In today's Salon, columnist Joan Walsh has a piece about Don Imus' stupid on-air remarks and takes a little time to discuss the Blogger's Code. As usual, Walsh gets it exactly right...
- I applaud efforts by bloggers and other online publishers to raise the quality of discussion on the Web, as well as to discourage sexism and abuse of women. At Salon, we struggle with these issues daily, and as you know, we recently made some changes to our posting policy, requiring people to register before they post comments or letters. Where some bloggers ban anonymous comments, at Salon we're going to continue allowing people to choose to post anonymously (for the reasons laid out well by posters in this comments thread). If we find that people are abusing the anonymous option to post abusive attacks on our writers or one another, we'll reconsider our policy. Right now, I don't anticipate that will be necessary. But I certainly consider it within our rights as a publishing company -- and I think any individual blogger has the same right. We also reserve the right -- and we use it -- to delete posts we consider abusive and/or off-topic.
What I don't understand is how anyone can believe that banning anonymous posts or deleting abusive ones curtails their "freedom of speech." Salon and individual bloggers aren't agents of the government; if you don't like our posting policies, you're free to stop visiting, or even to start your own blog criticizing us. In the New York Times piece tech publisher Tim O'Reilly and Wikipedia's Jimmy Wales talked about developing a tiered code of standards that would let readers know what they could anticipate on a given blog -- my tier might allow anonymous comments; yours might not, and there could be some kind of logo that helps visitors understand the realm they've entered. The whole thing seems a little impractical to me, given the breadth of the blogosphere, but it doesn't seem sinister. But Podtech.net's Robert Scoble, who stopped blogging for a week in solidarity with Kathy Sierra, told the New York Times the proposed rules "make me feel uncomfortable" and added, "As a writer, it makes me feel like I live in Iran." Scoble is smarter than that.