Academia and anonymous blog posts
May 10, 2013 5:49 AM Subscribe
Do any academic institutions allow uncredited blog posts?
I've been following a post from the College of Europe. It's a notoriously EU Institution friendly place, but yesterday an anonymous blog post appeared on their official blog, criticising the current EU Commission president. It wasn't outspoken especially, apart from by the college's usual standards.
Today, it vanished with no explanation. Thanks to the Streisand effect, it has now become widely known.
One person has appeared to offer an explanation, but there's no indication that they are a current student or academic at the college, but the defence seems to be: an academic institution cannot allow anonymous people to publish on its blog without being responsible for what they say. No other academic institution would ever allow it.
An academic has said "the contribution was not signed, and this does not seem to be a great start for an honest debate."
Apart from not understanding the Chatham House Rule for a start, this does seem a little, well, what does it look like to you?
I've been following a post from the College of Europe. It's a notoriously EU Institution friendly place, but yesterday an anonymous blog post appeared on their official blog, criticising the current EU Commission president. It wasn't outspoken especially, apart from by the college's usual standards.
Today, it vanished with no explanation. Thanks to the Streisand effect, it has now become widely known.
One person has appeared to offer an explanation, but there's no indication that they are a current student or academic at the college, but the defence seems to be: an academic institution cannot allow anonymous people to publish on its blog without being responsible for what they say. No other academic institution would ever allow it.
An academic has said "the contribution was not signed, and this does not seem to be a great start for an honest debate."
Apart from not understanding the Chatham House Rule for a start, this does seem a little, well, what does it look like to you?
I can't speak for all academic institutions, but I wouldn't be surprised if official blogs for any institution had strict(er) rules, both for content and for attribution, than personal or other professional blogs and websites.
posted by acm at 6:32 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]
posted by acm at 6:32 AM on May 10, 2013 [1 favorite]
I'm surprised that the institution even set up a blog where anyone could post to it. That's really unusual. Student blogs, etc. typically have all kinds of editorial restrictions.
It does look like one of their requirements is that blog posts be signed, which seems reasonable to me, and there's a disclaimer that blog posts aren't the opinion of the university.
It also looks like there's some kind of editorial group whose members do the actual posting of content to the blog. So I'm reading between the lines and seeing some kind of politics around the anonymous posting.
But what does it look like to you?
posted by wenat at 7:25 AM on May 10, 2013
It does look like one of their requirements is that blog posts be signed, which seems reasonable to me, and there's a disclaimer that blog posts aren't the opinion of the university.
It also looks like there's some kind of editorial group whose members do the actual posting of content to the blog. So I'm reading between the lines and seeing some kind of politics around the anonymous posting.
But what does it look like to you?
posted by wenat at 7:25 AM on May 10, 2013
the defence seems to be: an academic institution cannot allow anonymous people to publish on its blog without being responsible for what they say.
I really don't understand this sentence. Do you mean to say that this is a clumsy defence and they are, in truth, accountable for what was posted regardless of whether they have a policy allowing anonymous posting?
This is US law, but there's also what's called a common carrier provision. Under that metric, ISPs and other internet service vendors are exempted from liability for what their users do -- for instance, storing a pirated movie, and the full brunt of enforcement thus falls on the individual who committed the act. (Originally this was so people wouldn't sue the phone company if they got a harassing call.) In a technical legal sense, then, editing or moderating posts can actually nullify the common carrier protection. But I don't think that would apply to a blog, necessarily, and in any case there isn't a criminal penalty here as far as I can tell.
If the only concern is "an honest debate", well, the participants in aggregate need to define the terms of what constitutes one. It's sort of irrelevant what individual institutions decide as, barring the adoption of a universal model standard, they'll all have slightly differing policies anyway.
posted by dhartung at 5:54 AM on May 11, 2013
I really don't understand this sentence. Do you mean to say that this is a clumsy defence and they are, in truth, accountable for what was posted regardless of whether they have a policy allowing anonymous posting?
This is US law, but there's also what's called a common carrier provision. Under that metric, ISPs and other internet service vendors are exempted from liability for what their users do -- for instance, storing a pirated movie, and the full brunt of enforcement thus falls on the individual who committed the act. (Originally this was so people wouldn't sue the phone company if they got a harassing call.) In a technical legal sense, then, editing or moderating posts can actually nullify the common carrier protection. But I don't think that would apply to a blog, necessarily, and in any case there isn't a criminal penalty here as far as I can tell.
If the only concern is "an honest debate", well, the participants in aggregate need to define the terms of what constitutes one. It's sort of irrelevant what individual institutions decide as, barring the adoption of a universal model standard, they'll all have slightly differing policies anyway.
posted by dhartung at 5:54 AM on May 11, 2013
« Older Baby got (a bad) back. What next? | Will search engine users ever pay a user fee to... Newer »
This thread is closed to new comments.
posted by taz (staff) at 6:09 AM on May 10, 2013