When Internet Debate Gets Ugly And Bloggers Get Threatened
As most regular readers of Say Anything know I’ve managed to stir up no small amount of controversy in my home state over a column I wrote in the Dakota Beacon magazine (and also published on this site). The column was about the abhorrent conditions on one of North Dakota’s Indian reservations, and several months later it got noticed on the reservation and distrubted as photocopies all over the place. Not unsurprisingly it made a lot of people on those reservations (many of them government workers actually involved with the areas I described) angry. Very angry.
My original post of the column from December of 2006 is here, my follow-up post on the controversy it subsequently created months later is here. There are about 700 or so comments on those two threads, so if you want to catch up you can.
Some of the comments have been positive, some have been critical and some have been downright mean. But that’s par for the course when it comes to internet debate. It isn’t always civil. It’s rarely civil, in fact, but rarely is it more than passionate people sniping at each other in a mostly anonymous forum.
Unfortunately, my column about the Indian reservations has caused some to cross the line from snarky internet banter to threats. As an example, here’s Andy L. commenting on one of the threads linked above:
Rob, you spineless wonder. You come on our reservation, make all kinds of inaccurate observations, publish those observations in a conservative republican rag that’s peddled all over the state, and you can’t figure out why we’re all hopping mad?
You should be ashamed of yourself. You’re not doing anybody any favors, especially your right wing bigot friends. We are not going to stop commenting on this issue. Our next step is to formally approach the tribe and have the tribe formally approach your governor for an apology.
Do you realize what you have done? There are 30 thousand enrolled at Turtle Mountains. We have members in every city in North Dakota. We communicate with each other as one. This will not die down. You aren’t taking on a bunch of dimwits. Watch your back. We’re everywhere!
So now, because of an opinion expressed on a political blog and in a political magazine, I must “watch my back.” I have to start to wonder if I need to be concerned about myself and my family.
That’s pathetic.
My point in this is to remind people of this: While we all communicate in this forum we call the internet relatively anonymously and with strangers, we need to remember that we’re all just people. Concerned, passionate and (most of the time) caring people. We have opinions, and we can be mean and arrogant, but at the end of the day it’s about communicating. Not threats and intimidation.
I love writing about politics for all of you, and I love having this blog and the sizable audience that goes with it. It’s a rare opportunity to have such access and influence, and I appreciate it for what it is. But tonight, after being threatened for doing no more than expressing an opinion, I have for the first time started to feel like maybe this isn’t worth it. Maybe it’s not worth it to call down all this heat on myself just for speaking out.
I’m not thinking about stopping blogging, but tonight I’m feeling a little demoralized. Like maybe this isn’t as much fun as it once was.
