credibility & anonimity in blog

http://www.authorama.com/we-the-media-10.html

People I respect have told me we need to do away with anonymity on the Net. They have good reasons.
But anonymity is enshrined in our culture, even if its use can be distasteful at times. And there are excellent reasons for keeping one’s identity hidden. A person with AIDS or another disease can lose a job or housing, or be persecuted in more violent ways. Someone holding unpopular political views in a small town that leans strongly in one direction may want to discuss it with others of like mind. Corporate and government whistle blowers need to be able to contact authorities and journalists without fear of being revealed. More than anyone, political dissidents in nations where such behavior can be life-threatening deserve the protection of anonymity when they need it.

Though the benefits of anonymity are clear, it also has its hazards. In one now famous example in 2004, a software glitch at Amazon.com revealed what many people suspected about the site’s customer-written book reviews: authors were penning rave reviews of their own work under false names and, in some cases, slamming competing books. A New York Times story250 showed a remarkable willingness on authors’ part to excuse their deceptions as just another marketing tool. A more reasonable excuse was counteracting trash reviews by enemies. I worry what will happen when this book is published. I certainly have my share of adversaries. Will they trash me on Amazon? No doubt. Will that hurt sales? Probably. Can I do anything about it, assuming they don’t libel me? Probably not.

In one online discussion on my blog about copyright, I challenged a commenter named “George” on his refusal to say who he was. “You’re welcome to remain anonymous,” I said. “I think you would enjoy even more credibility in this discussion if you said who you were. A casual reader might wonder why you want to be anonymous.”
He replied: “You should judge my credibility by how my statements correspond with the facts, logic, and the law—not by who I am.”251

As we discussed in Chapter 8, advances in technology are likely to bring us better ways to gauge and, in effect, manage reputations and verify a commenter’s bona fides without exposing his or her actual identity to the world.
Googling someone, to see what else he or she has said online in other places, sounds like a good way to start. But it ultimately isn’t the answer. If, however, someone has been using a consistent pseudonym, at least we have the possibility of knowing if a person is reputable or has been making trouble elsewhere.
At the moment, my favorite solution is not the most practical: if everyone had a blog or other kind of web site, they could include a link as a kind of digital signature. Yes, web sites can be faked, but a hoax that uses someone else’s name or hides behind a pseudonym for improper purposes, could attract unwelcome attention from the authorities—and because web site owners have to pay someone for hosting their site, the owner can be traced. Again, I would do nothing to stop anonymity on the Internet. But if we are going to have serious online discussions, I think all parties should, with few exceptions, either be willing to verify who they are, or risk having their contributions be questioned and, in some cases, ignored.
How do you know if a troll is on your site? The definition on Ward Cunningham’s Wiki says it best:
A troll is deliberately crafted to provoke others with the intention of wasting their time and energy. A troll is a time thief. To troll is to steal from people. That is what makes trolling heinous.
Trolls can be identified by their disengagement from a conversation or argument. They do not believe what they say, but merely say it for effect.

But spin takes some insidious routes to the public. One of the worst forms is the media’s lazy use of press releases as news. Some smaller newspapers are known to print them verbatim, as if a reporter had actually done some reporting and writing. Lately, video press releases have become a stain on both the PR profession and journalism. Local TV stations are handed video releases, often including fake “reporters” interviewing officials from the company or government agency that wants to get its news out, and too often stations play all or part of these mock­eries of journalism. In March 2004, the Bush administration was properly chastised for sending out video releases to promote, in a highly political way, a drug-benefits bill Congress had passed a few months earlier.255

Online spin varies from the relatively harmless, and even amusing, to more ethically challenged methods. On the harm­less side is “Google bombing,” a method of connecting a word or phrase to a specific web site through the Google search engine. After one group of Google bombers got “miserable failure” to point to George W. Bush’s biography page on the White House site, his supporters retaliated by connecting John Kerry’s page to the word “waffles.”256 Sooner or later, Google will either prevent this kind of thing or risk some of its own credibility.

Cyber-spin is getting more sophisticated, especially when it comes in comments or other postings by someone who’s trying to make a point but doesn’t identify his or her connection to the subject. The entertainment-industry copyright defender who made such a point of critiquing my blog was, in effect, spinning not just me but my audience as well. This is an unintended effect of the conversation, but one we’ll have to live with.

Just before the January 2004 Consumer Electronics Show, I got an email from someone telling me, in a fairly breathless way, about a product due to be announced at the show. He was gleeful, it seemed, that the company had inadvertently given out information it intended to keep under wraps until the official announcement. He pointed me to several pages, including one that had a picture of the gadget (some gear for networking mul­timedia at home) and another where the company’s chief execu­tive had essentially confirmed the product’s existence on a product support forum.

So I posted this information on my blog. “Consider this a small example of tomorrow’s journalism today,” I wrote. “A reader who knew much more than I did about something did some reporting and found information worth noting. Now you know, too.”

the good one :)

Citizen Reporters to the Rescue

Blogger Ken Layne260 captured one of the online world’s essen­tial characteristics in a classic posting in 2001. “We can Fact Check your ass,” Layne said.261 When there are lots of citizen reporters scrutinizing what other people say, they have a way of getting to the truth, or at least shining light on inconsistencies.

Case in point: Kaycee Nicole created a blog to talk openly about life, illness, and loss. As she grew sick and lay dying, she created a community. Thousands of people visited her blog in 2000 and 2001. They comforted her—and each other—with messages of support and offers of help. They researched her ill­ness, looking for a way to make her better. And Kaycee did get better, at least for a while. Then she sickened again and finally succumbed to her leukemia.

But on May 18, 2001, someone named “acridrabbit” posted a simple question on MetaFilter, a collaborative blog and news site: “Is it possible that Kaycee did not exist?” The query set off a furious controversy. A relatively small but relentless group of Net denizens unraveled the tale of anguish and discov­ered a hoax. They investigated court records. They checked their findings with each other. They did some of the best detective work you’ll ever see.

What this group accomplished was, in a sense, investigative reporting. But they weren’t professional journalists. They were strangers who, for the most part, only knew each other online. But combining the power of the Internet and old-fashioned reporting, they’d come together—first in sorrow, then in dismay that morphed toward anger—to scrutinize a situation and, ulti­mately, solve a mystery.262

Fact-checking is a just one tool a community can bring to bear. As in open source projects, combining all those eyes and ideas can create a self-righting phenomenon. In the summer of 2003, David Weinberger and I discovered other community ben­efits. We’d launched a small, noncommercial web site called WordPirates,263 the purpose of which was to remind people how some good words in our language have been hijacked by corporate and political interests.

We opened the site to allow anyone to add a word plus an explanation of why it should be there. As we expected, some folks used the system to make off-point, irrelevant, or puerile postings, often with no explanation. We’ve had to prune heavily.

But a vandal found a security flaw in the software pow­ering the site and exploited it by posting programming code inside a comment form—some HTML that took users to an unaffiliated web page containing one of the most disgusting photographs I’ve ever seen. We removed the offending post, thanks to a sharp-eyed programmer who let us know how the page had been misused so foully. Finally, the developer of the software we were using, who hadn’t anticipated this kind of abuse, fixed the security breach.

We’d surely seen the downside of the Net. But we also saw the upside in the way the community helped us find, analyze, and fix the problem. As Weinberger noted after our dust up with the rogue coder: “It’s as if the Internet is not only self­correcting about matters of fact but also morally self-correcting: A bad turn is corrected by several good ones.”