Slashdot Mirror
Journalists Can't Hide News From the Internet
Hugh Pickens writes "Robert Niles at the Online Journalism Review discusses the issues surrounding the recent tragedy involving a MySpace user. A newspaper reporting on the story didn't name the woman, citing concerns for her teen daughter. Bloggers went nuts, and soon uncovered the woman's personal information. Niles writes: 'The lessons for journalists? First, we can't restrict access to information anymore. The crowd will work together to find whatever we withhold ... Second, I wonder if that the decision to withhold the other mother's name didn't help enflame the audience, by frustrating it and provoking it to do the work of discovering her identity.'"
Whether this was a real story or not, that woman did no one any harm; if she did Megan any harm, that's for law enforcement to deal with, not the rest of us.
By digging up her personal information - for which no one had any real, legitimate use - much less posting it online - these bloggers have negligently put this entire family's safety at serious risk.
Yes, information wants to be free blah blah blah - wait until the media puts the unwanted spotlight on you for some minor b.s. (that most of us don't even care to read about) and some Jezebel-esque nutball digs up your personal information - including where you live - and puts it out there for any unbalanced, easily enraged headcase to come dot your forehead with a 9mm shell. Or maybe they'll stalk and kidnap your kid instead.
These bloggers ought to have their information put out there by law enforcement - as convicted criminals. Aiding and abetting, for starters, then implied terroristic threats.
Here's the kicker, folks: when you put up the personal information of one person in the house, you put everyone ELSE there, at risk. Even their neighbors.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
There should be no sympathy for those who pose as fictitious characters only to create malice and havoc in others lives, whether it's online or in real life. I'm unsure if this woman will have charges brought upon her, but it wouldn't be unreasonable, imo. The simple fact she even did this shows that she's not even mature enough to have kids. Unfortunately, she'll probably plead "insanity" and get away with it.
Never monkey with another monkey's monkey.
...that in a big enough group, there'll always be some asshats to publish anything. Even if you can't stop them, why help them?
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
And hiding information that can be found just makes people want to discover it. What right does another person have to this information that I don't? I doubt people were angry, just curious.
What about "outing" alleged criminals? Long before a person is convicted of cleared of robbery/rape/murder/etc. charges, their name and picture (from which the rest of their personal information can be easily found) are in the public eye for all to see and judge, whether they are in any way guilty or not. A public record is as good as a criminal one.
IMO all arrest records should be sealed until a conviction is reached, and should be erased and destroyed upon acquittal.
When someone posts your address online over an alleged crime or slight, and you're the one whose tires are slashed or who has to confront a crazed gunman breaking down your door, you'll understand.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Outing alleged criminals is downright crazy. I've had to rethink my views on outing spammers because of that.
You're right, of course - arrest records should be sealed until a verdict is reached, and then destroyed upon acquittal. I wonder what religious rightist or corporate statist argument that runs up against?
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
I find very little credulity in the "You can't hide the truth from us" self-righteousness espoused by many of the bloggers involved in this. They merely saw what they could gain from the situation, not what was ethically or morally right.
Cringeworthy. But sadly, amongst many niceties, what I've come to expect from the "blogosphere" (cringeworthy name, in itself). Self-righteous vitriol and hyperbole seem far too common. "We're the new journalists, your ways are outdated." Bleh. In the rush to try to be the next big thing, seems "stopping and thinking" is an impediment to "first to publish/be pinged/trackbacked/make the Top 100 on Technorati/get on as many blogrolls as possible".
