Obama's MySpace: Lesson for teens?

What happened this week with Barack Obama’s MySpace profile could happen to anyone, and it’s a useful illustration for people trying to understand ways cyberbullying happens on the social Web. One way: A friend sets up a blog or profile for someone. The someone begins to feel that friend is misrepresenting her and suggests maybe she should take over her own profile. The profile creator takes offense because he feels he was so nice to set things up. He changes the password so the person the profile’s about can’t have access. Friends become ex-friends, and now the page is an imposter profile, where harassment and defamation can happen. It didn’t get that bad for Barack Obama, but his campaign let some nice volunteer supporter in L.A. create the candidate’s profile and run it for more than two years, the Associated Press reports. It was pretty convincingly Obama, you can see from this amusing Los Angeles Times commentary about how the writer was getting way too many bulletins from Barack and had to delete the candidate from his Friends list. Probably not because of the L.A. Times piece but wisely, Obama’s campaign people were beginning to feel it was time to take control of the profile and asked the L.A. supporter/profile creator to hand over the password. You can read in the AP piece how a sticky situation seems to have been resolved fairly amicably – thanks to a personal call to the guy from Obama himself - but with Obama having to give up the 160,000 friends the supporter amassed for his MySpace profile while it was under the supporter’s control. That 160,000 was “about four times what any other official campaign MySpace page has amassed.” But by Wednesday evening, the Obama profile’s Friends count was back up to 20,000. In a bigger social-Web fracas this week, user-driven news site Digg.com experienced a user rebellion that could mire the site in litigation that would have the potential to put it out of business – see CBSNews.com.

A call to stop cyberbulllying

Death threats against prominent blogger Kathy Sierra have set off what looks to be an unprecedented Internet-wide protest against cyberbullying. It's a horrible way to raise awareness, but awareness has long been needed. I unconsciously previewed the news when I wrote "Predators vs. cyberbullies: A reality check" a couple of weeks ago. More recently, "when computer programmer and author Kathy Sierra began blogging about technology, she fully expected to see comments critical of her ideas. What she didn't anticipate were online posts advocating her murder or sexual assault against her," Business Week reports. Hundreds of bloggers have blogged their protests, and tech-education blogger Andy Carvin has called for this Friday to be Stop Cyberbullying Day and created not a new blog but a new social-networking site to mark the day. My thanks to friend, blogger, and tech educator Anne Bubnic for her heads-up on this.