wasn't told, guys).

Personally, I'd prefer self-policing -- with bloggers setting their own policies -- to some sort of over-arching regulation of speech, no matter how benignly intended. Otherwise, you'd get folks like this setting the standards -- and regulating the debate.

MORE AT Reason's Hit & Run

Posted by: Greg at 10:47 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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