Don't worry, in 10 years time when the blogging generation is attempting to climb the ladder, we will have untold piles of dirt on them from their emo highschool years.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Here's a more novel idea... Don't even print the things that don't need to be printed. Anytime Myspace in particular or the Internet in general can be connected to a crime || suicide || nuclear war the press goes nuts with the idea. There is no story here other than a girl committed suicide, like hundreds of other troubled teens. Yes, it's a horrible phenomenon, but it's no story in itself. The journalist could have written about the suicide phenomenon (which goes back as far as history does) but that's not interesting. Myspace-assisted suicide apparently is.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
That is a serious depressing story. Playing with someone like that is awful. I feel the fact the Drews were not going to be punished in any way to be sort of unjust but I'm sort of uncertain of this mob mentality is really how to go about it. Sure public shamming and the economic and social ruin of their lives seems about right but what happens when someone takes it a step further? It's so mixed up.
"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."
What a brilliant idea -- let's give the police the power to arrest people, throw them into jail pending trial, and not tell anybody.
The justice system needs transparency in a free and democratic society. What you're proposing has been done by all of the most oppressive regeimes in history as a way of making people "disappear". And while publishing an innocent persons arrest in a public manner may damage their public image, it's also a way to ensure that said person gets the best possible opportunity to defend themselves within the community. People who are secretly jailed never do.
Yaz.
Identities are concealed, as in this case, to protect the accused from community backlash. Folks often forget that the accused have rights as well. Forgeting to protect those rights, and encouraging a community backlash before they've had their day in court... Well that's headed back to bad old days of lynching and vigilante justice.
What disturbs me the most isn't that there are random assholes on MySpace (or the Internet, for that matter) taunting people (I don't like it, but assume this -- 30 milliseconds on any FPS multiplayer server desensitizes you to that). Nor that a girl committed suicide (which is sad). Nor is it that some wacko blogger decided to post public information in an act of vigilante blog-justice (which is indeed very strange and unsettling). It's the implications of the comments on the jezebel blog. The comments on the other linked sites in the article are similar. It is clear these people (do they represent a typical American cross section?), have this attitude like: "if its on the internet it must be true exactly how it is printed. I want blood NOW!" No critical thinking. No common sense. No reality testing. Just pure reactionary tooth-and-claw emotion. It is the worst sort of groupthink one can imagine (wait, sounds a little like another popular internet forum I know about...oh, nevermind). A couple examples. One blogger writes "I'm not a vengeful person when it comes to my own life, so it always surprises me that my first instinct when I hear of these things happening to others is to plot murder." Oh really? Good to know. How about "If there was a loving God, so many people would be sterile. The parents playing 'Josh' [the fake MySpace account] are a good example." It actually makes slashdot seem like a pretty reasonable, organized, dare I say, civil place. Its a mad, mad, mad, mad world.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Personally, I suspect no charges were filed because of the fact most of the shenanigans were online only, and poorly understood by the officials involved. That's only speculation on my part, though.
My my, you sure seem eager to convict and sentence this woman, and not just the woman but her entire family.
Odd that if the RIAA wants to publish the names of people downloading, naming and shaming, people are against it, but in this case naming and shaming is a good thing. Why not bring out the tar and feathers. Hell why even bother with police at all, I got a rope right here and that tree looks sturdy enough.
This woman is innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. Mob mentality is a serious issue, say this womans daughter now commits suicide, and come after YOU. Do you want all your personal info out there, to be judged by the mob?
The reason the police and the press don't always publish everything is bloody simple.
First off, it is to keep a bad situation from becoming even worse.
But even more important, it is to keep information from becoming common knowledge to aid the investigation. The less details of the case are known to the general public the more likely a suspect can be pinned down on having knowledge they couldn't have unless they were involved.
By publishing for instance what was said right before the suicide, the woman in question can no longer be indentified as the person who sent it if she shows knowledge of what had been said. Before she could only have known what was in the messages if she had seen them, when they were sent. Now, she can just claim she read it somewhere.
But the most important thing here is, innocent until proven guilty. It is frightening how soon this is forgotten on slashdot just because this is a story about bloggers. IF a blogger was similarly convicted by the mob slashdot would be in a uproar.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Not for the details involved but for the slashdot reaction. a lot seem to be in support of the naming and shaming.
