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?
Personally, I'm in favor of my home address being posted on the Internet. These results are shocking.
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?
Ah yes, nothing like an austrailian news organization (the writer not ZDNet), quoting a survey by some webhost (alot of people have probably never heard of) of 2500 people to tell what the 292 million Americans favor.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
"It's like they're trying to trap you: 'Have you ever tried sugar, or cocaine?'" -Mitch Hedberg
Digital Sailor
Many Merkins don't know what bloggers are, but feel that they should have the same rights as mainstream journos. Many 'Merkins are also less likely to trust bloggers than other journos.
What's the problem? Why am I wasting time writing and thinking about it?
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.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
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.
The article title is very misleading - from the summary:
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.
Banning people from publishing the personal details of others is perfectly fair. This is nothing to do with 'unsuitable' content. While the article goes into more detail this appears to be more about privacy than regular censorship based on mature content. This just appears to be slashdot trying to kick off a load of censorship arguments and get more ad hits.
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.
The problem isn't me reading a blog entry about me. I already know where I live, what my ID numbers are, etc. etc. The problem is that I can't stop somebody else reading that.
This issue is bigger than just personal info valuable to strangers, too. I've had a bitter ex-g/f post intimate personal e-mails on her blog from the time we were going out, and with a large dose of editing, taking out of context, and outright lies thrown in for good measure. She knew damn well that several close friends of mine also read that blog, and would think less of me after reading what she wrote (or her adapted version of what I had once written).
The real killer is that despite the blog host being a big name, they didn't give a shit. In fact, after the ex made the post "private" (which didn't stop our common friends from reading it) when I wrote to her and asked her to remove the comments, the LJ admins then claimed (in response to my formal complaint) that they couldn't access that area of the database, and therefore couldn't do anything about the post. All of which helped me and my relationships with some formerly close friends not at all.
So, what am I supposed to do? I live in the UK, so I'm hardly going to pay hundreds of $$$ to hire a US attorney and pursue a defamation suit against my ex in the US just to get LJ to take the post down, am I? But without any official, international regulation of this area of the Internet, the damage was done all the same, and it hurt a lot more than posting any credit card number would have.
Freedom of speech is a valuable thing, but it is not the only valuable thing, and it is far too powerful to be an absolute.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Most Americans are unaware of how much of their information is public. You address and phone number are public information and most efforts you can try do not prevent it from being accesiable to the public. The problem is most Americans think that their information is private, it isn't. You want to start a flamewar on /. Just do a whois on someone's website and post it in a /. story. Dont believe me I did it here
The replies show how other respond to items like this. This is not about bloggers rights or whether or not they are journalists. They are about the fact that most Americans continue to revel in their ignorance about what they think is their right to privacy.
This isn't about unsuitable content or privacy, it's a poll with questions designed to stir up trouble. Addresses are public information. You may not like someone posting your address on their blog, but you can't stop them, or anyone else, from figuring out what your public address is. If it's information that is private, sure this is an issue of privacy, but that's not what the article says, it says "home addresses", starting us off right away with the main bit of personal info being totally public.
The problems occur when you have sites/blogs that are encouraging others to commit violence/etc. against the people they're posting about, but current laws cover this. I remember an anti-abortion website getting in trouble because the courts found they were actively encouraging people to kill the doctors they provided info about on their site.
The solution to bad polls like this is easy. If the pollers refuse to ask more straight forward questions, post their home addresses on your blog.
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?!
If you grab all the studies in the area and look at them in search of truth, all you are really doing is rewarding consensus. If all studies were your golf ball example, then looking at ten of them with that phrasing would be *less* helpful than one. As soon as this becomes the common way to do this, the guys wanting to raise golf ball taxes will simply commission more studies (months in advance, unpublicized) and they'll all come out over the course of two years, gradually swaying public opinion.
You would be a fool to believe that this is not occurring constantly.
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
If you don't believe this, go to your local courthouse - who has purchased what property and how much they paid for it is a public record and anybody can access it.
"other personal information", depending on what that covers, may be worth protecting.
Personally, I would suggest a privacy amendment to the constitution. Just take a national referendum and protect what the majority wants protected. Oh, and no special provisions for corporations, politicians, law enforcement, or the wealthy - everyone gets treated equally.
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:
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.
This particular thing has nothing to do with media censorship, freedom of speech, etc. etc. It is about data protection.
In the UK we have had a Data Protection Act for eleven years, and it has done much more for the rights of the private individual than it ever did for the government/spies/corporations.
The gist of it is this. If you give personal information to someone, they may only use it for the purposes you permitted them to, and after those purposes are complete, you must destroy the information. Additionally, if someone is collecting information about you and it is impossible for you to consent, they must warn you about it beforehand, and you may ask them at any time for a copy.
Here are some of the rights the DPA entitles me to:
I believe that this law also applies to the rest of the EU now, but I don't believe there's anything like this in North America yet.
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.
So what these statistics really say is that somewhere around 80% of Americans are idiots.
I don't really think that the 20% of Americans who are not idiots or the rest of the world will be too surprised.
MMMMmmmmm. Government by the majority. Tasty.
Deleted
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!