BlogHer Session: "Does the Blogosphere Need an Intolerance Intervention?"

I went to a fabulous BlogHer Session on Day 1 called "Does the Blogosphere Need an Intolerance Intervention?" that was moderated one of my Twitter buddies, Liz Henry.  The panelists were Laina Dawes, Tish Grier, and Kathryn Thompson.

Laina is a Contributing Editor for the BlogHer section on Race, Ethnicity and Culture.  She said that having an open dialogue on race that sparks discussion and debate is not easy to do.  Lots of people are talking about it, but there need to be some rules and regulations for how the blog operates.  Certain dynamics on websites that should be respected.  She has had to deal with lots of trolls, and not just different opinions.   She thinks it is fine for people to say, "I don't agree with you" and state why, but most of the time it is not like that.  Often, people argue that the blogger is being too sensitive, in an attempt to diffuse the situation, or negate the experience.   This is just one of the barriers to honest discussion.

Kathryn writes a parenting blog called Daring Young Mom.  Kathryn said she sometimes writes about topical news issues, but doesn't post them because readers come to her blog expecting one thing, and may be put off.  For example, she wrote about her thoughts on Don Imus, but did not post it.  She is saving them for another blog. She hopes to be entertaining in what she writes, but keeps it clean.  Her first experience of intolerance was with a particular blogger who said she had infilitrated the "legitimate Christians" because she is a Mormon and won a Christian blogger award.  This person singled her out and wrote nasty blog posts about Kathryn, even though her blog is not about her religion.  It was hurtful, and hard to deal with, but her friends in the blogging community rallied to her defense.

Tish writes a blog called the Constant Observer. Her main reason for blogging is to go on A list male blog sites, where there are not a lot of women and challenge them.  Drawing attention to women's points of view is important.  Jay Rosen once posted that women were terrorized on the blogosphere, and she said he was totally wrong.  A-list male bloggers will get rough if you challenge them, and decry the fact that most blogging is an echo chamber.  The echo chamber effect is caused by all men talking in the blogosphere, with no women's voices in politics, technology, journalism in the A-list blogs there to engage them.

Liz posed the question: When do you know if an argument has been constructive?

Laina:  If someone disagrees with you, be willing to recognize validity of the comment.  A true dialogue happens if someone coming to your site will learn something from the exchange.  This will invite people into the site.  If things are presented as black or white, people will easily dismiss it, so you need discuss the nuances.  It's great to have commenters bring opinions and personal stories to broaden the scope of the discussion.

Kathryn:  It's important to allow the discussion, even if you disagree with the opinions of your commenters.  She is pro-life, and wrote a post explaining why.  That post engendered better discussion and understanding for her of the Pro-Choice point of view.  She said the greatest compliment was when a Pro-Choice blogger said, "This is the first Pro-Life blog post I've read where I didn't want to strangle the author" and the commenter is still part of her reader community.

Some takeaway messages from the panel and the audience on keeping the dialogue constructive, and where to draw the line:

• Try to disconnect your own passion for being right, and don't go too far.  Too much back and forth can be destructive.  Delete comments if they are foul, offensive, or threatening.
• Post a comment policy.  If comments are summarily deleted, you may not be showing the full picture of the debate.
• If responses get too personal, shut them down.  Give a warning in the comments, if they cross the line.
• Some people think that trolls should be deleted so they don't get attention. Liz disagrees, thinks there should be forensic evidence of the controversy.  Could "disenvowel" them, by taking all the vowels out of the words.
• Learn to ignore nasty comments, don't engage.
• Let the work speak for itself.  Don't worry about what people are saying. Don't let them bully you into silence.
• Sometimes readers will come to your defense.
• Kill them with kindness.  One audience member had horrible things written about her, but used kindness to diffuse the situation.  Use humor as a defense.
• Cross-link on your blog to people are doing something completely different from what you are doing.  Promote diversity of opinions by looking outside your comfort zone. 
• Social networking tools are not set up for diversity, and expect that people are the same.  Moderators don't realize that this could be a problem. Put in some community guidelines so everyone is on the same page.
• We're all intolerant about different things. For some, intolerance is the thing they won't tolerate. 
• Don't be afraid to disagree with powerful people.  If you do, you must have thick skin, because they often play rough.
• You have power in moderation to take down offensive comments, postings.  Think, "It's my site, it's my brand.  I have to protect it."
• You owe it to your core readers to make a safe place for discussion, and not a place where they will be subject to ad hominem attacks if people disagree with them.

Again, a great panel and a lively discussion.   I am totally in awe of Liz and her moderating skills, and her purple hair.  I learned something from each one of the panelists, and think they are all courageous for doing what they do.

I've been fortunate that I haven't had many negative comments here, but over at Kimchi Mamas, we deal with this whenever we talk about issues of race and culture, or how Koreans and other Asians are marginalized or stereotyped in American society.  We  have many off-line discussions among the contributors about when to delete a comment, and pretty much only do it if someone is just being hateful, gross, or irrelevant.  We posted a comment policy a few months ago, and had to moderate comments for a while after some particularly racist comments.  Since then, most of the negativity died down, and we're back to normal.

I guess if I had to come up with a comment policy, it would be what I tell my son when we go to a play date:  "Share. Be Friendly. Be Nice.  Don't make me come over there." 

Comments

[Rachel]

Glennia, thanks for writing about this. I think about this issue a lot. I think it's important to listen to different points of view and not shut commenters down just because they disagree with us. But at the same time we don't want our site to become a platform for racists or assholes. Sometimes there's a fine line between dissent and disrespect.

Wish I could have attended that session.

[pamela]

We should all live by what you tell your son !

[Jay Rosen]

It's true that Tish said I was wrong. But I didn't post that women were terrorized on the blogosphere. I said that a lot of the women who spoke at the first BlogHer in 2005 spoke about their Internet fears, and yet this didn't stop them.

Here's part of what I said:

http://journalism.nyu.edu/pubzone/weblogs/pressthink/2005/07/31/blgh_rep.html

At the session on flaming and anger online, at the Blogging 101 workshop, at the discussion about identity blogging, and here and there in almost every other session I heard women talking about the personal attacks they had either expected or received. They discussed stalking and whether blogging led to it. They talked about losing their jobs if they said the wrong thing on their blog. They spoke about their children and whether kids were put in danger when mom blogs. They asked about publishing your address and what could happen if you did. They spoke about their dread when an anonymous blog was traced to them. They said they were filled with anxiety that someone they knew was going to read their blog.

It seemed to me (and I told the conference this part) that these were reflections on a kind of terror that is by now deeply associated with the Internet, especially the strangers who are on it. At a conference of bloggers that was 80 percent men and 20 percent women (the usual ratio) this would barely be heard. I don’t recall many expressions of dread from bloggers at the three BloggersCons I attended.

Here it was routine, which is not to say blogher was dominated by expressions of terror (because it wasn’t, at all…) but rather in a conference that is 80 percent women—and where 100 percent of the tone was set by women—there were no disincentives to speaking about raw fears connected intimately to the act of blogging.

But of course these same people, possessed of Net fears, were also possessed of blogging, despite whatever alarms they might have sounded in questions and comments. They weren’t being stopped but they were being open about being scared. What was most impressive to me was the way the speakers and presenters dealt with fears from the floor, which they were often asked to do.