More on the internet and freedom of speech

I was lying on my parents' sofa hungover one sunday watching the Hollyoaks omnibus when my 12-year-old brother entered the room in floods of tears. As I comforted him, he managed to tell me between sobs that something on the computer had upset him. I stomped over to the machine, ready to confront any pubescent cyber-bullies tormenting him on Bebo, and found instead the end of a YouTube video. Clicking 'play again', I felt nausea creep through my stomach as a baying crowd loaded on the screen and it became clear what was showing. It was a video of Saddamn Hussein's execution.

Ok, so recorded deaths may be pretty extreme in terms of what the average user posts to the net, but the fact that a site owned by the most powerful internet company in the world can't even control and moderate all its content just shows what a wild beast the internet is to tame. Defamatory claims are posted to message boards, pictures are shared without copyright and gory videos such as these make their way in to the hands of 12-year-olds. Just recently, the identities of Baby P's killers spread across facebook like wildfire and the BNP's membership list was not so much leaked as flooded across forums and blogs.

Shane Richmond, The Telegraph's communities editor, suggested to us that instead of fighting a losing battle we may have to just accept that we can never control the internet's content. He argued that many of our laws, such as defamation as contempt are court, are unenforceable in the online world and should be modified to reflect this.

Furthermore, users come to the internet because they want and expect freedom of speech, so who are we to deny this? We as journalists are paid to provide them with what they want. Now the greater choice available to them means we must work even harder to win their loyalty - and if a community where they can say and post what they wish is the way to do this, then so be it.

I've blogged on the complexities of free speech and the internet before, and have been unconvinced that minimal moderation is the best thing for users. Harmful, offensive and violent material aside, how can we ensure that users are not left swimming in an ocean of user-generated sewage, hunting for that illusive golden nugget of information they actually need? But if we waltz around social media culling anything not up-to-scratch, would we just become intellectual nazis, denying those without an educated or articulate voice the right to express themselves?

It's too early to tell whether either of these somewhat-apocalyptic visions will materialise in the future. But as it becomes ever clearer that the days when the user's voice remain silent are never coming back, the more we can be sure that this tight-rope line between moderation, protection and freedom of expression is one we shall be struggling to walk our whole careers.

(photo by gawd, shared under a creative commons license)

Adventures in Second Life: by a technologically-incompetent student journo

To start with, I wasn't impressed with the lack of decent surnames on offer - how the hell am I supposed to live out a 'fantasy' life with a name like Poliatevsta? I settled begrudgingly for 'Marigold Mubble' and sat watching the odd picture of a sunset that shows as the game loads with an impending sense of near-doom. It was fear of the unknown. What secrets would be lurking in this digital landscape? What mysteries lay around the pixelated corner? Would I survive or perish in this strange new world?

Firstly it took me over half an hour to even dress myself properly. A very friendly and patient 'mentor' named Davede helped me repeatedly as I struggeld first of all to pick up a dress, then put it on, then try to remove the clothes I still had on undeath before accidentally taking far too much off and ending up topless. A most classy entrance for Marigold.

"Lol. This is crazy. I don't think my computer's good enough for this!" said Luna, another fellow newbie, as she turned her back and disappeared off to the real world.

"It must get annoying having to teach us imbeciles how to do these basic tasks all day" I said to Davede.

"No not at all," was his reply, his little animated face conveying not a spot of emotion.

After spending time attempting to change my hair without much luck, my real non-pixelated dinner was ready on the table, it was time for I'm a Celebrity..! and I had wasted a good hour or so of my life. I logged off, feeling slightly guilty about not saying farewell to Davede after all his help, then figured he was probably used to it.

And so Second Life has remained a mere unused, unloved icon on my desktop ever since. I don't think I really have the time or the energy to dedicate to immersing myself in it. But if another strange divorce case comes up, at least I know how to put on an outfit to interview the subject in....

Second life divorce case: What it means for journalists

The case of Amy Taylor, who is divorcing her husband after finding him commiting adultery in the online game Second Life, sounds bizarre to many people. But even more bizarre is the story of how reporters uncovered it.

The Guardian reports that journalists from South West News, unable to communicate with the couple in real life, tracked down their online characters in the game and interviewed them in cyberspace.


One of the journalists working on the case said: "In real life [Taylor] had rejected everything - knocks on the door, letters, phone calls. But our characters started chatting and it was different. She began to trust us. Amy's character was much more confident in the game than she was in real life." South West News are now looking at opening an online bureau in Second Life.


The more the internet becomes central to our lives, the more we will see stories such as this crop up. Anthony Mayfield gave us a statistic which hinted at what may be to come: the longer someone has had broadband internet at home, the more likely they are to be highly engaged with the online world. When you consider that many households in the UK have only had broadband internet for two years or less, the more likely it is our relationships, achievements, traumas and tragedies will be played out online rather than off.


Us journalists will need new ways of scooping stories from the virtual world. So in light of the Taylor case, I decided to do what journos all over the country are probably scrambling to do and set myself up a Second Life account.....

The beginner's guide to blogging

When first ordered by the powers that be to start and maintain a blog, many of us aspiring journos fell into a state of panic. What should we blog about? Will anyone actually read it? Will they end up lonely and abandoned in the great blog graveyard in the sky?

Luckily, Adam Tinworth came to quell some of our fears. His top blogging rules were: keep the subject focused, keep the content varied, drive plenty of traffic and see it as a discussion with rather than a lecture at your readers.

Here's a podcast a few of put together dicussing this in more detail:

Peaches turns fashion designer...

My favourite celebrity is apparently now bored of being a writer and has turned her hand to fashion designing, The Guardian reports today.

Her first capsule collection for PPQ is apparently "inspired by her personal style", in a similar vein to celebrities such as Kate Moss and Lily Allen's forays into design.

Is this really what we want from fashion designers - a churning out of endless copies of celebrities' own clothes? What happened to original ideas?

Georgina Baillie and the sad tale of be-careful-what-you-put-on-your-myspace

When social media first became popular, many of us surrendered our private information to it without a second thought. Dates of birth and addresses were posted and hundreds of photographs uploaded with little consideration as to who could access them or own the rights to them. But as identity theft and other examples (hello, Sarah Palin) of the risks of this lack of privacy appeared, paranoia set in and we started to set our profiles to 'private', deleted suspicious 'friends' and un-tagged photos. Some even committed facebook suicide and opted out of social networking altogether.

But even if you go to all these lengths to protect your identity, you can never be sure that all your information is completely safe.

Now I don't think Georgina Baillie, the woman at the centre of the 'Sachsgate' scandal, should need much introduction. I was actually acquainted with Georgina about two years ago, albeit through a rather tenuous link - she was friends with the girlfriend of someone in my social circle at the time. Let's call the girlfriend 'A'. As the controversy escalated last week, I clicked on to the website of a national newspaper to read what was being said about Georgina. They had harvested several photos from her MySpace account, and one in particular gave me a shock.

Nope, it wasn't stills from her dance troup's "cheerleader massacre" routine, it was a rather more innocent picture of her with some friends on a night out. And who was standing next to her? 'A'.

'A' had not even uploaded the picture up to MySpace herself, Georgina had. But now her image was splashed over national news without her consent and without her control.

Web 2.0 technology means that anyone can upload content, and even if you go to great lengths to protect your privacy it's almost impossible to stop other people sharing your information if they want to.

As social media continues to play an ever-larger part in our lives, should we be educating people more about its benefits and risks? It could help the non-new-media-literate elderly and disabled, providing them with greater access to services and community, but also ensure that we all know about the risks to our privacy and personal information.