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Opinion

Blog ‘code of conduct' is a welcome change 

Jim McCormick
Opinion Columnist

On Monday, technology publisher Tim O'Reilly published the first draft of a "blogger's code of conduct," which he had written with the assistance of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales. While most of the points of the code of conduct were laudable, such as not linking to libelous content and ignoring trolls, there was one major point that has given bloggers pause. The code of conduct specifically forbids any use of anonymous comments. This change, however, would provide an improvement over the current state of online affairs.

The problem inherent with anonymous comments was quite eloquently, if somewhat profanely, described in the Web comic Penny Arcade. If a normal person is given a large audience and complete anonymity, there's truly no telling what they will do. Some time spent playing first-person shooters over the Internet should be enough to illustrate this idea. One would be hard pressed to find a blogger that hasn't gotten online harassment from anonymous comments. Most anonymous Web log comments are, in fact, nothing but inflammatory or off-topic tripe that simply reminds everyone of some idiot's stupidity.

Some would claim that removing anonymous comments is a strike against free speech, citing thousands of cases of government and corporate reprisals against bloggers that have said things that they shouldn't have. While the government making reprisals against its critics is rather chilling, the fact is that free speech should not be consequence-free speech. If an employee has signed a non-disclosure agreement with his or her company about a current project, and then leaks that information to anyone without company approval, he or she probably deserves the impending dismissal and lawsuit. Furthermore, stories of corporate and governmental corruption are perhaps best told using a pseudonym, if for no other reason than the fact that it is still easier to trust a signed story than it is to believe something that someone said behind the mask of complete anonymity.

The code of conduct still allows for pseudonyms in order to take care of situations where disclosing one's true identity would be a bad idea. If that non-disclosure agreement must be violated, or an employee must say something that could get him fired, he still has the ability to do so, so long as he at least gives some kind of identity, even if it is a false one.

It is about time that some effort was made to civilize online communication, which currently resembles the monkey cage at the zoo, complete with excrement-flinging chaos. There's no excuse for this behavior. But as long as complete anonymity remains, it will stay this way. 

McCormick, a computer science post-baccalaureate student, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu