ATTENTION BLOGGERS

'One case does not justify the need for group punishment'. Something that I would have to totally agree with. Unfortunately, it seems that a prominent blogger by the name of Tim O'Reily has other plans for the online blogging community.

This all happened after a certain incident that has happened to a friend of his online who got numerous hate-mail in her inbox, countless death threats on her blog and now lives all alone in a locked up apartment somewhere unknown to probably the little part of the 'real' community she lives in that actually cares about her.

Now, he demands that there would be guidelines for bloggers worldwide to stop anonymous comments being published on their blog's posts and furthermore, the need to implement a certain code of conduct amongst the vast online social buzz.

This would mean further restricting freedom of speech online that is already under threat by local and international law institutions that do not believe in this concept and a certain decrease in the number of people who would go about commenting on each other's posts.

This demand does not justify having to pass on this as a law amongst the online community because of one person's endeavor into what she knew she was getting herself into. For all we know she could have pushed the people online to do such an act on her blog and email by posting something that almost everyone disagreed on and passionately so, may I add. In addition, she could have stopped these comments and emails from coming to her by simply pressing the 'delete' button in either cases - but she didn't. Which is all the more reason to say that she was actually inviting in the comments.

I feel no sympathy for this woman. There are bloggers everywhere that have worse cases against them by being locked up by their governments because they publish information that their country's officials consider highly sensitive and would rather keep it under wraps.

This woman, knew what she was getting into when first signing up to open up a new blog and she knew there would be a consequence for every post she published online there. So it seems no surprise to me that this would happen to someone who thinks that the entire world is supporting her 100% all the way.

...Because that is just simply childish.

Question is now; would you submit your blog to these demands? And why?

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Links:

- Now, a civility code for bloggers?

- Weblogs 'need content warnings'