Slashdot Mirror
Survey Reveals Americans Support Blog Censorship
renai42 writes "A new survey has revealed that Americans overwhelmingly support strong censorship for blogs, even though a substantial amount have never actually been to one. Eighty percent of the 2,500 respondents did not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. However, more than one-third of respondents had never heard of blogs before participating in the survey, and only around 30 percent of participants had actually visited a blog themselves."
I don't think it has nearly as much to do with the fact that the
respondents have never been to a blog, but more to do with the fact
that the question is worded such that they are bound to answer in a
given way. Mark Blumenthal points out:
"The error is the incorrect belief that there is a "right" or
"unbiased" way to ask a question about any given public issue. There
is no such thing. Everyone who works within the polling field is well
aware that small changes in wording can affect the ways in which
respondents answer questions. This approach leads us into tortuous
discussions of question wording on which reasonable people can
differ. Further, as you have pointed out many times in the past,
random variation in the construction of the sample or in response
rates can skew the results of any single poll away from the true
distribution of opinions in the population."
Given the question in the survey: "[do you] believe that bloggers
should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal
information about private citizens?" Of course they are going to say
no. They would say so regardless if it were bloggers, firemen or
priests. It's like asking if you think children should have enough to
eat, everyone is going to say yes, even if it is attached to some dumb
bill raising taxes on golf balls.
What should we do then? Mark Blumenthal goes on to say, "The answer is
NOT to find a single poll with the "best" wording and point to its
results as the final word on the subject. Instead, we should look at
ALL of the polls conducted on the issue by various different polling
organizations. Each scientifically fielded poll presents us with
useful information. By comparing the different responses to multiple
polls -- each with different wording -- we end up with a far more
nuanced picture of where public opinion stands on a particular issue."
Makes sense to me.
--greg Vulcan quiescent... Q: What machine shutdown with this message?
Blogging anonymously is the only way to go. Hide your tracks. Say what you want.
However, nobody wants their personal infomation listed on the internet. I think we all agree that we wouldn't want that. Just posting somebody's email gets them spam.
I know that if somebody posted my son or daughter's picture, address, and phone number... I would want it removed. What if somebody posted your address and said, "They are always gone by 8:30 in the am."
We all want freedom... and that's why we hide ourselves on slashdot and in blogs. The things we say can hurt us. However, it can be used for evil too...
Kinda like everything else in life.
It's pro-personal privacy. It wouldn't matter if you replaced "blog" with "Tv news" or "newspaper" or "radio" people would still say they don't want their addressed published in the media.
what would their response have been if the word instead of blogs would have been "freelance journalists" or "independent newspapers"?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
Just because someone hasn't heard of or visited a "blog" doesn't mean they can't be of the opinion that "home addresses and other personal information about private citizens" shouldn't be posted online, whether it's on a "blog" or what we colloquially call a "web page".
More from the survey:
Fifty-two percent of those surveyed said bloggers should have the same rights as traditional journalists, while 27 percent did not express an opinion.
[...] most respondents classed bloggers in the same category as journalists when it came to free speech [...]
[...] most people used blogs to obtain information about politics or current events.
This isn't about "blogging". The personal information bit was about what usually constitutes harassment, that just happens to come in the form of a blog.
God I love these misleading, scare-tactic titles. "AMERICANS SUPPORT BLOG CENSORSHIP", which of course brings to mind nasty, ignorant, redneck religious right wanting to censor Common Dreams and DailyKos. No, morons. They do not believe that bloggers should be allowed to publish home addresses and other personal information about private citizens. All of a sudden that equates to wholesale BLOG CENSORSHIP? And yes, I realize that any censorship - even of that information - is still censorship, but let's get a freakin' grip, here, before people start talking about the "good little sheeple doing what Monkey Boy Bush tells them" etc., ok?
The consumer-drone sheeple strike again.
Survey says: highschoolers across the country think NEWSPAPERS should be censored. I'd be astounded, frankly, if these same people a few years later decided to support freedom of speech on all mediums.
Quid festinatio swallonis est aetherfuga inonusti?
Africus aut Europaeus?
"It's like they're trying to trap you: 'Have you ever tried sugar, or cocaine?'" -Mitch Hedberg
Digital Sailor
it seems to me the headline could have been just as easily:
americans overwhelmingly support privacy of citizens
but doesn't fly as well with the america-haters...
Of course not.
People are willing to censor blogs? Does this surprise anyone?
