Naming names and underground blacklists

As Robin's sticky policy statement says, you shan't name names in a pejoritive manner in the Forums. Now that the policy is being swiftly enforced, I've seen a number of threads of the following form:

A: Someone did this jerky thing to me
B: Send me the name in IM please so I can watch out for this avatar
C: Send me the name in IM please so I can ban this avatar
D: Send me the name in IM please so me and my associates can v-break this avatar's v-kneecaps

I don't fault A through D for their actions as us humans have a very refined sense of social justice and social sanctions. They want to be able to at least be wary of an avatar that has been jerky towards someone (A) whose report they trust. The policy of not naming names and lack of enforcement against jerky conduct has given rise to a form of frontier justice.

However I see two problems here. If I am the "jerky" AV, I get no social cues that I've violated a norm and so if I was unaware of the implications of my actions and truly wanted to change and make amends, I'd have no idea what I did or even that I was the one who did it. I'm still waiting for the time when someone posts "IM me the jerk's name" and finds out that the jerk is him. Secondly, it gives the alleged jerk no opportunity to rebut the accusation. I well know that most "rebuttals" in these instances serve only to solidify the jerkiness of the accused as the rebuttals are usually flames even more damning than the original conduct. But even this is valuable information for the community. So the reprisals are still happening, they've just gone underground.

The framers of the US Consititution knew how unjust it was to be unable to know the charges against you and to face your accusers, thus the 6th amendment. Then again, SL is not RL, but it still offends our natural sense of justice.

Oh, and I'm getting really tired of the Lindens quartering soldiers in my house without my consent.

we can't have it both ways. we can either publicly debate such things here where the accused have the opportunity to read our opinions and post rebuttals, arguments and apologies, or we maintain private systems ofcommunication that automatically assume guilt and impose punishment.

considering that, under the current forum rules, we don't have a choice. we'll be using the latter option. if ll want to change their mind, we'll revert to the former as we were doing before. the problem is that newbies read all that and get scared and cancel their accounts and post to all their boards how horrible a game sl is. that's the theory anyway.

i wonder if they're any less afraid of secretly organized rings of fetied blacklisters?

Both 90% of the people on this forum and especially the Lindens need to read through John Stuart Mill's "On Liberty" and take it to heart. A marketplace of ideas would be a much better option than this ridiculously overprotective nanny state and its cadre of "me-tooers" we have currently.

Me too! Er... oh. Never mind.

Upon further reflection, it appears if the "don't name names" policy has backfired and is achieving the opposite of its goal.

If the "no naming names" policy was instantiated in order to protect people from public slander for something they may or may not have done then I consider it an attempt to protect the "rights of the accused" from vigilante justice. If so, then the policy has done little but encourage secret vigilantism.

If the policy was established to curtail "did not - did too" threads, then it may be realizing that goal at the cost of private slander.

I'd far rather be slandered publically, as my posting habits show

I get where you're coming from Mal, but this is hardly a new thing. I don't think there's a connection between people sharing names of griefers for the purposes of keeping ban lists and the no names policy on the forum. Had the names been named in the thread in question the results would have been the same. When someone I trust informs me of destructive behavior by people with no respect for property rights I'll ban first and ask questions later. It really isn't hard to avoid getting on people's ban lists. The unnamed person in the thread you're using as an example clearly knew what they were doing was wrong. This is not the type of person I want to invite onto my land, nor is it my responsibility to rehabilitate them. Actions have consequences, as they should. Don't want to be on ban lists? Great. Don't do stupid things that get your name added to them. If someone can't be bothered to ask permission to do something on other people's land, I can't be bothered to extend the benefit of the doubt.

The problem is that some people do things without knowing that they offended someone. In the thread that was started recently the player has a reputation of doing this in the past.

