A Call for Manners in the World of Nasty Blogs

Is it too late to bring civility to the Web?
The conversational free-for-all on the Internet known as the blogosphere can be a prickly and unpleasant place. Now, a few high-profile figures in high-tech are proposing a blogger code of conduct to clean up the quality of online discourse.
Last week, Tim O’Reilly, a conference promoter and book publisher who is credited with coining the term Web 2.0, began working with Jimmy Wales, creator of the communal online encyclopedia Wikipedia, to create a set of guidelines to shape online discussion and debate.
Chief among the recommendations is that bloggers consider banning anonymous comments left by visitors to their pages and be able to delete threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship.
A recent outbreak of antagonism among several prominent bloggers “gives us an opportunity to change the level of expectations that people have about what’s acceptable online,” said Mr. O’Reilly, who posted the preliminary recommendations last week on his company blog (radar.oreilly.com). Mr. Wales then put the proposed guidelines on his company’s site (blogging.wikia.com), and is now soliciting comments in the hope of creating consensus around what constitutes civil behavior online.
Mr. O’Reilly and Mr. Wales talk about creating several sets of guidelines for conduct and seals of approval represented by logos. For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.
Bloggers could then pick a set of principles and post the corresponding badge on their page, to indicate to readers what kind of behavior and dialogue they will engage in and tolerate. The whole system would be voluntary, relying on the community to police itself.
The code of conduct already has some early supporters, including David Weinberger, a well-known blogger (hyperorg.com/blogger) and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. “The aim of the code is not to homogenize the Web, but to make clearer the informal rules that are already in place anyway,” he said.

But as with every other electrically charged topic on the Web, finding common ground will be a serious challenge. Some online writers wonder how anyone could persuade even a fraction of the millions of bloggers to embrace one set of standards. Others say that the code smacks of restrictions on free speech.
Mr. Wales and Mr. O’Reilly were inspired to act after a firestorm erupted late last month in the insular community of dedicated technology bloggers. In an online shouting match that was widely reported, Kathy Sierra, a high-tech book author from Boulder County, Colo., and a friend of Mr. O’Reilly, reported getting death threats that stemmed in part from a dispute over whether it was acceptable to delete the impolitic comments left by visitors to someone’s personal Web site.
Menacing behavior is certainly not unique to the Internet. But since the Web offers the option of anonymity with no accountability, online conversations are often more prone to decay into ugliness than those in other media.
Nowadays, those conversations often take place on blogs. At last count, there were 70 million of them, with more than 1.4 million entries being added daily, according to Technorati, a blog-indexing company. For the last decade, these Web journals have offered writers a way to amplify their voices and engage with friends and readers.
But the same factors that make those unfiltered conversations so compelling, and impossible to replicate in the offline world, also allow them to spin out of control.
Women are not the only targets of nastiness. For the last four years, Richard Silverstein has advocated for Israeli-Palestinian peace on a blog (richardsilverstein.com) that he maintains from Seattle.
People who disagree with his politics frequently leave harassing comments on his site. But the situation reached a new low last month, when an anonymous opponent started a blog in Mr. Silverstein’s name that included photos of Mr. Silverstein in a pornographic context.
One public bid to improve the quality of dialogue on the Web came more than a year ago when Mena Trott, a co-founder of the blogging software company Six Apart, proposed elevating civility on the Internet in a speech she gave at a French blog conference. At the event, organizers had placed a large screen on the stage showing instant electronic responses to the speeches from audience members and those who were listening in online.
“Any community that does not make it clear what they are doing, why they are doing it, and who is welcome to join the conversation is at risk of finding it difficult to help guide the conversation later,” said Lisa Stone, who created the guidelines and the BlogHer network in 2006 with Elisa Camahort and Jory Des Jardins.
A subtext of both sets of rules is that bloggers are responsible for everything that appears on their own pages, including comments left by visitors. They say that bloggers should also have the right to delete such comments if they find them profane or abusive.
That may sound obvious, but many Internet veterans believe that blogs are part of a larger public sphere, and that deleting a visitor’s comment amounts to an assault on their right to free speech. It is too early to gauge support for the proposal, but some online commentators are resisting.
Mr. O’Reilly said the guidelines were not about censorship. “That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make — believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,” he said. “Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

