Stop Cyberbullying, Not Free Speech

I've written enough about good and bad online behavior that I feel compelled to weigh in on the Kathy Sierra situation and the ill-advised "stop blogging until someone does something about this" crusade that's been unleashed on the blogosphere.

For those who don't know, Kathy Sierra is a talented software designer and writer who's become the victim of some truly heinous threats on her blog. She went public about the threats and her fear of them, and that's led some other bloggers to decide to go dark to protest the poor behavior of a few miscreants.

This, of course, is a bad idea. The only thing accomplished by everyone jumping on the Sierra blackout bandwagon is to empower the attention-seeking lowlifes who posted the comments in the first place. From their anonymous accounts, they've now sent a shudder through the blogging community, and they're probably bragging with glee about how powerful they are.

This is why you don't feed trolls. They're like Freddy Krueger. If you ignore them, turn your back on them, you take their power away. If you confront them, you embolden them. It's that simple. Every blog that goes dark just contributes to the aggregate success these self-important idiots now feel.

It gets worse when the news media sums up the campaign by saying, "Fellow bloggers have declared tomorrow 'Stop Cyberbullying Day.' They will suspend their online journals, hoping to focus attention on the dark side of free speech. " The dark side of free speech? Maybe we should do away with this "free speech," seeing as it's so dark and destructive. Maybe David Louie, who penned this repugnant line, ought to go practice his journalism in China, where he'll have much less free speech to worry about.

Yet Mr. Louie is not alone in his opinion. Bloggers and readers are calling for "something to be done." That something is, no matter how you look at it, censorship, and it's worth noting that Ms. Sierra's distress stems not just from comments on her blog, but things posted on other blogs as well, so the scope reaches beyond simply deleting inappropriate comments from one's own blog, which any author is free to do. What's being said by a few is that this sort of behavior, anywhere, on any blog, ought to be stopped.

This is that slippery slope we keep hearing about. I agree that the posts in question have no place in civilized discourse, and that the people behind them should be shunned, banned from posting on other people's blogs, and paid visits by law enforcement if their threats cause undue distress. At the same time, Ms. Sierra needs to understand that she, like all prominent bloggers, is a public figure, and one of the "perks" of being a public figure is having irrational people threaten you, stalk you, and, in extreme cases, attempt to do you harm. There's no shortage of celebrities who have to deal with this. It's the price paid for stepping into the spotlight.

Stalkers are best handled through law enforcement. Cyberbullies are best handled through marginalization and shunning, not any sort of agreed-upon "standards of behavior" that limit free expression. And bloggers serve their purposes best by writing about what's happening and inviting discussion, not by going dark in protest.