But what if a situation arises in which the player did not do what the poster said they did? In this case the poster will have sent various IMs to people accusing someone, while the person gets neg rated and shunned by the community without knowing what happened and not being able to face their accuser. Another situation that could arise is if a poster posts about something that occured and sends IMs with the person's name, when it could have been a misunderstanding that hadn't been cleared up. In this case the person's name is marred all over SL and clearing up the situation would be difficult given how fast rumors spread.

I propose that if the current policy stands that this data be posted on one of the third party sites in a very condensed manner. It took me a while to figure out why: because I'm selfish and neither feted nor inner and I want that information too.

I do agree with Chip about the stance that if someone is reported as a griefer by a reputable party then ban/shun first and let the griefer earn back trust. But, as the prior posters point out, we are not permitted to openly exchange this information on the LL forums. To keep contention down and parsing rapid I suggest that the following tuples be listed:Where "concise" here means half a dozen words or so. This would allow each reader to make their own decision about the significance of the accusation, the credibility of the accuser, and allow the accused to make a statement in their defense for those who might wish to consider the other side or discuss the accusation with the accused. There might also be a "recinded by accuser because" field. This database should be write only so that accusers will feel compelled to stand by their claim which I hope would reduce spurious accusations. There could be a parallel forum for discussion of the "badness" of a particular infraction or for anyone to add additional information. This forum could be ignored by those who want the information but don't care about the attendant drama.

I think this would work for a number of reasons: it allows individuals to make judgements for themselves; it turns private accusations public; it allows the "accused" to know they've been accused and why and to be able to make a statement in their defense. For those who might be tempted to say that this is just a place to slander your neighbor, remember that the "trumping" defense in RL of slander claims is "truth".

What are the problems with this? Well, the accuser does open themselves to in-game retaliation which may chill the desire to accuse. It has the potential to start feuds of various sorts. Finally, the validity of an accusation is nearly impossible to substantiate. Beyond that I don't see much downside and it is certainly better than the underground "justice" that is currently happening. Indeed, one could argue that hidden justice is not justice at all. I'll follow in a little with examples of the sorts of entries one could expect in the grief database and how they'd be interpreted,

Well you aren't allowed to directly name this person.

But you can sort of rename him/her to (mister or miss X)

In-game you can tell anyone , anything you want in IM.


Our in-game abuse support doesn't seem to work properly. (at least that's what i think)

I think people post here as a cry out cause the people from the abuse report do nothing about it.



However if you dare to show even your nipple in PG that's taken care off the same minute.

But when people report someone for abuse , nothing happens.

Weither it's someone trapping people in cages , or people lockin down chatloggers on your land...

Interesting idea. It seems to fulfill both needs... public disclosure, but no 3rd party flames & trolls. I would love to see this put to a test. My statements in the forum put me at the same risk of in-game retaliation already, so that's not new.

Sleeping on this whole issue I did come up with something I would consider more like the frontier justice you are describing. I made a public statement. The person knows he's been accused. (not always the case if you don't get to the forums, but in this case a yes). He has options. It strikes me that simply IMing all of my friends, calling cards, groups, list of sim owners.. and privately warning them about this individual is closer to what you are describing. I'm sure this goes on.

Back to your suggestion.. have you considered dropping that in an email to the Lindens? Sooner or later they are going to have to overhaul the abuse, etc. system.

I think one can post disputes in the SL Universe forums, and these should be just as accessible to interested parties as these Linden Lab forums are.

As Cristiano and I have recently gone from horn-locked nemeses to... umm... openly flrtatious I was thinking that SLUniverse would be an ideal spot for such an attempt at a more open system of frontier justice.

I think the expression "be careful what you wish for as you just may have to code it" is apropos here.

Malachi,

<<If the "no naming names" policy was instantiated in order to protect people from public slander for something they may or may not have done then I consider it an attempt to protect the "rights of the accused" from vigilante justice. If so, then the policy has done little but encourage secret vigilantism. >>

This is one of the very reasons I oppose forum censorship. In a thread where names are named, accusations are flung, insults traded, the time eventually comes where things reach an equilibrium and problems are solved, or else everybody is talked out. In the latter case most people reading the thread get an idea of what really happened.

