The ethics of revealing identities of people on your blog

Breaking news: There was a sex scandal in Washington DC this week!

100 years from now the first sentence of this post will still be relevant. Sex scandals are to politics what hangovers are to college fraternities. This week it's about Foley having sex with underage pages; a decade ago it was about Clinton getting oral pleasure from an intern, and, 2000 years ago, it was rumored that the Roman emperor Octavian got to his position by being on -ahem- "intimate" terms with Julius Caesar.

Therefore, the moral hypocrisy of a dirty old man in congress does not interest me all that much.

What is new is how the Foley scandal has given us an excellent opportunity to start taking about ethics, or lack thereof, in political blogging. Specifically, revealing the identities of people on your blog who would have preferred to stay out of the public eye.

Here's what happened in case you missed it:

When the Foley scandal broke, ABC appears to have left the AOL screen name of the alleged underage congressional page on it's website. A quick-thinking blogger named William Kerr, (aka "Wild Bill") of the blog PassionateAmerica, deduced the identity of this person and then posted the information on his site: Complete with a picture and where the individual was currently employed

Here is a link to a short news cast about the incident.*

It's easy to condemn Kerr offhand if he were a reporter.

But guess what?

Kerr is not a reporter, and PassionateAmerican is not a formal news-gathering organization.

When Kerr investigated the AOL screen-name he was writing about the story. When he went with the decision to publish personal information without taking into consideration the privacy of the individual, he became the story. An editor at a reputable newspaper would not have allowed Kerr to do this - but becoming the story is standard practice for many political bloggers.

Ignoring the legal consequences for Kerr of this, if indeed the page was 17 at the time of the IMs, what are the ethical lessons we can pull from this incident?

Ethics do not usually come into the equation for bloggers because the blogosphere is so new that no one really understands our role. Therefore in cases such as this the brickbats or laurels go merely to whomever posts first.

Here's an example of a brickbat Kerr got from conservative blogger Michele Malkin:

I refused to link to the blogger then and even though the Drudge Report has plastered screaming headlines about the blogger's scoop, I refuse to link to it now. There was absolutely no good reason to expose the former congressional page's name and identity. Seizing on ABC News' redaction failure and reporting errors (more on that in a moment) to play gotcha in a feeble attempt to avenge Foley is not a sufficient reason to obliterate the young man's privacy. The young man was the prey, not the predator.

It's interesting that Malkin would write this because seven months ago, in April of 2006, she published the names and phone numbers of people whom she disagreed with; people she knew to be students, possibly underage.

The point here is that A-list bloggers, who should have known better, have been just as guilty of not thinking about the privacy concerns of the people they report on as smaller blogs like PassionateAmerican.

Sunday night I contacted Kerr via Yahoo IM, and got his point-of-view directly. Kerr believes that the IMs ABC published on their site were from someone who was at least 18 years old at the time. He also believes that although he never talked with the person he claims as the author, the individual is now 21 years old... so he hasn't harmed a minor.

Therefore, he sees no ethical breach.

I disagree. Even if Kerr is 100% correct that the page was 18 at the time of the IMs, in the world of politics having your name associated with a sex scandal can sink a career even if you aren't the one with political power. Ask Monica Lewinsky.

Furthermore, the IMs Kerr references are not the only evidence that ABC had that Foley was acting inappropriately.

On the other hand, what would you have done if you suspected that ABC was giving out false information, but the main proof required a breach of someone's privacy?

Personally speaking, in this case, I would have kept the identity of the page a secret, but still posted how I came to my conclusions. I would have pushed relentlessly to hear from the page himself to confirm, deny or at least give me a "No comment." (In Kerr's case, the former congressional page worked nearby to him; Kerr could have easily driven over for a visit.)

Bloggers are, first and foremost, attention hounds. We live for the hit counter, and I believe that is what motivated Kerr more than anything, and he may wind up regretting it.

This is why we bloggers should look internally and ask ourselves why we blog, and, what kind of ethical standards we should hold our sites to.

I look forward to input from other bloggers on this topic.

Read counterpoint here.

Tags: blogging - blog ethics - standards - ethics - journalism