I saw an article (sorry, no reference) where the researchers took a poll to see if people thought certain things should be allowed. They rewrote the Bill of Rights to they'd be unrecognizable to the casual reader, and they asked people if each amendment should be allowed. For each amendment in the Bill of Rights, many (if not most) thought that the right need not be constitutionally protected.
It's not that people agreed strongly with the idea of preventing the government from forcing the quartering of soldiers. It's that most people are so ignorant that they don't know why we have certain protections in place in the Constitution. Freedom of speech? Naw, the government should be able to censor. Freedom of the press? Naw, the press should be required to get government approval for items published. The results were amazing and disturbing!
The point is too many people in America are so comfortable that they take their rights for granted. When people spend more time worrying if a certain entertainer is wearing slutty clothes than they did considering whether the government had given enough (or even correct) justification about going to war and killing hundreds of thousands of people, you know that a country has its priorities screwed up.
It's sad but patriots have died to protect these freedoms and most people don't give a damn. But that's why we have our Constitution: to protect the public from its own shortsightedness.
Insert simplistic political, ideological, or personal proselytization here.
I detect a bit of bias on the part of the submitter. Who cares if one third of the respondents hadn't visited a blog? They still wouldn't want their addresses or phone numbers published on the Internet. Who would? Would the submitter? I think this is an attempt to stir up the masses with references to "censorship."
It could be argued that publishing such information is a violation of a person's privacy. Free speech extends so far that it does not violate the rights of another person.
Notice how the poll questions are essentially asking the poll respondents about PRIVACY issues (bloggers spilling PERSONAL data online about politicians, judges, and celebrities). But this article is trying to sell those results as evidence that the public supports cracking down on political blogs using campaign finance laws.
You have here a first rate example of the economic elite using mass media propaganda.
They have been doing this for over 100 years here in America.
eat shiat and bark at the moon
This has nothing to do with censorship and who ever wrote the title should be ashamed of themself. People, whether celebrities or politicians deserve to have their personal information kept private when it has no bearing on their ability to do their job. I don't care what a politician does in his or her personal life, I only care what they do when they're dealing with the issues of the day. All these people seem to be saying is that personal issues should be kept out of the public eye. That's not censorship that's just common decency.
I agree with several posters that not being able to publish people's personal information is not the same as 'strong censorship'.
... Yeah, like I'm going to get any recourse that way. Do I think privacy trumps free speech for ordinary citizens? Yes, absolutely. If you haven't made yourself a public figure then you deserve to be left alone even if people might not like how you make your living or who you are married to.
There has been a misuse of this kind of thing. Publishing someone's name and phone number with the almost certain knowledge that this will enable a bunch of nut cases to make threatening phone calls is nothing short of malicious. The free expression of ideas is not the same as facilitating hate crimes. Of course, if you publish my name and phone number and address and somebody throws a firebomb through my window maybe I can sue you
1. does the "slashdot party line" support the publishing of personal information on politically active websites? the addresses of judges involved in cases concerning controversial social issues?
probably not
2. does the "slashdot party line" support the censorship of blogs?
definitely not
but y'all should work out what the overlap is between question #1 and question #2 before everyone here starts crying "the sky is falling!" because there is concern for freedom of expression, and concern for privacy rights, and sometimes they overlap
then there is this sort of hypersensitive kneejerk "censorship bad!" on issues that, according to question #1, the "slashdot party line" would in fact be all for censorship
imagine that
because it really isn't censorship according to all of the censorship issues we are really concerned with... it's censorship in the broadest definition of the term, encompassing a form of "censorship" that most here would support
so please, less kneejerk, more thought
or otherwise you erode the fight against those who would censor you and violate your privacy in ways that are genuinely evil, because you are hypersensitively kneejerk about issues without examining what is really being talked about
it's propaganda at work: presenting a half-truth, a fact out of context... because, indeed, we are talking about "censoring blogs"
insert kneejerk reaction: "censorship baaaaad!"
no, it's not bad, if you examine what is really being censored: publishing the addresses of judges, for example... then you would agree with the censorship in question in the end, because what is really being censored is a violation of privacy
so when slashdot, or zdnet presents an issue in a propagandistic way, we all lose, because privacy rights and censorship are serious issues, and you water down the discussion on a serious issue and only make yourself look like a fool, and so you lose more important fights for the sake of kneejerk propaganda instead of prudent thought
so please, slashot crowd, this is a serious fight, don't waste your energies in braindead kneejerk reaction
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Products are not bound by NDAs. People are. There is no legal problem with publishing trade secrets at all, nor should there be.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
The real killer is that despite the blog host being a big name, they didn't give a shit.
