Regulating blogs
Leading Tory blogger Iain Dale highlights a select committee proposal to regulate blogs. He’s right to say the proposal will fail.
Larger social networking sites, like MySpace or Facebook, could be regulated, because they have clear identifiable owners who can be held responsible for content. Blogs, on the other hand, are often independently owned and run and can be moved to overseas service providers quickly and without interruption on a whim. Codes of conduct are worthless when the malicious can claim anonymity relatively easily.
It’s hard to share Iain’s optimism that ‘self regulation works perfectly well’. Iain may be a responsible blogger who corrects mistakes and removes offensive comments, but that doesn’t mean everyone is.
Worse, popularity matters little, as it is not always a blog’s regular readers that you should worry about.
This blog receives a regular trickle of traffic from people who Google Diana Appleyard, a novelist and freelance writer regularly commissioned by the Daily Mail. These people are clearly interested in Diana Appleyard rather than my take on public relations – they may be thinking of commissioning her or conducting research prior to an interview around one of her books – and may be disappointed to learn that she was at the centre of a race row earlier this year.
This story would be no less damaging to Diana Appleyard if these were the only people to visit the blog.
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