On monday evening I attended a panel at Westminster Skeptics and posited a question to Tim Ireland and the panel, along the lines of:

The facility of search – Google Search, Twitter Search – makes the web a content-addressable space; if someone says something nasty and the words are reported, we can soon identify the source of the words by searching on the text.

If I am insulted on Twitter, is there a moral imperative / duty of care upon me to try to anonymise the source of insult by suppressing the exact words with which someone insulted me?

If not then – because search makes a person’s words almost equivalent to their identity – what is wrong with my clearly identifying someone who has insulted me, albeit that that might lead to a Twitter-mobbing (Twitchforks?) of the source?

This question was inspired by Tim’s panning of Ricky Gervaise for outing/naming people who were criticising him; for me – immersed in the net for 25+ years – words and identities are approximately equivalent because of search, so I find this notion of not-naming-someone-who-is-trivially-searchable to be a twee tradition, especially when it is over something so pointless as celebrity slanging.

The panel essentially resolved the question by refining behavioural rules as “don’t be the first person to behave like an asshole” (or similar phasing) – which is not far off the ages-old Netiquette guidelines.

I am a lot happier with that rule than with general prescription against naming-and-shaming.

But just to prove that content-based addressing works, from the Daily Mail today:

Angry employee’s resignation speech which outs manager for having sex in the office with female colleague goes viral after he emails it to entire workforce

[…]

Damning: The email from disgruntled employee Kieran Allen provides reasons as to why he has decided to leave his job at London-based media agency MEC Global. Parts are censored for legal reasons

…a quick Google will fill in all the redactions.

Simple, huh?

One wonders where the first asshole is in this chain of communication.

Where this gets messy and emotive is when the same argument is applied to something like the naming of rape-accusers in large and messy legal contexts – at which point you’re taking for granted that people not only understand that this works and is trivial, but also that everyone approves of this freely available mechanism even where it runs counter to accepted practice of information which should not be known / should be legally protected.

Taking that for granted is a really bad idea, and we’re going to be in for a really bumpy ride when the courts and parliament finally try to “address” the matter.