That really must have sucked for you, but why should they care? Ex-girlfriends badmouthing ex-boyfriends (and vice-versa) has been going on for years, and how are they supposed to know whether it's true or not?
But without any official, international regulation of this area of the Internet, the damage was done all the same,
So you want the government to stop this? You're not willing to pay hundreds of $$$ to stop this, but you want the government to spend hundreds of $$$ to investigate this? Or do you want every ex-girlfriend who was viciously abused to be silenced by the government, just because some of them lie?
Would it have been that much harder to say "Survey Shows American Oppose Online Publication of Private Information?" 'Cause that's all the survey really showed.
Here's a poll: is unbiased reporting of news better or worse than biased reporting of news?
...but is it art?
The solution is to publish the exact wording of the actual questions. (also might be good to publish the exact method of choosing the pool of questionees)
But the exact wording of the questions would, to a certain degree, "open-source" opinion polling.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
http://www.firstamendmentcenter.org/f irstamendmentcenter.org/analysis.aspx? id=13575
http://www.
The First Amendment Center regularly polls Americans about their feelings about the First Amendment - and as the second URL, an assessment of the 2004 report reveals, it's an exercise that reveals that as a population we are ambivalent and conflicted about the freedom of speech, often asserting contradictory opinions about related topics. I think this is an example of the same issue. We overwhelmingly support the First Amendment in principle... but when it gets to the specifics we get sketchy. And I can sort of understand this: when asked about freedom of speech we think about general principles, abstractions. When asked about something like posting personal information on the internet we imagine personal scenarios: our own information or the information of our loved ones being made public (of course we're not talking about information that is otherwise truly private, but the question focuses attention on a specific scenario), bad things happening as a result. It's not surprising we're conflicted.
It Is the Nature of Information to Transgress Artificial Boundaries
I think when he says that many studies should be lumped together I believe that it's with the assumption that each study would ask a the question in a slightly different manner. I don't believe him to mean that we should take 10 polls asking "Should all children have food" and pool the results. More likely we would take 5 polls that ask:
Should all children have food?
Should tax money go to feeding impoverished children?
Should welfare be funded through taxes on luxury goods?
Should children be fed even at the cost of higher taxes?
Is it possible to feed children without raising taxes?
Lump those questions together and you may get a more accurate view point of how people feel about a particular subject.
Next thing you know, folks on Slashdot will be posting comments without even reading the articles!
Bad comparison. As in a public record style disclosure of information, your records are lost in a sea of anonymity when thrown in with everyone elses info. When it's on display on a bloggers site, it's more than likely outing you specifically. John so and so is an adulter, blah blah blah, here is is home address:
There are ALREADY laws against criminal harassment, threats, and other crimes. Additionally, there are always civil options for suing over any damages you wish to claim. You only need to convince the court to agree with your case.
The medium for these crimes ought make no difference. The logical processing of electrons should NOT be a "special case".
I suggest you read Slashdot
I want to know what Hostway's demographic was on this survey. 2,500 people is not enough to be an adequate sample of Americans. There are currently 295,877,596 Americans according to POPclocks. A sample of 2,500 people, some of whom might not even be Americans, is about .000084494% of the American population.
Take this "survey" with a grain of salt, but put on your rain boots, it's going to be a FUDdy day for the media.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
You weren't modded down for posting "private information." You were modded down because the way you provided the information implied that people should harass the site operator.
"Hey everyone! Mr. Smith at (555)555-6547 is a complete ass."
"Hey everyone! Jon Doe at (555)555-4578 Lane is a registered sex offender."
Are you going to call up Mr. Smith and ask him for a cup of sugar? Do you plan on asking Jon Doe to baby sit? Do you expect to have any kind of meaningful dialog with these people?
"Is it true you're a sex offender?" "Yes."
There is no use for that information other than to bug those people.
----------------
This comment re-posted for your viewing pleasure. Now with 60% more carrage returns!
Sorry, I don't believe that any whiny moron with a web page is automatically God, and can do whatever he damn pleases to other people. Privacy _is_ an issue even if you're a "blogger".
And sometimes it's just that: privacy. I don't care about "slippery slope" theories, you just have no business giving away someone else's data. I'll worry about "freedom of speech" issues when it's about actually censoring political opinions, which is really all that that ammendment was supposed to protect. Bullying your boss or your ex-girlfriend via publishing their life on the web, is one "freedom of speech" I'll be quite happy to do without.
And it's not even just about bloggers.
