Happy Slappers Unite!
Tim O’Reilly is drawing some irrational criticism for proposing a voluntary code of conduct for comment boards. Hundreds of boards already have codes of conduct, and the mob never complained about that, so apparently the issue is just that people hate Tim. Or they hate that an a-lister is promoting civility and recommending others do the same.
But I am glad that an a-lister is not afraid to stand up for civility. Dave Winer was one of the first to take such a step, when trolls were fouling up his blog comments. He turned off comments, saying “it’s my blog, and I make the rules”. Everyone screamed “censorship!”. I supported him then, and still do. Chris Locke, on the other hand, wants to have it both ways. He wants to incite nasty behavior, and claim “I didn’t write it, I don’t make the rules, and I will never censor anyone”. It is so dishonest that it’s pathetic.
Government authorities in this age of YouTube have been looking at ways to deal with losers who hide behind “free speech”. France recently banned “happy slapping“, which is the practice of getting your buddy to assault someone, and then taping and publishing the attack. The losers hid behind “free speech”, saying “I didn’t perpetrate the act, and it was news, so it is my journalistic right to publish it.” The French law bans anyone other than professional journalists from publishing video footage of violence online. The hypocrite civil libertarians are screaming bloody murder, but I support the French.
In my opinion, these scum are not very distant from the a-listers who republished the Anshe Chung video after it was pulled from YouTube. They acted as if they were upholding some great journalistic integrity by running the virtual rape footage, but they were simply looking for ratings. Showing the full video had absolutely no journalistic value — the snapshots which the real journalists at CNET ran were more than enough, and it’s possible to convey the news without running the images at all.
This is my gripe with John Perry Barlow and EFF. If they had their way, people would have a right to profit from murder, rape, and child molestation; as long as the events portrayed *actually* happened and the person doing the filming was not involved. We already see people leveraging video of beheading, military killing, etc. to get ad revenues on their web sites. It is quite easy to see where this is going. We are rapidly moving to a time where snuff films will be legal and easily available, in increasingly gory detail.
A serial killer, terrorist, or rapist who wants to broadcast his acts to the world no longer has to worry about old media’s conservatism. He simply has to find one bozo like Chris Locke who craves page views and is willing to hide behind “I don’t censor!”. This isn’t 1969 anymore. Google has broken the back of old media, and with it the civility the “old boys” could enforce. And the equation is completely changed with ubiquitous ability to publish and index on YouTube.
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Again, I don’t support additional regulations on bloggers. But anyone who thinks Tim O’Reilly is the enemy for calling for civility, needs to think twice. If a-listers would stand up for civility, and condemn things like Chris Locke’s “virtual happy slapping forum”, maybe we could avoid regulations for a while longer. But as long as Perry Barlow and the rest of the mob bury their heads in the sand and act like it’s evil to speak out in favor of civility, things are going to get a lot worse.