MHO is that significant lying about yourself should be an offense that can get one banned.
Let’s face it, certain present company excepted, we’re all pretty much anonymous. I don’t know who 99% of the Dopers are in real life. But I do know a lot of you by reputation - a reputation that was built by the way you answer questions and respond to other posters. I know when I see certain posters that I can rely on their answers because of the way they have presented themselves on these boards. And I know that other poster’s answers have to be treated with skepticism for the same reason.
But the bedrock of our community here is, IMHO, our identities. If I were to come out and tell you now that I’m not an Orthodox Jew, but an evangelical Christian (and have been all along), that would seriously threaten the credibility of just about everything I’ve said on these boards - not just the answers I’ve given about Judaism, but everything.
Just about everyone (myself included) has information about themselves that they’d rather not be public knowledge. If you’re that concerned about it (as a transsexual might be about his/her “previous life,” then don’t bring it up. No one is forced to contribute to any particular thread. If you value your privacy about certain aspects of your life, then by all means, keep quiet.
Our identities on these boards are the sole way we have of keeping track of who is who. I would not like to find out that I’ve been lied to about a fundamental aspect of someone’s life for years.
Maybe I have a different perspective on this because I post under my real name and don’t mind having details of my life out in the open; but that’s my feeling on the matter.
Maybe I am thick skinned but I don’t really care about Kaitlyn being revealed as a liar. Kaitlyn was the type of Doper whose posts I skim - far too self involved and prone to ending up in the middle of an argument. Knowing that Kaitlyn is a liar would just cause me to give the posts even less credence. There have been several instances where I have thought that someone has posted something that makes me wonder about their bona fides, but I just figure “who cares if they are lying” and let it go.
I hadn’t realised until this banning how communist Russia it all is. The only banned Doper I ever had any regard for was the short lived Reverend Mykeru* and after his short time here I thought it unfortunate that we didn’t accomodate him. I still regularly visit his site, he’s a funny guy. But this one is even closer to the bone - someone that lots of people have engaged with and suddenly whooooosh…gone. Imagine if real life worked like that - caught in a lie at morning tea and you are never spoken to (only about) again.
Lies are bad, no doubt about it. And the fact is that lies repeated, and embroidered and sustained are not the same as a simple made up statistic, or falsly attributed quote. Wheter or not you did the later on purpose, you might have done it by error. Creating a persona has similar range. You just might wish to avoid the notoriety that being a Holocaust Survivor would engender. You might just pretend to be twenty years younger and not bring up your experience. I have no problem with that.
But when your lie becomes a part of your posting position, and has influence on the opinions and emotions of the community, I think you are headed rapidly toward being a jerk. When you beat the drum about your assumed identity’s social and moral signifigance, then you have moved on well into jerkdom. At that point, it also matters how you come back to truth. “OK, I have been caught, I admit it.” is not much of a change in behavior. “Listen, I never realized how important this community would be to me, and I have to come clean, about myself.” is a lot better. But it is still gonna cost you.
Banning seems entirely appropriate for the first case. The second takes a bit more thought, although I am not certain the community gains from retaining such a member. Perhaps so, perhaps not.
Tris
“The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards.” ~ Alexander Jablokov ~
That was handy, who posted incorrect medical information that could have been dangerous. He was finally banned when he posted that women could not get pregnant on their period.
Per the OP, we already have this rule in place. Lying about something in order to get attention is called trolling. Trolling is not allowed. Works for me.
Venue is a factor in this. Condensing several incidents into one more fantastic version, purely to keep things interesting, might be very appropriate in MPSIMS. Minor embellishment, even without alteration of facts, would not be appropriate in General Questions.
Imagine the difference between posting horrible camping experiences in a thread titled “Do you like camping” in MPSIMS, vs. giving meaningful camping tips in a thread titled “Best way to keep dry while camping” in GQ.
Some of the best posts ever make use of long-standing traditions of storytelling. I’d hate to see that end in favor of strict, unvarnished reality in all forums.
That said, making things up out of whole cloth, or even seriously twisting reality, deserves to be called out. I think that automatic banning is too harsh, and that one of the reasons we have moderators is to help us adjudicate decisions such as these.
Once a serious lie is exposed, suspension and moderator review are more appropriate than outright banning. This is particularly so in the case of otherwise long-standing posters – our core membership. These people form much of the ‘character’ of the board, and this ‘character’ is one of our major attractions. We already recognize it’s importance, and the rules for banning are clear enough as they are.