Companies too _are_ bound by some privacy laws, and doubly so in Europe. If anyone published my details, even in a newspaper or company brochure or as "customer of the month" on their games e-commerce site, they could get their pants sued off. That data is, simply put, mine not theirs in the first place. If they published children's addresses and schedule to go to school, I _think_ they may even run into some criminal laws.
But even in the USA, there are already laws covering that kind of thing. E.g., a newspaper can't publish your medical record.
So I see nothing wrong with asking that "bloggers" are bound by the same rules. Again, no, just being able to type a whine in a text box does _not_ make you god, does _not_ put you above privacy or common courtesy rules, and sure as hell does _not_ give you carte blance to bully other people ("here's my boss's home address and phone number. He's a fucking moron. Do something to inconvenience him.")
You're just a guy with a web page, nothing more. You're not above the law. And if something annoys enough people, the law gets changed to reflect that. Even if it involves bringing you down from the imaginary pedestal of blogger godhood. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
No, sorry, I think people are perfectly qualified to understand that they don't want their private data on the web. They don't have to even know what a blog is. They don't want you publishing _their_ data. Period.
Seems to me that they're perfectly competent to decide that.
Incidentally, though, you do also illustrate another problem with blogs, and why it _isn't_ some Earth-changing revolution. Why it's still just a bunch of whiny nerds, too busy patting each other on the back, to actually cause any social or political change.
See, it's just this kind of self-centered ivory-tower attitutde. Re-read what you just wrote. Basically it's "bah, I'm the important one. You don't matter. If you dare disaggree with me, then your opinion is worthless and you're a bunch of incompetent morons. Heck, you don't even really _have_ an opinion."
That kind of self-centeredness doesn't win many supporters, much less move the masses or challenge the establishment.
Additionally, most of the time it's not just that bloggers can't carry the message across, it's that they don't even _have_ a message anyone else gives a damn about. It's the self-centering again. Their world revolves so much around themselves, that their only issues are their _own_ problems.
See the whole thread here, or again, what you wrote yourself. The whole focus is "how dare those sheep want to censor _us_?" Ever stopped to wonder _why_ those people answered that way? What is the problem _they_ see? What public benefit could cyber-bullying someone in a blog possibly have? I.e. _why_ on Earth would someone in their right mind answer "nah, I really want every socially-inept whiner to publish my address and telephone number on the web"?
And I mean really trying to see the others' point of view, not hand waving and piss poor excuses like "waah, someone made them answer that way". Might be a new experience.
There's a lesson in there: the way politics works is "vote for me, and I'll do something for _you_." _Noone_ won or swayed an election yet with a message like "I'm the important one, and you're a bunch of sheep I don't care about."
The way it works is "I care about _your_ problems". It's not "I'm the important one here.
You should come solve _my_ problems."
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Go America, if we don't understand it, let our government regulate and control it for us, because they can do no wrong. They'll do what is right for us, yee haw!
Bunch of fucking sheep in this country.
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Actually, the fear for most of us aren't some crazed serial killer coming to our house (although not knowing the address help). The number one problem with having personal info on the web is the chance that identity thief might use them to social engineer others to impersonate you. Also, the reason no one slaps a restraining order on the paparazzi is because their target have higher libel (forgot the correct term), which means that their targets are famous, so they should already have the reputation and mean to dispel any rumor unlike us insignificant, poor peasants.
For 1, I don't believe bloggers should have ANY need to publish personal info (other then stating names and such) or normal, private citizens (which would exclude the likes of politicians and celebrities).
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
What exactly is wrong with believing that personal information like home addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses etc should not be publically published? that's not censorship at all. Censorship is when one is forbidden to publish his/her opinion on a subject.
Web logs are a nice 'invention' for communicating ideas, opinions etc, but since the pen is mightier than the sword, blog content must be 'politically correct' in the sense that it does not harm others. If revelations about scandals are to be published in weblogs, they better be accompanied with evidence, otherwise it is yellow journalism.
I know it's a little late and so this will probably not get much attention, but having read through the list of comments I'm surprised not to have seen more about how easily accessible home addresses and phone numbers already are.
You've got the phone book, sure, but remember you've also got Google out there. Type in someone's full name and city (sometimes city isn't even needed) and pop! there is their address, and, unless it's unlisted, their phone number.
Now, one can play the game, saying that posting information like that on a blog somewhere is a lot more like pointing a finger directly at the person in question, highlighting their information, but to me the difference is slight, if tenable at all. All you need is someone's name to get an address out of Google, and it is still legal for bloggers to post a name.
Besides (and I have seen this posted above), personal addresses and phone numbers (unless specifically requested) are not private information at all. So we're talking about intent here. The intent to misuse this information.