That is nice, would they be just as supportive when the RIAA deciced to publish their names for illegal filesharing and they get expelled from their schools, told to leave their jobs, asked to resign from their clubs?
There is a reason we put the law into the hands of the legal system and have deciced that lynchings are wrong. The simple problem is that of where does it end.
Say that this woman's daughter now commits suicide, is it then right for her family to publish the bloggers personal details? Publicly try them on the internet?
Innocent until proven guilty, presumption of innocence, trial by jury. My how quickly these ideals seem to be forgotten when blogging is involved. Note that when it is the other way around and some blogger gets exposed "slashdot" has shown an almost fanatical support for the sancitiy of privacy.
A few months ago slashdot had a story about internet driven vigilantism in South-Korea where this kind of naming and shaming is claimed to be far more common, the odd thing was that then the general attitude seemed to be that this was an extremely bad idea.
So how come that some slashdotters now support it? Is it the magic of the word blog? The idea that the MAN was outwitted, freedom by all means and damn the consequences?
Should the dutch teens who stole items from an online game be named and shamed? Should the blogger who published this info have every part of his private life put on the web for all to see?
Since this is a suicide where the whole community failed, why aren't they all being named and shamed. Why not print a list of all the people involved, everyone that could have talked to the girl, made friends with her, and publish them under the headline, "where were you!".
Some people seem to think that blogs are a magical something, they are not. They used to exist before, they were called pamphlets and people with enough motivation would write them and print and distribute them and say in them what they wanted in the name of "The truth".
They were back then the perfect tool to incite the mob. It is on paper, therefore it must be true, lets lynch them.
A few years ago in england a woman's house was attacked because the mob thought she was a pedofile. The evidence was clear as day, she had a sign on her door that said so "Pediatrician".
Consider this, if this woman is guilty of the suicide, then is any suicide that follows the publishing by the blogger the guilt of the blogger? What if the blogger is outed and kills himself? Where does it end?
The community taking the law in their own hand, it sounds tempting and sometimes seems to be the only solution but it never works. The law often fails us, but we should then change the law, not simply ignore it.
But think of this, do you really want there to be law that puts people to blaim if they said the wrong thing to a person who commits suicide? Better not mod me down, it might make me commit suicide.
Should society decide who needs to be punished? I would dearly love to name and shame every drunk driver out there, everyone who ever hurt someone in an "accident" that could easily have been avoided.
Before you support naming and shaming, ask yourselve wether someone else might not have you on their list.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That law enforcement didn't do anything is no excuse for vigilantism. If law enforcement doesn't do their job, you protest about law enforcement, not about someone you suspect of having done something wrong.
The US government puts people at risk all the time by publishing the names and addresses of people deemed to be "sex offenders" (I use this term lightly for the US, because of all the FUD and extremist politics).
Ahh... The old "someone else does it too" defense. I suppose this means you think it's ok to murder too, since some states have the death penalty.
Yes crowds can be dangerous. People can be dangerous, but keeping something that obviously has a large public interest a secret is wrong (and unrealistic). Sometimes you just got to let the chips fall where they may and find out what type of society we live in.
Lynch mobs rarely do research. There's plenty of examples where media has been directly responsible in causing attacks on people by publishing names and addresses or pictures which people could have easily found for themselves, but the kind of people who go out and do that kind of crap are not usually the same kind of people that put in the effort to find out their identities.
There IS a huge difference between making information available and making it easily accessible or pushing it in peoples faces.
Personally I don't want a society where people do the equivalent of shaking a red cloth in front of a bull regularly in the name of "public interest" - it's at best tasteless, and at worst dangerous. I strongly believe that anyone doing this should be equally responsible for any illegal act carried out as a result - hopefully that would be a deterrent.
There's a large difference between the name being possible to find by going to the right places, and having it plastered all over the place. What is the purpose? The only purpose I can see of posting their identity is that people hope that "someone" is going to do something with that information.
That's at best disgusting and makes people who does it scum in my eyes.
