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!
Tie a rock to them and toss them in the water. If they float, they're a witch. If they sink, they're not a witch. Repeat as necessary.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
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....
and there is fuzziness about guilt here, the perpetrator is known and fixed
the local da was not going to press charges
with all the heat, they say now they are going to review the case
given that, the victim's parents decided to go public, against the advice of their lawyers, for exactly this effect: wide public knowledge and shaming of the perpetrator, and to warn people about what kind of mainpulations can go on
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
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.
More information from a less hysterical view (compared to the bloggers' accounts) is available at http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/11/17/internet.suicide.ap/index.html. There's also a video clip including an interview with Megan's parents.
This is a pretty messed up situation. The woman mentioned in the article summary is the mother of an ex-friend of Megan (the girl that committed suicide), and posed as a boy ("Josh") on MySpace trying to keep tabs on what Megan was saying about her daughter (Megan's ex-friend).
Whether the woman created the "Josh" account is not up for debate-- it's from the police report*. Likewise, whether she pretended to be interested in the 14-year-old girl is not debatable. What is debatable is whether she was the person logged in to the "Josh" account when the taunting messages were sent, especially given three people from her family posed as "Josh", and were complicit in the deceit. Complicating matters, Megan's mother said the Wrong Thing At The Wrong Time to Megan, by the mother's account, minutes before the suicide. (It's abundantly clear she will never forgive herself for this.)
As I said, it's pretty messed up. Were the mainstream media right in concealing the identity of the woman? I'm not so sure. It seems to me that too many times identities have been concealed, preventing true community backlash against perpetrators. It's clear the woman was at least partially culpable-- she didn't accidentally make the Josh character fall in love with Megan. On the other hand, the local community is already shunning the woman and her family, so is Internet Outrage really accomplishing any more?
* Unintentionally leaked by CNN, and transcribed by a blogger using frame capture.
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.
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
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.
If law enforcement isn't doing their job, then you protest against law enforcement, you don't take enforcement into your own hands.
how do you protest against law enforcement? Yhe whole purpose of this recent publicity was precisely to push law enforcement into action by stoking public outrage.
the world is not a court of law. "Innocent until proven guilty" is a legal standard, not a moral one. There is no question about this woman's actions, or her identity. There are no significant facts in dispute, only legal and moral culpability. And yes, individuals and communities do have the right to judge moral culpability for themselves, with or without your permission.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
We do not seem to have much of a problem with false arrests; the only problems I know of are the usual ones of the prosecution sometimes going "gung ho" (wanting to convict SOMEBODY no matter what, to save face) and occasional abuse of the "Police can put somebody in detention for 24 hour before pressing charges". Overall, it seems to work fine, and the hiding of identity from media publication seems to only be positive.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.
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.
My thinking is less focused on the idiot "adult" who did this scam as it is on her parents.
Megan did not survive long enough to reproduce. Fault? Blame Darwin or Megan's parents. Take your pick. Or, perhaps parents in general nowadays.
Let me explain. Megan had problems and felt bad about herself? Why? (actual question, not a setup) She was beautiful. Where were her parents? How in the fcuk could a beautiful girl like that grow up not believing, *knowing* she has value.
I tell you waht (sic), when I felt bad about myself going through puberty, and kids do, I was *corrected* by my parents. Corrected as in almost short of discipline in a way. I was corrected for not thinking. That was followed by a very understanding and thoughtful teaching by my parents. They did what they were supposed too do and taught me self respect, correct body image (with what I had to work with) with proportional value in what a pimple actually means in the grand scheme of things. What an adult should be thinking.
It is unfathomable to me that what someone said could bring a person to suicide. And, I blame Megan's parents. Megan, at 13, was on psychotic drugs? WTF!? Sure, the "adult" who perpetrated this scam needs psychiatric help but the suicide I put on her parents.
My son was only on loan to me. And I took my parenting job very seriously. It was the most important achievement I was tasked with as a human being. On a scale of 10 with parenting on top, even paying the mortgage falls in at about 2. Nothing comes before raising a child. At least for me. (Thank you Mom and Dad).
What I returned was a happy, well adjusted, contributing member of society. Someone who thankfully doesn't understand the need for plastic surgery. I guarantee there's nothing, not one thing you could say, even as a teenager, that would even bring him close to suicide. Knowing my son, I suspect you're more likely to get a polite and understanding "thank you" after rejecting him than any other response. He understands that rejection, in the long run, is a blessing. Why didn't Megan understand this? Their little snowflake is gone. And I blame them; they can blame Darwin and you can think whatever you want too. As far as I'm concerned, they fcuked up IM,NOH,O.
-[d]-
The essence of the publics' right to know is about public issues and the portion of private ones which would enable them to be better informed on the way that public policy should be formed or how to avoid somebody else's tragic mistake. Neither of those are served by finding the name of those that weren't already named in the article.
Its soft news journalism that reports on things which wouldn't be interesting had it been done by normal every day people.
In this case, I think that the bloggers in this case ought to feel really badly about having engaged in this sort of shenanigans. At this point, the woman had been reported to the sheriff's office, and there is a possible suit in the future. What they've done is managed to harm everybody involved in this that isn't already dead. Even then, I get the feeling that they would have pissed on her grave if they thought that could make a better story.