Frank and I watched that Dixie Chicks movie tonight–three young women, toting seven babies among them, trying to make a career in the public arena, end up a focus of loonies who think it’s great fun to target prominent women with ugly insults, an attempt to wreck their career, and some (maybe credible and maybe not) death threats.
I had no idea, when I borrowed Shut Up and Sing from my little sis in Florida, that it would be so relevant to the current blogstorm surrounding ugly insults (and more) aimed at some of the blogosphere’s most high-profile women on some websites that just got called out by Kathy Sierra.
I’m glad that by pushing back hard and loudly and effectively, Kathy Sierra has got some much-needed wider public attention to cyber-bullying. I would have preferred it if her mention of their names hadn’t aimed lynch-mob psychologies toward two of my most admired elder-bloggers, Jeneane Sessum and Frank Paynter. (And I am proud of my old friend Dave Winer for stepping up to defend Frank and Jeneane and even Rageboy, all of whom have said some pretty harsh things about him in the past.)
I’m not in favor of lynch-mobs–and I should probably take Dean Landsman’s good advice to “Blog no evil.”
But I’m not ready to make nice on this.
I think that those who wrote ugly stuff about Kathy and Maryam and Tara deserve to think about what it would mean to have their own real names permanently attached to the nasty stuff they wrote in some “sekrit” web clubhouse.
Doc Searls was told that some unknown hacker made all this big mess. If that’s the case, said hacker has been responsible for criminal acts far beyond cyber-bullying, and I look forward to reading more about police efforts to learn the troll’s identity. Update: Doc has now expressed some doubts of his own on this story.
I hope that Kathy and Maryam and Tara will dismay their tormentors, as the Dixie Chicks did, by moving on to more renown and new achievements.