The focus is supposedly on people's ideas of censorship, in whatever form you want to take it, but what we're really talking about here is discrimination.
I don't really want my information highlighted on the internet, public or private as it might be. But I want even less to discriminate against those who are exercising a perfectly legal right to publish public information. *That* is where the slippery slope begins, and we don't want to go down that road.
Oh wait... we already are.
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
This is how the Propaganda Machine works. The media tell you what you should think, then they conduct polls using questions based on false premises with answer sets designed to exclude dissenting opinions.
Goebbels would be so proud.
Have you stopped hitting you're mother yet?slashdot broke my sig
Lies, damn lies and statistics. Nothing in the article supports the conclusions drawn in the squib, and the survey might not even support the statements in the article.
Surveys ask particular questions, and when properly conducted under certain assumptions, can yield statistical inferences about the behavior of a defined universe with respect to the questions asked. Done properly, they can offer remarkably good insight about a population at large.
Strike any of the assumptions, however, they are meaningless numbers, reflecting only a census of the narrow population that was actually polled, permitting no meaningful inferences about larger populations.
But in any case, even where the survey is properly conducted and permits inferences about the attitude of a broader population, the results of the survey are only the inferences concerning the QUESTIONS THE SURVEY ASKED.
And even so, it is as important to consider questions not asked and to measure the impact of the question on the sample. Are there adequate controls.
Here, the article suggests that persons were asked, among others, whether bloggers should be permitted to publish personal information. Is that a question about privacy law or about blogs? Would the same persons, asked the same question answer the same or differently if the medium was a home newsletter, network news or a newspaper? Perhaps the censorship sought here is merely the publication of personal information regardless of medium. Would it matter if the material were itself newsworthy?
Absent scientific control questions, we'll never know. In any case, I saw nothing to suggest that a poll of consumers of a particular service using the questions asked without more would support the far-flung suggestion in the headline, the squib or een the article itself.
I must disagree with your arguments. You speak from the position of enlightened hopefullness - you hope anonymous bureaucrats won't take things too far, since you would not yourself (you feel). This is the sort of cowed, wishful thinking that got us the Department of Homeland Security.
This is, at heart, a question of scale. In how many cases is the release of "private" information by bloggers 1) possible, 2) not remediable under existing laws? Answer: damn little. Potential for rediculous escalation and abuse of power? Certain.
Let consider some examples: some disgruntled employee goes and whines in his blog about his boss, and publishes his home address on the page, with the implication that someone should go and egg the boss's house. Ok. How many people will seriously do that just because they read that on the web? Maybe a few - but they would be looking for trouble in any event, and this is simply a different focal point. Vandalism is an offence. If they get caught, there will be some legal trouble, and the boss has to garden hose his house for a bit. Case settled.
Another, more serious case: someone with access to medical records finds info on a person they don't like and publish it. Now it's on the web, i.e. for everyone to see. This is serious. Serious enough that the offended person can have recourse to full strength of laws about privacy and god knows what else (IANAL). The person is sued, fired from his condifential job, and probably become unemployable. Troubling for the victim - yes. But if they take action within the civil, personal scope, ultimately self-correcting. It's true that the person who would think of violating their professional ethics to this extent is already highly unbalanced, should not have been employed there, and the Internet facilitates (but by no means is the sole cause/avenue) for such behaviour. However, that's the reality of the changing world - more info available nearly-instantly to everyone.
Now your solution. "'checked' censorship". Checked by whom?! "Who watches the watchers" isn't a new question - it's as old as sin. The Romans even knew about it. As you have pointed out, the censorship is difficult. Read: unenforceable. How in the world are you going to do this: hire more federal employees to check every online forum and post? Have the Department of Online Blogging? Only blogs hosted by the Feds are legal? Signing up to their account? What are you talking about? This is about as rational as Argentina requiring IP records for 10 years on all connections. It's beyond delusional.
The most disturbing thing is that people are in favor of government supervision in things that they don't even know about. This is "Big Daddy White Father Knows Best" attitude at it's finest. This is what the pioneer descendants of Lewis and Clark have turned into? A country of savage surviving badasses that hacked and slashed their way across the country, worked, sweated and died as rugged individualists, *this* is what they've become? A people in favor of having some pencil-neck bureaucrat in a Washington Office Ok-ing the publication of even the garbage that they post online? What next? The Office of Bathroom Permission? Yes, Citizen 8849393, you may visit the bathroom now. Citizen 4921993 - you have made 3 unauthorized bathroom visits in the last 2 days. How about you explain that behavior?
Oh my country! What have you done to yourself!