[conspire] Rick's Linux Gazette essay

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Adrien Lamothe (a_lamothe at yahoo.com):

> I believe the town-hall meeting is indeed related, because an internet
> mailing list is a form of electronic town hall. Anonymity becomes a
> problem when people anonymously slander; but then again the moderator
> can always delete the post and ban the sender.

Well, since you raise the point:

I spoke of personal smear-campaigns conducted online against people with
established public reputations by anonymous people with (generally
undisclosed) grudges, sometimes posting from multiple "sock puppet" fake
identities to make a single crank look like a crowd.  My point was to
call attention to the asymmetry of that sort of attack, and to suggest
extreme skepticism when we see someone obviously hiding behind
pseudonyms bashing someone notable.

You spoke of a town-hall meeting (but your actual phrase at the time was
"panel discussion event") where a couple of initially unnamed critics in
the audience rose to challenge statements made by the panel, one of whom
derided the critics as anonymous snipers from the audience who had not
claimed ownership of their words.  You pointed out that the critics'
claims were demonstrably true.


The critics in your story were not conducting an anonymous personal smear
campaign.  They _were_ physically present and thus to at least that
degree standing behind their claims, rather than taking shots from
behind an online handle, and, though unnamed initially, could readily be 
either asked to identify themselves or otherwise held accountable.  They
would have been unable to perform the "sock puppet" trick.

See the difference?

And no, an Internet mailing list (or, worse, a Web forum with
pseudonymous posting) is very little like a town hall, if only because 
in a town hall you can't have a dozen fake identities speaking to praise
the wisdom of your comments, and you can't accuse the mayor of being a
child-molester and then slip out the door without being identified.


You came rather close to suggesting I wanted people ignored if they
don't have established "names" or seem otherwise obscure.  But I said
nothing at all like that.  What I said was:  be extremely skeptical of 
personal smear-campaigns conducted online against people with
established public reputations by anonymous people with (generally 
undisclosed) grudges.

And, in _our_ community, which has way too many passive-aggressive
pinheads with no discernable morals, you won't have to look far, either.