The ethos and motto of the Straight Dope is fighting ignorance. Lying promotes ignorance.
BTW I differentiate between posting something which you think is true and posting something which you know is not true. The latter is lying; the former is a form of ignorance of which most of us have been guilty from time to time.
But Zev (and I totally believe you’re a Jew), you don’t have to be an orthodox Jew to be an expert on the subject. Your being Jewish has nothing to to with the credibility I assign to your posts.
I believe the bedrock of the community is the open dialog; not the “identity” (which is unknowable in a cyber format) that holds us together. It’s not who you “are”…it’s what you contribute to the table.
Well, I don’t know about everyone else, but if I found out that you were a Buddist that just happened to be an expert on Judaism, I would not demand your removal from the boards. I don’t CARE about the “who”…just the “what.”
Look at Lieu…he’s built his career at the Straight Dope on tall tales of hilarious bathroom incidents (please let them be stories…please let them be stories). Bullshit is part of life…sometimes a very entertaining part of life!
Too simplistic. It’s just a slogan, after all. There’s a lot of knowledge that the Straight Dope actively prohibits from being disseminated, and most of it for good reason. A lie isn’t even necessarily morally or ethically wrong. As Gaudere once pointed out to me, if a serial killer-slash-rapist asks you whether your sister is home, surely you aren’t expected by any moral or ethical standard to answer “Yes,” even if she is.
As far as the OP, I think lying should be a bannable offense when it is a material part of breaking the rules. If you lie just to be a jerk, or just to use hate-speech words like “faggot” or “fundie” as though you’re entitled, or just to spam people with your commercial interests, or just to draw attention away from a sock you’re maintaining — that sort of thing. Otherwise, it’s no big deal.
I personally feel it would be well over the top to begin banning people for lies they tell, or made-up personas.
I’m not a liar. In fact, sometimes I wish it was in me not to tell the truth, but it is not. Unfortunately, most people aren’t like that. Many people have things to hide, or things they’d rather not share, or things they’d change about themselves and environments like the SDMB are the perfect incubator for such behavior.
I’m sure there are many people who have lied, or stretched the truth or outright fabricated themselves from whole cloth here in the SDMB and to ban them for it seems pretty harsh.
Indeed, bullshit is a part of life-some have mastered it and other have not.
I thought Kaitlyn annoying, but that doesn’t matter, really. I’m sure people find me annoying too. But, I think it’s kind of sick to weave a story and make kindhearted people care about you only to inform them that you’re lying.
There are an awful lot of kind hearts on the SDMB, and even though I’m not really one of them, I’d hate for them all to become cynics because they don’t think they can believe anything people say.
I take everything on the interweb pages with several grains of salt, and I can’t think of anyone I feel particularly close to. I love Eve, and miss her, but other than that, I don’t care so much.
Someone in MSPS shared their story of having a premature baby and all the problems, joys, and sorrows that have gone along with it. Having followed that thread, I’d be horrified if I found out she was lying. (I’m sure she’s not, btw, this is just an example). I think that type of lying should be a bannable offense.
I think if the lieing goes far enough to render the lier a jerk, then the don’t be a jerk rule is sufficient to deal with any lieing posters.
So if someone is shown to have lied then it gets investigated. If they used that lie to give false information then they were a jerk. If after being confrinted with their lie they continue lieing and don’t come clean, that is also being a jerk IMHO. If they used the lie to gain sympaphy that is also jerkish.
There’s a monstrous difference between “lying”, and “making up stories to garner sympathy/empathy or whip the boards up into a tailspin”. The former, even if a huge lie about an online persona, we shouldn’t care about at all. The latter I care a bit more about, but the latter also isn’t “lying”, it’s blatantly trolling for attention, which K/6 did.
The thing that gets me is that it seems a lot of people are now saying that K6’s posts kept talking about a single topic and hijacking threads. Then we found out that the subject of these hijacks wasn’t true. So people said K6 should be banned for being a troll.
My point is that the offense was hijacking threads not lying. The issue should be just what’s in the posts, not what’s behind them. If somebody keep hijacking posts off topic on to some personal matter, they should be told to stop - regardless of whether the personal matter is true or false.
Plenty of people manage to be jerks without having to tell a single lie. But is telling lies automatically proof that somebody is a jerk?
