11-14-12: Don't Feed the Trolls

You are missing some Flash content that should appear here! Perhaps your browser cannot display it, or maybe it did not initialize correctly.

Nathan-PJ-1114.mp3

If someone took a creepy picture of you in public and anonymously posted it to one of the Internet’s most popular websites without your consent, would you consider that free speech?

Reddit.com is home to some of the internet’s busiest discussion forums. One of them is called “creepshots,” devoted to the kind of pictures I just mentioned.

In October, Gawker writer Adrian Chen dug around and found the identity of the man who volunteers as the moderator for “creepshots” and other disturbing Reddit forums that make creepshots look like Sunday school.

And he outed him. The Reddit editor, named Michael Brutsch, got fired from his day job, and…he lost the anonymity that made him such an effective internet troll.

Is “creepshots” free speech? And can vigilantes go too far in trying to unmask the Internet’s anonymous creeps?

Today we ask our monthly social media analysts, Nathan Jurgenson and P.J. Rey.  Nathan and P.J. are Ph.D. candidates in sociology at the University of Maryland, and they blog at Cyborgology.