Flogs and Nannies
Ok.. so slashdot gives us two gems today on fake bloggers - but more than fake, paid. I don’t think anyone is complaining about unpaid fake bloggers. The first is an article on canada.com about how all these paid sites are undermining the pristine value of the interwebs. The next is on the new law in the UK that bans people from “falsely representing oneself as a consumerâ€, which would make these people identify themselves or face justice.
My knee jerk reaction was that this was another case of too much nanny stating. After all, it really does turn out that you can’t believe everything you read on the webnet. My initial thinking was that people should be more discerning about what they read and take everything with a grain of salt - which is, in my opinion, good thinking in general.
As I pondered this some more I became less sure of it. After all, commercials have to report that they are sponsored by this organization or that. The same with journalists who should disclose anything they receive (although perhaps not online journalists) - and return it. It should be clear where the motivation for this writing is.
However, as pondering continued, I thought - there’s so much crappy information and biased posting on the net is this form more than a drop in the bucket? If I’m a blogger and I write negative postings on an operating system just to get page views, is that functionally different than getting paid to write it? Could it be that, unearthing these folk and their pay masters and heaping shame upon them both is enough disincentive to do it? I don’t know, but if I had to pick a side I think for now I’d keep it out of legislation.
