You, With the Blog: You're Ugly and Your Mother Dresses You Funny

Hi folks -- now, I realize that I could come to regret this, but I think that Tim O'Reilly's Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct that I've been reading about yesterday and today is stupid and irrelevant to most bloggers (that is, regular folk who aren't among the so-called A-Listers, corporate or otherwise high-traffic  bloggers).

(The part that I might someday regret is if this idea grows legs, a seal of approval, a standards and sanctioning body, annual certification dues, and corporate sponsors, which AOL decides to join as a charter member, causing me immeasurable future heartache, etc. But this is unlikely.)

This all came about from the Kathy Sierra incident that I mentioned a few weeks back (with a follow-up last week).

In response to perceived death threats and generally vile and misogynistic blog nastiness directed at Ms. Sierra, some of the more prominent bloggers out there had suggested ways to try to fight this, one result we see now in the O'Reilly's Draft Blogger's Code of Conduct.

You kind of have to read it. It's a masterpiece of social engineering (the old-fashioned kind, not the "tell me your password" kind) that blends far-reaching legalistic prohibitions:

"We define unacceptable content as anything included or linked to that:
- is being used to abuse, harass, stalk, or threaten others
- is libelous, knowingly false, ad-hominem, or misrepresents another person,
- infringes upon a copyright or trademark
- violates an obligation of confidentiality
- violates the privacy of others"

And combines it with infruriating vagueness:

"We define and determine what is "unacceptable content" on a case-by-case basis, and our definitions are not limited to this list. If we delete a comment or link, we will say so and explainwhy. [We reserve the right to change these standards at any time with no notice.]"

Here's are my initial thoughts, in the rough order they were received:

• April Fools Day was last week.
• Given those prohibitions, good luck finding anything to link to.
• If you have to explain yourself every time you delete a comment from idiots, spammers and trolls, the idiots, spammers and trolls have won.
  
• I wonder what kind of badge Wonkette would run

Yeah, they've proposed badges:

"Civility Enforced" vs. "Anything Goes"

All snarks aside, the problem with sort of thing is simply thus:

* The people who would adhere to this kind of speech code are not the people you need a speech code for in the first place.

* The stuff that is already illegal (e.g. death threats, libel, defamation) is, um, already illegal.

* For those of us who use a third-party blogging service (which is the vast majority of bloggers), we're already subject to Terms of Use; for example, the AOL Network's Terms of Use forbids activities that

1. violates or infringes the rights of others including, without limitation, patent, trademark, trade secret, copyright, publicity or other proprietary rights;
2. is unlawful, threatening, abusive, harassing, defamatory, libelous, deceptive, fraudulent, invasive of another's privacy, tortious, or contains explicit or graphic descriptions, or accounts of, sexual acts;
3. victimizes, harasses, degrades, or intimidates an individual or group of individuals on the basis of religion, gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, age, or disability;

Blogger's is similar (see #12, Member Conduct), as is WordPress's, etc.

So, who is this voluntary blogger speech code for? People (or companies) who run their own blogging software on their own hosted servers, who want to show they're on the right side of things by wearing a badge graphic.

Why am I worked up about this?  I despise meaningless gestures, and I especially dislike blanket statements that actually only apply to a very small fraction of people dealing with guilt complexes when they should just put the smack down on idiots, spammers and trolls.

High-traffic blogs have to deal with a lot of crap, since they get a lot of comments, and a some of those commenters just come to take a dump in the punch bowl (as they say). So the blog owners have to deal with it, even if they're legally shielded from comments posted by others in their blogs.

And there are any number of ways to deal with this, depending on your blog platform -- reviewing all comments before they go live; pre-screening commenters; even disallowing comments entirely or having volunteer, community or even professional moderators.

Blog owners have the absolute freedom to decide what kind of comments they'll allow. I've read of some bloggers who say they feel pressured to not pre-moderate comments, or to keep nasty comments, or to allow anonymous comments, out of some sense of obligation. Who are these people? It's your blog, do what you want.

Now, all that said, I do what I can to maintain a civil atmosphere in whatever blogs I'm involved in. As a relatively small-fry blogger, I don't have to worry about getting lots and lots of comments flooding in that I can't keep up with.

So, to extract a germ of usefulness out of all this silliness, I think an articulated comment and community policy is a good thing (which means I should probably spell one out somewhere: "I reserve the right to delete any comment, for any reason, including those that violate the AOL TOS, or are otherwise useless." See the blog rules my cohorts at the Community Info blog have for theirs.)

Also keep in mind that these are absolutely not new problems, and not restricted to blogs. Check out this Washington Post article from March about similar shenanigans on a law school-themed message board.

Also, since I started drafting this entry yesterday, the folks at BlogHer have a much better and more concise analysis of this, and of course, all the A-Listers are weighing in as well.

How do you feel about comments and blogger conduct codes? Leave a comment of your own below.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: tim o'reilly, blogger code of conduct, kathy sierra, speech codes, blogging