Cyberbullying

During my time at both Flickr and Polyvore, I saw first hand the type of unwanted content and communication that happens within online communities. Between the two sites, a lot of it was very similar; pornographic uploads, derogatory comments and users complaining about and sometimes ganging up on each other. The difference, however, did exist in the way the two sites were able to deal with this behavior. Flickr was designed from the start to be a community, and has obviously had years of refinement since. As such, their administrative controls, as well as the tools they give users to deal with each other, are pretty advanced:

Blocking another user
Blocking a user means that the user can’t comment, favorite, blog or add meta-data to your photos, become your contact, or send you FlickrMail. You can block someone from their profile page, from the buddy icon drop down menu thingie, and when you delete one of their comments on one of your photos. Flickr’s blocking functionality is pretty robust, and as you can see from the note at the bottom of this help entry, it wasn’t always this way.

Reporting content
The “Flag this photo” link exists on all photos and allows you to report and classify content. Flickr’s content filters are kinda complicated but they get the job done.

Behind-the-scenes controls
Flickr’s community management team is well-equipt to handle the huge amount of stuff their users throw at them on an hourly basis. The administrative tools allow community managers to control all aspects of a user’s account, remove the account and all content associated with that account, as well as monitor the user’s reputation based on a number of different factors.

But that’s Flickr. On the other hand, many new online communies build their community features sort of “after the fact”. They set out to build a service or a platform, but because people love communication, what they build evolves into a community. It’s only natural for these new sites to support this communication (because communication tools drive traffic and pageviews) by allowing private messaging, commenting, etc. But what isn’t as natural, is to support the blocking of users and content.

When I see a headline like, Bebo blamed for 13-year-old boy’s death, I can’t help but wonder how much liability there is involved with running an online community. It’s so easy these days to create a space where users can talk to each other, share things and hang out. In fact, kids in high school and college are doing it right now. What’s much harder, though, is thinking about how to responsibly create an online community that’s safe – and if you do create one that isn’t safe, how much of this is your fault. If I create an online community where people can communicate, am I also responsible for creating tools that protect users from unwanted attacks?

And how much of this responsibility is in the hands of users? StopCyberbullying.org seems more geared toward informing parents about what cyberbullying is and taking control when it happens. myYearbook has launched the “Megan Pledge,” an oath against cyberbullying that it is asking its members to take. Indeed, if a fight breaks out at Starbucks, is Starbucks liable for creating the space where the fight took place, for not preventing the fight, or for not breaking it up? If an online community is just like any other public space, then do the rules of government simply apply to each individual’s actions in the same way? Of course, the government has also done a pretty good job of giving us identities that we all wish to protect and informing us of it’s laws and its punishments – something that online communities try to do, but that always seem to be an afterthought.