If law enforcement isn't doing their job, then you protest against law enforcement, you don't take enforcement into your own hands.
Good for the parents in at least taken this public, if there is one redeeming factor out of all of this.
The fact is, there is no FUZZY issue of guilt here - the fucking shit is clear as crystal - these adults were abusive towards a 13 yr old child w/ severe mental problems.
He was not proposing that the police "not tell anybody" -- only that the decision to release the information about an arrest be up to the accused at least as long as the accused had not been found guilty.
The NCIC, as just one example, is full of partial records that indicate arrest and even indictment but not acquittal.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
Explain to me where the crime is.
Because that glove fits the other way around too. If someone doesn't break the law but "wrongs" you somehow, just go and blow the horn until everyone and their dog talks about it and cries bloody murder, so the police has to dig up something to create some trial.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
It's not an "either/or" situation. We aren't choosing between complete transparency vs. no transparency whatsoever.
The goal is a fair and structured hearing, and punishment or acquittal based on the laws, decided by a jury & judge as impartial as possible.
With no transparency, the police can ignore the laws, and you might never see a jury at all.
With complete transparency, any "interesting" crime will be first judged by the public, based on third and fourth-hand information with no legal repercussions for errors (it's not *perjury* when the local rag prints gossip and rumors that are dead wrong), and the jury will be tainted by exposure to this mess, and the accused will be punished by the public even if acquitted by the legal system.
Think the public has no real power to exact punishment? You don't even need vigilante gunmen, though that can happen. No laws need be broken, though they might be. But "the public" includes your boss (soon-to-be former boss?), your neighbors (and their kids), the checkout person at the grocery store, your mailman, the guys at the bar, the technician from the phone company, the plumber, the teenagers at the mall, the pizza delivery guy, everyone. If your face is all over the web, if your home address and home phone are all over the web... well, first of all, they'll be all over the web for the rest of your life, because this stuff doesn't go away. Secondly, most people won't even say anything (they'll just stare after you as you leave), but you come into contact with hundreds of people... some of them will probably do something. Some people will actively seek you out to punish you, because vigilante justice is awfully tempting... I'll bet that's already happening with this family.
With the "power of the internet", now they don't just need to worry about getting snubbed by the people on their street. They have to worry what percentage of the, say, 2 million people who've seen their address and phone number will actively contact them. 0.01 percent? Mom, there's 200 people at the door. They want to talk to you and dad. Are my numbers too low?
So yeah, we need a balance.
This story is horrible and sad, and I want everyone to read it and realize that the online world is real, and in some ways it's more dangerous than the offline world. You can do things you'd never be cruel enough to do to someone's face, and cruelty has real consequences.
But I don't want to know where this family lives.
A number of Wikipedia users were "outed" by the website Perverted Justice (PEEJ). Not one of the users was what they said it was, and it named a few users (including myself) as supporters of child molesters. Eventually, PEEJ retracted the statements, but only very reluctantly.
The problems here are that:
a. What happens when the bloggers get it wrong? Let's say they accidentally type in the neighbour's address. Some poor bastard who had nothing do with the issue gets targeted.
b. The bloggers are by and large anonymous also. It's sheer hypocrisy for them to hide behind a blog pseudonym and publish someone else's details.
c. There is a reason we don't have martial law. Vigilantism is never a good move, mistakes are made, it bypasses due process and the right to a fair trial, innocent people are hurt. That's why Western democracies have the legal system they do: sure, it ain't perfect, but I'd rather us have a legal system that let uninformed bloggers pass judgement and mete out punishment.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Ummm... you want arrest records sealed?
"Officer, my husband never came home from work yesterday - I want to lodge a missing person's report"
"Sorry ma'am, he's not missing."
"Then where is he?"
"Sorry ma'am, I'm not allowed to say. That information has been restricted for privacy reasons. Oh, and it looks like he never got around to consenting that you could access his private information in regards to dealing with local law enforcement."
Yeah, like that would bloody work.
