No Place To Hide

Last week the website Gawker published a lengthy feature about one of the most offensive posters on the website Reddit. If you have never been to Reddit it is a social networking site where people can post links to interesting stories or start discussions about pretty much any topic. It is a lot like a big message board, except celebrities occasionally swing by to answer fans question, which gives it more credibility. The problem with the site is they don't do a great job of weeding out offensive comments. Stupid people saying stupid things comes with the territory, but Reddit's commenters can be especially nasty. Still, one guy managed to stand out above all the rest and that was enough to get Gawker's attention. Turns out he's a middle-aged computer programmer and, like most people who comment on the internet, he doesn't believe most of the vile things he says (though he does defend some of them, which somehow makes it worse because it shows he does have a moral compass and it's slightly broken), he just like to make outrageous comments to get a response out of people while knowing they will never be able to do anything about it as he hides behind a screen name. Almost immediately Reddit responded by saying this was an infringement of the man's free speech and in response they would delete any links a user posted to any of the Gawker sites. Sure, because what is a better way to advocate free speech than to censor people who weren't involved in the original dispute?

As you would expect, I find this is an interesting issue because I happen to think freedom of speech is the most important thing we have in this country. People have the right to say what they want, no matter how obnoxious. Remember, the First Amendment doesn't exist to protect the statements we all agree with, it is there to defend the statements we all hate. You can disagree with the words, but you can't disagree with someone's right to say them. Besides, if they really offend you what you should be doing is ignoring the person, because giving them any kind of response is just going to encourage them. But even beyond that is the fact that no one asked Gawker to be the internet 'good taste' police in the first place. Reddit didn't see a need to ban this user and while we can question whether or not they should have, websites have the right to allow stupid commenters. That is not Gawker or any other website's call to make. Considering Gawker, and especially other sites in their network such as Deadspin (which I like and have linked to), often print rumors without always having facts to back them up, you could easily make the case that this was a textbook example of people in a glass house throwing stones.

The flipside to the free speech argument is that I don't think the Founding Fathers had internet trolls in mind when they wrote the Constitution. Also, they wanted people to have the right to say anything but never promised the right to anonymity. Saying something just to try and piss off random strangers and then hiding is not a good use of a person's time and at some point people should be held accountable for their actions. We live in an age where people can be offensive just for the sake of being offensive and never have to face the consequences thanks to the anonymous nature of the internet. The only way to get people to reverse this trend may be to shame them. One of my favorite moments of internet justice ever came when Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban reprinted some of the offensive emails people had sent him about one of his players and included the senders' email addresses. The number of people who were writing vile and racist comments through .gov or .edu emails was staggering. You can only hope they learned to tone down the hate. So, I do think there is a line people should not be crossing just because they can, but where that line is and who gets put in charge of watching it is a tough question.

I think my problem with this case, and what ultimately makes me land on the side of Reddit, is the fact that Gawker singled out this one individual. Sure, he may have been the most active offender on one particular website, but that still only makes him a small fish in a very crowded ocean. And I'm sure if you felt like having your faith in humanity destroyed you could go looking and would find much more offensive comments on another random website, yet Gawker picked this one person to go after. Plus, if they want to go on a crusade to restore civility to anonymous voices on the internet they should be outing people in clumps. (If you notice, this is how the police work, like with the Maine Zoomba prostitution case where they revealed 20 names at a time.) Not only will outing commenters like this one at a time take far too long, it can do real harm to that individual, as this internet commenter has since been fired from his job. I'm not saying he didn't deserve it (I certainly wouldn't want a person who says thing like what this guy said representing my company), but if his company wasn't aware of what he was doing I'm not sure it was Gawker's job to bring it to their attention. It's a really complicated issue, but I still think it has a fairly simple solution - before you post something, ask yourself if you would want your mother to know what you were writing and if the answer is no then don't hit 'send' because you may not be as anonymous as you think.