Exploring Blogospheric Ethics
By Jesse Singal - Nov 20th, 2008 at 11:25 amFeministe is a really good blog, but I disagree with something that Jill, one of the site’s primary bloggers, did yesterday:
My initial post here was just my preliminary thoughts on the auto bail-out. I’m still not sure where I stand, but I’ve taken the post down because the more I read and actually focus on the issues involved, the more I can’t stand by what I wrote, and the more I feel that the initial post was doing unnecessary harm to this community. Apologies. Feel free to continue the discussion.
I’m completely open to arguments as to why I’m wrong about this, but I don’t think Jill was right to take down the post in question. The proper move here, in my view, is to write a follow-up post apologizing and to stick an editor’s note at the top of the original post linking to the apology.
If you write something, you’re responsible for it. Obviously things are a bit different with blogs than they are with magazines or newspapers, which is why this is sort of an interesting case study in blogo-journalistic ethics, but I still think that once you hit that “post” button, you’ve made a commitment to what you wrote.
This isn’t a set-in-stone ideological commitment, of course–you can write something and realize 20 minutes later that you were completely wrong–but it is a commitment in the sense of, “At this date and this time, here’s what I thought and wrote.” Thus, the proper response if it proves unpopular, or if it’s debunked, or if you were in a bad mood when you wrote it and this colored your judgment, isn’t to take it down–which violates that commitment–but to follow up and explain why you’re unhappy with what you wrote.
I’ll now get off the soapbox. Do people agree or disagree with me on this? It’s somewhat uncharted territory, which is why it might make for a good discussion.
I think her response covered it - it was a mis-/un-informed post, and leaving it up would have perpetuated that mis-/un-information. She redirected to comments wherein far better informed people were doing a much better job of comvering the topic.
November 20th, 2008 at 4:02 pm