An Open Question To The Blogosphere.
We all benefit greatly from the openness and connectivity of blogging, but as we all know, that can be exploited. My question to you is this - if a highly respected and very popular blogger were to be experiencing anonymous abuse, death threats and general nastiness far beyond the normal ribbing and teasing, what would you suggest they or we do?
UPDATE: here.
posted by john dodds @ 11:50 AM
6 Comments:
Don't accept anonymous comments, report all threats of physical violence to the police, delete all nasty comments, and keep on posting.
Agreed Bill - I'm not the victim and the comments come in the form of other blogs/sites.
My main thought is Never Retreat.
For death threats, etc, trace their IP back to the Internet Service Provider and call both them and the police.
Don't give up on the good people of the world. But make sure threats are taken care of by the justice system we have.
I have a very hard time giving these threats any thought at all. For more than a decade now, the internet has proven a haven for pathetic weenies to make themselves feel big and important behind their anonymous online mask.
Getting worked up about it, talking about it, getting the police involved, and, in fact, doing anything other than just deleting the offending posts is exactly what the weenie wants: attention. You give them attention, they keep at it. You give them nothing, and they give up and go annoy someone else.
Now, I admit, there are very few people who pose a personal threat to me. I am a big guy, ex rugby player, lived and worked in the Balkans during the wars, and wear a kilt every day. Almost nobody is a threat to me! So I can treat these kinds of threats the same way I treat fruit flies.
I cannot speak from the perspective of an attracive blonde woman who lives in the public eye. And I do not assume to speak for her in this case.
But I do wonder what would happen if this moron was treated as just another troll, and consistently had his posts deleted...
CJ
If one can ignore the situation, then I would concur with you, but that's not always possible. Your argument is exactly why I made the original post - there are pros and cons to both the ignore and the publicise strategies and I was genuinely interested in gauging reaction.
That said, I know the degree of hurt that was felt and also know about, but am not privy to, the existence of much more than that material which has been made public.
I now hope that something good comes of this.
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