This past weekend at Type A Mom, Katherine Stone of Post Partum Progress asked what to do if she pointed out an injustice or a mistake (in her case, it was an inaccurate article on AOL about postpartum depression) and though the situation was rectified to her satisfaction (article removed, apology issued), commenters and other bloggers went out for blood against the writer?
What happens when you lose control of the opposition you created? Are you responsible?
The conversation continued, with other examples offered up of a reporter's personal e-mail being tweeted and hate campaigns unleashed (anyone remember #nikonhatesbabies?), and finally someone asked, "Do we really have to go so far as to say 'Don't attack this person as a human being?'"
And it turns out that we do.
Entire sites have been devoted to denigrating bloggers' writing skills, their mothering skills or even their children. Those people -- the children attackers, at least -- are in the very small but vocal minority. However, once you've seen someone attack a child because she is mad at the mother, you can't unsee it. You can't unsee ugly Photoshopped pictures of a child, nor can you unread hateful things said about that child and therefore stored somewhere forever in the annals of the Internet. I can't believe we have to say it is not okay to attack someone's child under any circumstances. But it seems we do.
Attacks on writers are sometimes genuine compassion for the victim that just gets out of hand. Sometimes, in an effort to support one of our own, this community falls like a ravenous mob on a writer who has just made a mistake. Even an egregious mistake is still a mistake, especially if the writer acknowledges it as such.
And, you know, let she who is without mistakes throw the first stone.
I left the session thinking no, of course, we shouldn't have to remind people not to invade someone's privacy or loudly proclaim their ineptitude or dive-bomb their blog or what have you, but it might not be a bad idea to tag that reminder onto any post criticizing an article, a campaign or an idea. Just as I'm not calling for the head of the marketing guru who coined the term "corn sugar," most bloggers up in arms over an inaccurate post or a misquoted entry or even a bit of plagiarism are mad, but within reason. No lives need be lost over the Internet.
We must (and I fully count myself in that "we"), when we rush to support a friend, check our anger at the door and think hard about the best way -- the most productive way -- to get that message heard. We must rise above the hashtag. We must remember that for every post out there, there's a human being behind the keyboard.
