Highly unliekly childcare news here at RMM. The childcare ‘expert’ (sorry, but beyond feeding the little brats, what else is there to it, eh?) Gina Ford, is demanding a public apology from the owners of the mumsnet website due to comments made on their forum. The comments, mostly contesting Ford’s obsession with ‘routine’, included the frankly genius allegation that she ‘straps babies onto rockets and fires them into South Lebanon’
I couldn’t care less about the baby thing, but what’s fascinating to me is that Ford’s threatening legal action against mumsnet if they don’t apologise. Not for something that they’ve said, but for what people are saying on their forum. It begs the question; who’s responsible for what gets said in what is, in effect, a public space? If I defame Ford in the local town hall by suggesting, for example, that she uses babies to monitor climate change by tying them to windmills, am I to blame or is my local council? We have to consider precisely what sort of space, legally and culturally, forums are. The word forum, natch, means public square in Latin – and that’s the foundation of free speech and democracy if you believe Herr Doktor Habermas. But things written on internet forums stay around forever in cache, rather than floating away in the breeze like defamatory statements muttered in the marketplace. Do forum moderators have a responsibility clean up the obscene graffiti in their public squares?
And another thing… the new web sentiment analysis and influence monitoring tools proliferating right now are going to make it way easier to find out when someone’s saying somehting nasty about you, your product, or the babies you may or may not have fed to the lions.
For a more positive view of internet forums than that held by Ms Ford, what better example than http://www.amileformaude.com ? Set up entirely by Mumsnet members, this charity appeal looks set to make substantial amounts of money for the Foundation for the Study of Infant Deaths – the cot death research charity.
Without Mumsnet these 350 women would not have been to organise this extremely worthwhile event. Think about that, Ms Ford, when you are throwing your toys out of your pram.
[...] We’ve been here before, with parenting website Mumsnet defending themselves against charges of libel for what users had published on their forums (notably that childcare expert Gina Ford had tied babies to rockets and launched them into Southern Lebanon – which she didn’t, despite what critics of Ehud Olmert would have you believe). Google, like Mumsnet, are arguing that the internet is a public space, whilst Viacom argue that Google are profiting from a business model which sells advertising in that public space and then does not efficiently regulate what is said in it. [...]