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Can’t We Just All Get Along?

Apparently not. And some wouldn't have it any other way. Anyone who has ever posted anything on a site with respectable traffic has been on the receiving end of what is, at best, mean-spiritedness, and at worst -- well, much worse.

Most of this sort of thing comes over the transom anonymously, and one's first taste of the more vitriolic aspects of the otherwise exciting give-and-take that characterizes the Web can be a shock to the system. Of course (as has been discussed ad infinitum) the medium itself removes all social barriers to this kind of behavior. As one colleague of mine once memorably observed, it's like handing out free ski masks and machine guns to the general population. Someone's bound to get hurt. How bad the injury--and therefore how seriously we should take cyberbullying--continues to be the subject of intense debate.

Which is why Tim O'Reilly's call last week for a blogger's Code of Conduct raised, as could be expected, a firestorm of commentary, ranging from the (predictably) abusive, to respectful disagreement, to the enthusiastically supportive. O'Reilly has since drafted such a code. Here are the high points:

1. We take responsibility for our own words and for the comments we allow on our blog.
2. We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person.
3. We connect privately before we respond publicly.
4. When we believe someone is unfairly attacking another, we take action.
5. We do not allow anonymous comments.
6. We ignore the trolls.

There's an informative, constructive -- and, I'll point out, decidedly civil -- discussion going on at Blogging Wikia in which the consensus seems to be that the no-anonymous comments will be the deal breaker. Among other reasons, many people quite reasonably point out that people from countries with restrictions on Internet freedom or other human rights issues would be effectively barred from online dialogues. Others simply passionately subscribe to anything that smacks of censorship, and warn against the proverbial slippery slope. I happen to agree with that -- even as I delete any e-mails with overtly abusive subject lines from my inbox without reading their contents.

What do you think? Have you been the subject of cyberbullying -- and if so, how have you handled it? Should there be a Code of Conduct? Is it at all realistic to think that such a thing would be adopted by a critical mass of Websites? Let us know by responding below.

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