By those standards, Woodward and Bernstein’s work on the Watergate scandal was the act of vigilantes.
Reddit’s allowing of “creeper” materials, and the actions of others to uncover who is behind them (one of them was a teacher who was posting upskirt pics of his students and was found to be in possession of real child porn) has been an item in Internet-related news for a while now. Like it or not, this was investigative journalism. Put it on the level of trashy tabloid fishing expeditions rather than presidential election manipulation if you prefer, but this was not a random “outing” for “the lulz.”
Gawker did not punish this man, they merely allowed the world to know who was behind an “anonymous” persona. If you live your life in a way that requires anonymity, you need to think hard about your life choices. It’s one thing to wish to be private, it’s another to think “If anyone finds out this is me, I’m screwed.”
You’re missing the point. Also, you cannot legally be fired for voting (the wrong way). My point is that the ability to track people online with such exactitude and at such a low cost, could greatly expand what employers think is under their purview if such activities are routinely made public. You already have some employers thinking it’s okay to ask for people’s Facebook passwords, do you really want to encourage a culture where your personal life is no longer at all private?
What has changed is not the ability for others use your extracurricular activities against you, it’s the ability to monitor those activities (and thoughts) online at such a low cost, and with great accuracy. Of course, your boss could follow you around in my car checking to see if you are doing anything objectionable, but widespread long term surveillance is not practical. The big internet and cable companies now do the equivalent as a matter of course. Breaking down the firewall that exist between the real world and the world online basically means that you are ceding a great deal of your privacy to anyone desirous to out you for whatever reason. It’s one thing for your boss to take actions based on reading in the newspaper that you’ve been arrested, or to see you entering a brothel. It’s entirely different for her to find your home Google search history objectionable, and to fire you because of that.
So while it’s nice this scumbag got his a reality check, a broader policy of ignoring the online/offline line of demarcation wrt to privacy has bad implications for everyone. Would it be okay if I outed anyone searching for gay porn or cruising on hookup sites online? Would it be right to out anyone researching how to get an abortion? What about if I outed anyone who has or has had an STD based on their searches? The problem is that although I think we can all agree that this guy is a scumbag, there are gray areas like the above where we all may not agree that there is a compelling interest to out someone. Overall, I just think we are going down a really slippery slope when we celebrate and encourage things like this.
What if you would be screwed if people found out you are gay? Or that you have HIV? Or that you support a certain candidate? Or that you had an abortion? There are many things that some find reprehensible that are legal and innocuous. Do you trust the average person to exercise such discretion in a reasonable way all the time?
The place this argument falls down is in the justifications he used for his actions. According to VA, if the information was available, his publication of it was fair game. We already know the journalists actions were legal and I believe that people should be prepared for the positives and negatives of positions they take.
In your list, I would feel the same about a person who was gay who publicly shamed others for the same, or a woman who had an abortion who pickets abortion clinics and speaks out against abortion without revealing hers (and all the rest too). If you say you’re against something BE against it. If you say you’re supporting something actually support it. You can’t take the benefits of a position without expecting the downsides to crop up at some point.
You know, I didn’t think about it this way, and you’re right. I don’t want someone who is just minding his own business to get hurt by being outed on the internet, and there are reasons for decent people to need some level of anonymity.
There IS a line between “I’m a miserable scumbag who everyone will reasonably hate” and “I’m a good person who will be hated by certain unreasonable scumbags”. That doesn’t mean good people won’t get hurt, it just means that I’ll feel bad when they do.
I think that most people think that VA is a huge hypocrite, who wants to be free to do whatever HE wants but wants other people to have restrictions on what they can publish about him. I think that if he really believes in free speech that he’d be OK with people publishing the truth about him. He’s been using the “free speech” card to invade other people’s privacy, and now it’s turned around and bitten him on the ass. All of a sudden, he thinks it’s not OK, because it hurts HIM. When his ox is being gored, he changes his stance.
Yeah, but you are picking the easy cases. It’s very easy to be for puppies and cute children, and against child molesters and murderers. The problem is that having an anything goes policy wrt to outing “anonymous” people on the internet means anyone and everyone will be subject to the whims and morality of others who might want to out them. Even if you are just okay outing people when it feels good (like in this case), the problem is that there is always some asshole who feels righteous doing pretty evil things. There is gonna be some guy who finds out some woman had two abortions, and thinks it’s appropriate to alert her church or potential suitors. There is gonna be some person who finds out some parent didn’t vaccinate their kid for some crazy reason, or that the kid has a disease, and decides the kid’s medical status should be known by his fellow classmates. There are going to be cases where athlete is outed as gay because his teammates need to know who they are showering with. All sorts of asinine things are going to come out because people think they are doing the right thing even if they are just being trolls and scumbags.
Additionally, there is no oversight of fact checking whatsoever wrt to the accuracy of these claims. What if someone at Gawker incorrectly fingered you as the Violentacrez. How would you defend yourself? What if they outed you on some blog based in the Cayman Islands? What recourse would you have?
This pissed me off. Gawker acted badly. It’s very bad form to take away someone’s privacy or anonymity in a place where they have been told to expect it. And frankly it was none of their concern. It was a matter for the Reddit community. The penalty for acting like a dick online should be an online punishment.
Punishing an Internet troll by attacking him in real life is like punching someone for cheating at Monopoly.
If there was evidence of illegal activity or the threat of harm, that information should have been turned over to the police.
You may not care because he was a sleazy troll, but it sets a precedent and will have a chilling effect on the free exchange of ideas in the Internet. This time it may just be a sleazy troll, but next time it will be the in the closet gay teen or the recent victim of date rape looking for support in an anonymous forum and being outed by well meaning conservatives.
I find it especially funny all of the people making light of the expectation of privacy who are not posting under their real names, and probably have gone a few rounds in the Pit.
When it came time for him to face similar to what he’d been merrily doing for years, he rolled over and claimed he would be an informant for Gawker if they just wouldn’t go public. So this captain of free speech and anonymity was offering to throw plenty of other people under the bus instead. Meanwhile Reddit’s mods wouldn’t slap him down, since he’d positioned himself as the guy who was willing to deal with the real child porn so they didn’t have to look for that stuff. They protected him more than once.
And I think the “slippery slope” argument is being used a tad too freely here. VA was involved in what was an ongoing Internet news story. He’s not Amanda Todd who flashed her tits on a webcam as a 7th grader and had some asshole “dox” her and spread her child porn with her identifying info all over the net and to all of her classmates and stuff. I’m OK with putting my acceptable/unacceptable border nebulously somewhere between those two cases. Other people’s mileage will vary.
So? Plenty of people get talked about when they haven’t done anything illegal. Affairs aren’t illegal. Out-of-wedlock kids aren’t illegal. Yet journalists dig up dirt on that.
The girls whose photos he plastered everywhere weren’t doing anything illegal, either.