Third on the headlines today on TechMeme (perhaps the leading tech news aggregator) is this headline: “An Apology To Our Readers,” a heart-felt piece from TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington disclosing that a TechCrunch intern had, on at least two occasions, demanded computers from start-ups as compensation for writing favorable blog posts about them on the highly influential site. The intern was immediately suspended and, when the allegation was confirmed, terminated. Arrington made no excuses for Daniel Brusilovsky on account of his age (he’s under 18). You can read Daniel’s response here.
If this incident demonstrates anything, it’s just how essential it is for a site like TechCrunch to, as Arrington promised his readers in closing, “maintain complete transparency with you on how we operate, even when it isn’t such an easy thing to do.” Arrington went so far as to have “deleted all content created by this person on our blogs”—indeed, “every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network,” which presumably includes comments.
One might take from this the lesson that the press, as it evolves from the newspaper model towards something blog-ier but still hard to pin down precisely, can police itself pretty darn well. Alas, the FTC has taken a much dimmer view of the ability of reputational incentives to discipline the influence that might be exerted by “blogola” payments (cash or in-kind) on editorial discretion and journalistic creation. Continue reading →
Another great column by the Wall Street Journal’s Gordon Crovitz, who is quickly becoming my favorite tech policy columnist. In today’s column, “Bloggers Mugged by Regulators,” he comments on the FTC’s new disclosure rules for bloggers, which I discussed here over the weekend. Crovitz focuses on the enforcement challenges associated with the new rules and also argues that self-regulation should be given a chance to work:
There should be more disclosure, but the Web is different from earlier media in ways that make government regulation less relevant and practical. The Web has its own self-regulatory mechanisms. Failing to disclose interests sullies one’s reputation online, and reputation harm travels faster and lasts longer than it did before the Web.
There’s also greater need for caveat emptor online, because there is no practical way that any government agency can monitor the world’s bloggers and posters. There will always be people who post comments about products and services that are self-serving in one way or another, at least by someone’s definition. […]
Instead of trying to extend analog-era regulations onto the Web, the FTC should encourage readers to be vigilant about assessing for themselves the independence of sources online. At least we now know the biggest fraudulent claim so far on the Web: It’s been committed by regulators claiming there can be a government stamp of approval on everything anyone posts anywhere on the Web.
Amen brother.
Like James Gattuso, I have a lot of questions about the Federal Trade Commission’s new “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising,” especially as they apply to bloggers. (And over at Silicon Angle, Mark ‘Rizzn’ Hopkins has been doing a great job keeping tabs on the many questions and hypothetical situations that others have been posing about the new rules). But the one thing I just can’t wrap my head around is how the FTC plans to enforce these rules against those speakers or media outlets who have print publications which are fully protected by the First Amendment. So, I was pleased to see my favorite press critic Jack Shafer of Salon, ask the same question in his latest column on “The FTC’s Mad Power Grab”:
Because of a pesky thing called the First Amendment, the guidelines don’t apply to news organizations, which receive thousands of free books, CDs, and DVDs each day from media companies hoping for reviews. But if the guidelines don’t apply to established media like the New York Review of Books, which also happens to publish reviews on the Web, why should they apply to Joe Blow’s blog? Regulating bloggers via the FTC while exempting establishment reporters looks like a back-door means of licensing journalists and policing speech.
Exactly. Is the FTC just going to ignore such speakers or media organizations but enforce against everyone else? Isn’t that just a bit silly and radically unfair? Moreover, might such a policy end up incentivizing some folks to create token print publications to get around such the regulations? I doubt it, but you never know.
Regardless, as Shafer notes, the rules are so hopelessly open-ended and arbitrary that they are bound to pose problems for whomever they are enforced against: Continue reading →
A terrific Radio Berkman podcast this week on “Adventures in Anonymity” featuring Sam Bayard, a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center and the Assistant Director of the Berkman Center’s Citizen Media Law Project. Along with host Daniel Dennis Jones, Bayard discusses the intersection of anonymity, free speech, defamation law, privacy, and more. In addition to sorting through the sticky legal and ethical issues, their discussion includes some really excellent historical perspectives on anonymous speech. They also get into the recent “skank” blogger case and the AutoAdmit case. I discussed those cases and some of these issues more generally in these essays:
In a post earlier this week, I discussed Randy Cohen’s “guideline” for anonymous blogging. Specifically, Cohen argued in a recent New York Times piece that, “The effects of anonymous posting have become so baleful that it should be forsworn unless there is a reasonable fear of retribution. By posting openly, we support the conditions in which honest conversation can flourish.” While sympathetic to that guideline, I noted I agreed with it as an ethical principle, not a legal matter. In others words, what might make sense as a “best practice” for the Internet and its users would not make sense as a regulatory standard. I prefer using social norms and public pressure to drive these standards, not regulation that could have an unintended chilling effect on beneficial forms of anonymous online speech.
