System 13

Earlier today as I was going through my feeds, I came across this post by Nils. While it’s certainly not his fault, having read the post has darkened my day quite a bit.

What’s it about, then? It’s about threats of violence in the blogosphere. Kathy Sierra of Creating Passionate Users has, for the past four weeks or so, been getting death threats in the comments on her blog. There have also been some violent images and nasty comments directed towards her on a few different blogs, like meankids.org (no longer in existence), as well as unclebobism.wordpress.com (also no longer in existence, due to breaking the terms of service at wordpress.com). You can read more about what’s been going on here.

When you get down to it, the title of her entry says, in short form, what I want to express here:

Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech”

Blogging has been heralded as a great tool in exercising one’s right to free speech. People across the world have turned to blogging to express themselves, particularly those who aren’t permitted to do so in their local areas.

However, regardless of how great blogging is when it comes to expressing yourself, that doesn’t mean you can go around threatening bloggers you don’t like. Blogosphere or “the real world”, threats of such a nature are still a federal offense here in the United States. As Scoble remarked, a lot of people just take such threats on the internet as part of the territory. The anonymity that the internet supplies makes some people lose sight of the fact (or perhaps, they just stop caring about the fact) that they’re dealing with human beings. The fact of the matter is, bloggers shouldn’t have to deal with such threats. I don’t know what the solution is, but “coping” with such sick shit isn’t the answer. As Kathy remarked in her post, she’s probably never going to be the same, and to be honest, if people were hurling death threats and sexual attacks at me over the internet, I’d probably be feeling pretty screwed up, too.

If you have a blog, it’d be great if you blogged about what’s going on, to get it out there for all to see. The first part of the solution to this issue is to get people to realize that it’s happening in the first place.

As a note, if I sound like a jerk in this post, my apologies. I’m just really upset about this, because it could just as easily be any of us bloggers going through what Kathy is going through. What those people have done to her is total bullshit, and to put it bluntly, it has got me extremely pissed off.

Update: Here’s another good post about this over at apophenia.