The problem, I think, with your suggestion is that most human issues are messy, and wouldn't fit in with your neat arrangement, which wouldn't IMO give any more objectiv e a result.

I have found from my experience in the forums that what normally happens is this:-

A long-winded exposition is given of a wrong done by poster B to poster A.
Posters C-M come in berating poster B.
Poster B then posts his or her own exposition, which differs markedly from poster A's version, containing several new facts.
Posters C-M express consternation.
Poster N comes in and supports poster B's position.
Poster O comes in and supports poster A's position
Posters A and B then trade insults for four pages.
Posters C-M come in and join the debacle, trading insults of their own.
With luck, eventually posters A and B make the peace, and with luck come up with a compromise solution.

This seems to me the way it normally works, and while it might not be ideal, it at least has the virtue of getting all points of view heard

Selador, I see the same phenomena you describe. I'm certainly not looking for objectivity with this system, just concision. If I find that Malachi seems to have an awful lot of what I consider petty accusations, I can make the utterly subjective decision to disregard them. Similarly for people accused of griefing builds, for example, I have the ability to rapidly see those accusations and go make my own appraisal without having to wade through 20 pages of debate on "what is aesthetic?"

I did also propose a parallel, conventional forum so that those who are inclined to debate how many alpha'ed angels should be allowed to dance on the head of a prim.

Objective? No. Sunshine? Yes. False accusations and alts making gratuitous accusations? Sure. But *I* get to decide whether I'm going to put more weight into Selador's word than I am into, say, Malachi's.

Thanks for the cogent critique.

Some people are not open to debate for a number of reasons, including that they have already debated the issue contentiously to the Nth degree and now find it tiresome, irritating, and likely redundant. They will be more akin to act without further exchange of heated dialog, and act in a way which will -- perhaps oddly enough -- provoke more debate.

In other words, no matter how much discussion is done, some peeps will just go ahead and do what they wanna do: for better or worse, and all the colors in between.

^the aforementioned includes my far-flung but not improbable idea that some "Master List" of a great number of alts and whatnot is/will be compiled and posted on some 3rd-party site (or even here, before being Edited) due to one's consternation with the current or futurecurrent system in place.

Definitely a lot of merit to the many points and counterpoints raised within.

I see your thinly veiled personal attack, Selador! What you said about Chip Midnight is reprehensible. I am going to express my complete consternation, in solidarity with Chip who has been ruthlessly alluded to in such a subversive way. We CMs have to stick together!

PS - congrats on your wedding

Hmm. "Naming names and underground blacklists", eh? So is this the right thread to ask for people to IM me the names of any of (edited) alts they know of, since he insists on being a total twat about, well, everything?

Once I have created said underground blacklist, I will happily forward it to anyone who feels similarly

LOL. No no... he's right. I've been a bad, bad C-M! I will seek to ammend my ways.


And yes, congrats Sel and Red!!! Sorry I had to run out so quickly afterwards!

Four words - "Court of Public Opinion".

Airing out dirty laundry and trading accusations on the forums is the last place that anything would get resolved. I'm all for the process of public accusation/rebuttal, but it needs to be in a controlled environment where unrelated parties can't knee-jerk their way into the matter and turn it into a slugfest.

And for an example of such a system in r/l, I submit the following: Jerry Springer. We have on one side an accuser, on the other side the accused, and then the audience. JS may be known for many things, but being a forum of reasoned and impartial deliberation it is not.


I can understand the need to have a social mechanism that provides justice for both accuser and accused, but the public forums simply does not have the capability to handle it well. It'd be like trying to discard eggs by throwing them into a spinning fan - the egg may be gone, but odds are you ended up with yolk on your face in the process.

Cristiano,

Thanks to you and to Chip for your support.

It was a great day for me, and the presence of both of you made it even better.

I believe the prefered phrase is 'lists of color'

Siggy.