Dan Gillmor of the Center for Citizen Media of the Harvard Berkman Center has a new column up at the UK Guardian in which he takes a slightly different cut at a new standard or social norm for dealing with some of the more caustic anonymous speech out there:
One of the norms we’d be wise to establish is this: People who don’t stand behind their words deserve, in almost every case, no respect for what they say. In many cases, anonymity is a hiding place that harbours cowardice, not honour. The more we can encourage people to use their real names, the better. But if we try to force this, we’ll create more trouble than we fix. But we don’t want, in the end, to turn everything over to the lawyers. The rest of us — the audience, if you will — need to establish some new norms as well.
Specifically, Gillmor argues that, ” We need to readjust our internal BS meters in a media-saturated age,” because “We are far too prone to accepting what we see and hear.” I think Gillmor has too little faith in most digital denizens; most of us take anonymous comments with a grain of salt and assume that the ugliest of those comments are often untrue. And that’s generally the “principle” he recommends each of us adopt going forward: Continue reading →
Randy Cohen, who pens “The Ethicist” column for The New York Times Magazine, wrote this week about the “skank case,” or the controversy surrounding the recent legal outing for an anonymous blogger who called fashion model Liskula Cohen a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank.” Thanks to a recent court decision, we now know that the blogger who uttered those words is Rosemary Port, a 29-year-old Fashion Institute of Technology student. And she now apparently plans to sue Google for revealing her identity to the court. [As a shameful aside, can I just say that there has never been a nerdy Internet legal battle that involved two more smokin’ hot women than this! Sorry, I couldn’t resist pointing out the obvious.]
Reflecting on this catfight in his NY Times Magazine editorial, “Is It O.K. to Blog About This Woman Anonymously?” Randy Cohen asks:
Has anonymous posting, though generally protected by law, become so toxic that it should be discouraged? It has. To promote the social good of lively conversation and the exchange of ideas, transparency should be the default mode. […]
Here is a guideline. The effects of anonymous posting have become so baleful that it should be forsworn unless there is a reasonable fear of retribution. By posting openly, we support the conditions in which honest conversation can flourish.
But Mr. Cohen never specifies whether he is talking about an
ethical guideline or a legal guideline. There is a world of difference, of course. As a matter of social or personal ethics, I think many of us would agree that anonymity “should be forsworn” and we should encourage people to “post openly.” I always live by that rule myself when blogging or posting comments on other sites, whether they are blogs, discussion boards, or even shopping sites. But that is my choice. I would not want that choice forced by law upon others. Continue reading →
I’ve been catching up on Radio Berkman, the podcast produced by our friends at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a great companion to the TLF’s own Tech Policy Weekly Podcast. There’s been a lot of talk about government transparency on the TLF lately, including TPW 40: Obama, e-Government & Transparency. But that conversation has been mainly focused on how to make “public” records accessible.
The most recent Radio Berkman episode, “Can you Keep a Secret?” explores the thorny questions about what should be deemed public in the first place, and what should be classified:
The government keeps secrets. We take that for granted. But should we? Some speculate that intelligence agencies and elected officials are a little bit trigger happy with the “Top Secret” stamp, and that society would benefit from greater openness. With the government classifying millions of pages of documents per year – in a recent year the U.S. classified about five times the number of pages added to the Library of Congress – a great deal of useful human knowledge gets put under lock and key. But some argue that secrecy is still crucial to our national security.
Radio Berkman pokes its head into a recent talkback with the directors of the film
Secrecy, Harvard University professors Peter Galison and Robb Moss. They are joined by Harvard Law School professors Jonathan Zittrain, Martha Minow, and Jack Goldsmith.
I look forward to seeing the film (when it comes out on Netflix).
What I found most interesting was the discussion of the essential trade-off in the relationship between the media and the state has always been between the media’s “independence” and its “responsibility” (~33:30 in). Even the staunchest critics of the national security state would probably accept that there are
some stories in the media shouldn’t publish because they’d jeopardize the safety of Americans. But we all want the media to blow the whistle on the bad stuff that goes on behind a veil of secrecy. Drawing that line is a terribly difficult task. But it becomes even more complicated with the decline of traditional professional investigative journalism and the rise of blog/amateur journalism. Continue reading →
The New York Times, that dinosaur of old media, is currently live-blogging the most important Congressional debate since that epochal, thoughtful discussion back in October 2002 as to whether Iraq posed a clear and present danger to the United States justifying a declaration of war—I mean, total non-debate that preceded Congress’s decision to issue President a blank checkthat has proved nearly as expensive as the blank check currently before the Congress.
The highlight of the debate thus far:
11:39 a.m. | No socialism!: After Jeb Hensarling, a Republican representative from Texas, affirmed that he was voting against the bill because it smacks of socialism and might represent limits on liberty, Barney Frank, a Democratic representative from Massachusetts, said that he is “ever mindful” that George Bush might “lead us down the road to socialism,” and so Congress would monitor the bailout closely.
Wow. When Barney Frank, just about the closest thing to an avowed socialist in Congress after Bernie Sanders, warns about the dangers of a Republican president and supposed “free market” champion leading us down the “Road to (socialist) Serfdom,” we should all feel a terrible chill. To paraphrase the over-paraphrased Yeats:
Surely some revelation is at hand
Surely the Second Coming is at hand!
… what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards [Washington] to be born?
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.