This article has been on the back burner for a few days now, prompted by some comments made by a local councillor on their blog expressing dismay at people hiding behind anonymous pseudonyms on the internet. This article addresses only political bloggers, and specifically excludes social / professional blogs made by the likes of policemen, high court judges and call-girls. I view political blogging from two perspectives: 1 - Its a very useful tool for politicians to put across a message and gather feedback. 2 - Its a useful tool for members of the public to put across their message and give feedback. My thoughts on this are very clear, if you are a politician then you are obliged to provide your true identity as you are a public figure and rely on the support of the public. At the point at which you became a public figure, you gave up your right to privacy as an individual member of the public. Therefore you should not only always reveal your true identity when addressing the public but also be prepared to receive what may be seen as unjustified criticism by those diametrically opposed to you. As a member of the public you are entitled to privacy and to speak your own opinion freely and openly within our democratic society providing it will not threaten a 3rd party or incite others to commit violence. Many members of the public blog anonymously, most blogger's pseudonyms are well known or easy to distinguish. However bloggers tend to stand behind this fa�ade purely and simply because they have a right to privacy. For example, I've always blogged as Thoades, (its a misspelling of my name Rhoades made famous by a student I was teaching over 15 years ago!). Any one wanting to find out my real identity could just look up the registration details for this site on NIC and hey-presto! My address would be there. As a point of principal however, when officially contacting an MP or councillor I'd always provide on correspondence my full name and address so the said official clearly understood that I was a member of their constituency. However there's a big difference between personal correspondence with your MP and responses on the Scunthorpe Telegraph web site. However, I do think that the public have a right to privacy when posting on their bloggs which should be respected. Where I think there is a grey area which I would like to see improved is on sites such as the Scunthorpe Telegraph's discussion forum. Like this site, you have to register and give a valid email address. However, every post you make on the ST site you can change the name and location. Also a feature which I don't like is that there is no "Accountability" for example, if you click a user name on this site, you will see every article and comment made by that user. You'll also notice on this site, people can rank posts from Excellent through to Offensive - remove it! If enough people press the offensive button then the post gets removed. My point being that for credibility to exist in blogging there must be a certain level of credence given to the author. We don't need to give our real names, but by forcing people to adopt a singular pseudonym we can provide accountability and manage behavioural traits as no one wants to be consistently barraged with negative comments from other bloggers or to have a personal history that's full of nasty, negative, vindictive comments which are available to all. Love and peace from Thoades & his Dog (or should I say Paul ;-) )
Thoades' Dog the assistant blog editor who goes by the name of "Saffie" - short for.....