Britain’s Military to Permit Former Captives to Sell Stories

Two days after they were paraded as heroes with a story to tell, some of the 15 British sailors and marines captured and released by Iran seemed Sunday to have decided they have a story to sell.
In a highly unusual decision, Britain’s Ministry of Defense — normally tight-lipped, to say the least — acknowledged Saturday that it had agreed to permit them to offer their experiences for sale to newspapers and television stations.
Such transactions are common enough among civilians, some of whom have traded the rights to their stories for considerable sums of money. But the notion of active military service members making a profit from their exploits — particularly when thousands of others serving in Iraq and Afghanistan face daily peril and sometimes death — has reinforced the criticism of the 15 Britons’ seemingly pliant behavior toward the Iranians holding them.
“Our armed forces are, I think, the most respected institution in the country pretty much, and they deserve to be after the job they have done in very difficult circumstances in Iraq and in Afghanistan,” William Hague, the opposition Conservative spokesman on foreign affairs, said in a television interview.
“But if, whenever people have been in a difficult situation, they are going to be allowed to sell their story quickly after that, then I think we are going to lose steadily that dignity and respect for our armed forces.”
Six of the 15 former captives spoke at a news conference on Friday, recounting moments when some of them thought they were about to be executed as they faced psychological pressure to make public “confessions” on state-run Iranian television that they had unlawfully strayed into Iranian territorial waters.
The Ministry of Defense’s decision to allow them to tell the stories of solitary confinement and blindfolding to the public seemed intended to offset criticism in newspapers here that the sailors and marines had succumbed too easily and too quickly to Iranian pressure. The critics said their behavior contrasted markedly with that of service personnel in earlier eras, when captured service members were under orders to provide their captors with only limited information.
“It seems reasonable to at least wonder whatever happened to divulging one’s name, rank and number,” the columnist Marina Hyde wrote in The Guardian.
Opposition even came from the possibly unexpected quarter of Max Clifford, one of Britain’s leading publicists, who, as a well-known agent on behalf of people selling their stories, has done as much as anyone to put the word checkbook into checkbook journalism.
“This is purely a propaganda exercise,” Mr. Clifford told The Press Association news agency. “In the past troops were always stopped from talking about what had gone on.”
“They can control it, and they do control it when it suits them,” he said, referring to the Ministry of Defense. “It didn’t suit them in this particular case.”
The Ministry of Defense said in a statement on Sunday that the sale of stories would strengthen its control over what the released sailors and marines had to say.
“It was clear that the stories they had to tell were likely to have emerged via family and friends, regardless of any decision the navy took,” the statement said.
By allowing them to sell their stories, by contrast, the statement said, the navy and the Ministry of Defense would have “sight of what they were going to say as well as providing proper media support to the sailors and marines in the same way as would have been the case in more ordinary circumstances.”
Mr. Clifford estimated that the sales could earn about $500,000, with the biggest amount likely to be paid to Leading Seaman Faye Turney, the only woman among the captives, who was said by Iranian television to have written letters home criticizing British and American policy.
Mr. Clifford said he had been approached by three or four of the service members about selling their stories.
In some ways, the unfolding saga of the 15 — captured on March 23 in the Persian Gulf — has become a parable for modern Britain in a time when warfare has become intertwined with the battle of perceptions and versions played out on 24-hour television news channels.
During the captivity, British, American and other broadcasters picked up and retransmitted Iranian video of the captives seeming to deny Britain’s official insistence that they were captured while performing a legal search in Iraqi waters.
“The released hostages are behaving like reality TV stars,” Col. Bob Stewart, a former commander of United Nations forces in Bosnia, told The Sunday Times of London. “I am appalled that the Ministry of Defense is encouraging them to profit in this way.”
There is an element, too, of the class distinctions that still stratify some parts of British society. “No one complains if a general writes his memoirs,” said Flight Lt. John Nichol, who was captured and tortured during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. “But there is snobbery about a junior rank telling their story.”
The most poignant criticism came from the relatives of the 140 British service members who have died in Iraq since the invasion in March 2003 and of the 52 who have died in Afghanistan since 2001.
“This is wrong and I don’t think it should be allowed,” Rose Gentle, the mother of a 19-year-old soldier killed in Basra in 2004, said of the decision to allow the sailors and marines to sell their stories.
One of the former captives, at least, had a different view on the sale of stories. “I am not interested in making money out of this,” said Lt. Felix Carman of the navy, the highest-ranking of the 15 captives, who spoke at length during Friday’s news conference. “My main aim is to tell the story.”
“There’s some people who might be making money, but that’s an individual’s decision, that’s very private, but that’s not something that myself or many of the others will do,” he said.

Costly Contraceptives

For almost 20 years, college health centers have been able to purchase contraceptives at nominal prices. This was not a tax-funded subsidy. It was a financial incentive that gave drug manufacturers an exemption from Medicaid pricing rules so they could sell contraceptives and other products to certain charitable groups, like the college clinics, at an extreme discount. In response to concerns that drug companies were abusing this privilege, language was sewn into legislation in 2005 to close a loophole. It also inadvertently slashed this important benefit for clinics and their patients.
On some college campuses, the price of brand-name contraceptives has risen from the neighborhood of $5 per month to $40 or even $50. Switching to a generic is an option in some cases, but it can still entail a 300 percent price increase. Generics often run at about $15 per month. Newer contraceptives, like the NuvaRing, which contains a very low hormone dose and does not require a daily action that is easily forgotten, are not yet available generically. Many students are priced out of the market.
The spike in price affects more than just consumers of contraceptive devices and pills. College and university health clinics sold these products for a small profit — buying them at, say, $3 and selling them at $5. Even on a small campus, these dollars add up quickly. The money was an important part of health center operating budgets, paying for classes and even subsidizing more expensive medications.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services could reapply these exemptions with the stroke of a pen. If they do not, Congress should restore this much-needed benefit.