Next time you think we have a troll problem at SJ, read this

YES! This. Thank you. Finally somebody gets to the nut of it.

Reddit and this troll are all for free speech of any kind... Until Chen exercised his.

 

No one in this thread is doubting the legality of Chen's article. I think Reddit is being incredibly hypocritical for suppressing the article. Shit, with it out there, might as well use it as a reminder that actions, even anonymous ones, can have consequences.

That said, the issue at hand is Internet ethics. It's not illegal to pay a source for an interview, but it's against journalistic ethics to do so. In my opinion, Chen violated Internet ethics because he and Gawker view themselves as arbiters of all that is good and right in the world.

 

There are no Internet ethics.

 

Depending on the state, there would certainly be a number of privacy torts, but I can't imagine simply outing an anonymous commenter, by itself, could possibly satisfy a claim.

 

I can imagine a judge standing up beside his or her chair saying, "In summation, NO OUTING!"

 

Would the judge be wearing a Bobby Knight sweater?

 

We thank you.

 

Vers, first off, no offense taken. I understand the point you're making, and I think it's a legitimate one.

There actually are some aspects of that story that should really hit home here, which is one of the reasons I posted it. How much anonymity should you, and can you, expect in a message board community? And what standards of behavior do you have to violate to make it somehow morally OK to have your on-line persona get "outed," even though you're not doing anything illegal?

Part of what makes my situation with Whitlock a little different is, when he did out me (or attempt to), my response was kind of to shrug my shoulders. I can't pretend that I've always adhered to this standard, but for the most part, I wouldn't write anything here that I'd be afraid to own up to if asked to own up to it. I think that's different than "I would never write anything I wouldn't say to someone's face." I frequently get made fun of now for asking for a little respect for people in our business, and I think it has roots in my own behavior, realizing how easy it was to be the critic. When I was younger, I think I probably jumped on a few of the Bill Simmons dog piles, especially when it felt like the whole sports journalism world was being asked to choose sides between his way of thinking and Charlie Pierce's way of thinking. Bill also took a few digs at a story I wrote that ended up on BASW and it (unbeknownst to him) hurt my 26-year-old feelings (when I was a big fan of his), and I probably carried that around for a bit longer than I should have. That's life. You make mistakes, you mature. I have considerable respect for him now, and have had friendly exchanges with him since. But other than that, I don't think there is much I'd rather not admit that I wrote. There was a time when I mocked The Big Lead regularly (before Richard Deitsch convinced McIntyre to out himself) because I thought his ethics were pretty shitty (Matt Leinart has another baby mama, so says my friend of a friend!), and he was doing his best to rub shit in the faces of every newspaper guy every time someone left newspaper to work for Yahoo. But whatever. I don't know that I regret that. We're different "journalists" and that's fine. I have no personal animus toward him. I'm actually happy for his success.

Whitlock likes to pretend that his beef with me was over some moral code, that I was taking shots at him repeatedly and anonymously, and he would never hide behind a screen name to do his business. That actually never happened. In fact, if you're up for a baffling and embarrassing take, check out this 2006 post I made where I respond to Fenian Bastard with a 1,000-word post about what I perceive as Whitlock's intellectual honesty as a columnist. Ugh. And here is his response, where he says essentially how much it meant to him. We used to be quite friendly in that anonymous internet way, and frequently praised one another's weekly take on The Wire.

For some reason he got it in his head, though, that I was going around giving myself anonymous blowjobs on this website, I guess because I once said the Wash Post was my favorite section in the country, and he assumed I must be Les Carpenter, and that he'd cracked the secret code and couldn't wait to expose me as a fraud. But here is the sad truth. He was simply mad I decided he should be played by Sweetums in a joke I was making about Deadspin/Gawker. That's really it. To be honest, I really didn't even think about it at the time. If I'd have known it was going to hurt his feelings that much, I would have just eliminated him from the joke, because I think fat guy jokes are the cheapest kind of humor.

The funny twist to all that is, Jason's attempt to "destroy" me might have helped me -- in a round about way -- get the job I currently have. I basically went Obi Wan Kenobi on him. It just kind of makes me laugh that in trying to "gotcha" me, he only helped me leave the job he tried to make fun of me for having.

But back to the lecture at hand (/Dr.Dre); Should you have an expectation of privacy on a message board or forum? I don't know. This dude thrived because of his anonymity. He really couldn't have become "Internet famous" without it because of all the despicable shit he was posting. Take that away and he's not the same poster, because he doesn't have the keyboard courage. At some point, I kind of decided I didn't really care who found out (it's a subject for another thread, but the prevalence of Facebook drastically changed SportsJournalists.com) because I could live with the consequences. (And in my case, it turns out the consequences were actually, well, good. It's why I try to tell people don't be a jerk on SJ.)

Brief interlude:

Even funnier is this — DyePack, as many of you recall, became convinced I was Drew Magary because I said something of Magary's made me laugh once. And DyePack's main beef with me (I swear this is true) is that he was really, really upset at how much I liked How I Met Your Mother (a show he hated!!!). So he went around and tried to out me, DD, as Magary, even once posting it in the comments of a Dan Le Batard column on the Miami Herald. (Don't ask me know I know that. I just do.)

Should you -- when the shit blows up -- have to own the things you do and say on the Internet? I think you're clearly right about Gawker, they have a very flexible moral code and the entire empire frequently falls back on the "What? It's just the Internet! Don't take yourself so seriously!" thing when they do something really questionable. (Dauliero outing the teenager who supposedly slept with Mark Sanchez, for example). But the one thing they seem to cling to is people shouldn't get to be anonymous and do mean things, or things they determine are interesting enough that it will help their own business model.

It makes for some interesting thinking. The other thing that I thought was compelling (and relate-able) was the way this dude got away with doing bad stuff because he got to be a part of the system, because of his relationship with the mods that went back years. I know that sentiment pops up here occasionally (moreso before the place was sold), and I think it's not unjustified. There is definitely a group of posters here who was really angry when a small group of posters split off and started TSD a few years ago, but the main reason it happened is because they/we (I guess I was part of it briefly) felt that a poster (who is still here) had tried to out another poster to their employer as revenge over a political argument, and that troll was allowed to go unpunished, as least as far as we understood. And we all suspected there were reasons behind the lack of punishment, and it went beyond "Well, we can't prove it." A lot of people wanted to pretend it about something else, but that was really what it came down to. That should have upset a lot of people, but for the most part, it did not.

One thing I feel like pointing out -- because a friend pointed it out on Twitter when he grew a little tired of seeing the story receive so much praise -- is how little reporting Chen actually did. I mean, how about calling the ex-wife and trying to confirm the thing about the stepdaughter? (Or confirm it's bullshit?) How about knocking on his door? A lot of the things in this story, we take the troll's word for it that he's telling the truth. Did he run a criminal background check on this guy? Basically, did he do anything other than G-chat and out another Reddit member based on the fact that he found him despicable? Sometimes, Internet reporting has to merge with real world reporting. If you wanted to go ALL IN on outing the guy, maybe do a little more legwork.

 

Great post, Les.

 

Tonight's sj challenge: find where Double Down edited his post.

 

I wish I didn't know who any of you were.

 

8th graf: ADDS italics


As a practical aside, if your online behavior is so reprehensible that Anderson Cooper calls you out on air, it is reasonable to expect people to put more effort into discovering your identity.