Arrests are public for the good of society - so that the government can't just lock people up and not admit to it. The individual's private need is outweighed by the need to see that the government isn't abusing its authority.
Oh, wait... you're American, right?
"Software is too expensive to build cheaply"
So ugly girls don't have value?
...that doesn't mean we should.
It's an old saying, but no less truthful for it. Modern technology makes communication, data storage and research into effectively free commodities. These things can be used for many constructive purposes, but a natural side effect is a loss of privacy.
The thing is, society has adopted privacy as an accepted cultural value for good reasons. Society also typically frowns on vigilantism for good reasons. No-one is perfect, and if you tend towards a system where there is some dirt to dig up on everyone and if you choose to share it then you can bring down disproportionate consequences on anyone you don't like, then no-one is ever safe from the screwed up people.
In a way, this is no different to any other criminal behaviour. You can't systematically prevent it, any more than you can systematically prevent someone from driving their car at reckless speeds and causing an accident, or from betraying the confidence of an ex-partner they no longer get on with to her friends or new partner, or from beating up a smaller kid in school when the teachers aren't looking. But these things are all the actions of someone deeply unpleasant, and society frowns on them, tries to prevent them as much as possible, and punishes them when it can.
What is different is simply that this whole context is new. A lot of people — particularly, it must be said, a lot of young people — are enjoying a kind of freedom and collective power that previous generations have not, but they don't yet understand the responsibility that comes with that freedom. Because it's so new, it's an alien concept to the adults responsible for teaching them, and mistakes are made. (There is an obvious parallel here with big businesses getting away with things because privacy laws haven't yet caught up.)
In time, I hope this will pass, and society will come to frown on invasion of privacy and sharing information without due respect in the same way that we frown on violence or blackmail today. But I'm afraid we're going to take a few years learning some hard lessons, and there are likely to be an unfortunately large number of relatively innocent victims along the way. As with any form of growing up, the road to maturity is sometimes a painful one. At least when you get there, you usually find others have walked the same path and can forgive youthful indiscretions.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Guilty of not being very nice, sure. Guilty of much criminal? I don't know, depends on what was really said and done. You can say a lot of mean and hurtful things without it being criminal at all, or at most a misdemeanor. She may have had severe mental problems, but were they publicly known? From the sound of it, even her mother didn't realize the seriousness of her condition. Were they being really mean to her or would she have gone equally off the cliff when her first boyfriend broke up? One thing is to pass moral judgement on them for the deception, but you also need to take a reality check on how much they truly contributed to her suicide. If all it took was a fake profile and someone she'd never met in real life, it sounds to me like she was ready to jump already. Or maybe I'm just a cynic because I had worse and got through. It's just that if I think of all the people in my class and how much some of them was hurt at times, we'd have several suicide victims at that rate. Yes, punish those that make other people's lives hell, but don't punish them for other people's inability to cope with normal live. I've seen some of both...
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
"If all it took was a fake profile and someone she'd never met in real life, it sounds to me like she was ready to jump already."
You make what they did seem pretty harmless, but this fake profile was broadcasting "Megan Meier is cruel to her friends, Megan Meier is a slut" and other such remarks not just to the little girl, but to all her friends too. Try to remember what being a teenager was like, when our worlds were as small as our high schools. Know that suffering from clinical depression makes such situations even worse. The kicker is that it was a parent of a friend of the girl that started all this, a full grown adult who should know better.
I'm not completely convinced if the neighbor should be charged with anything. I don't think they should server prison time, but having to fork over some money to the family of the deceased girl sounds like a fair reparation to me. I do feel that the unmasking of the neighboring parent's identity and the resulting national public shame they will have to deal with is definitely karmic. After all, if it isn't illegal to send someone messages over the internet calling them a cruel person and a slut, then it shouldn't be illegal for someone to send someone messages over the phone, via mail, etc, calling them murderers, evil people, neglectful parents or a shame to all of humanity.