What Makes a Blogger?

Amanda DePerro

ad302410@ohio.edu

What Makes a Blogger?

Let’s talk about blogging for this blog (I think the “yo dawg” meme goes here). Blogs, for most, are just a quick way of letting out creativity and responding to interesting stuff found on the Internet. Informing people.

To me, that’s journalism. Amateur journalism, perhaps, but journalism nonetheless.

So how should we reprimand or hold bloggers responsible for defamatory content? What about untrue content? What makes a person a blogger?

Where to Draw the Line

Since I’ve already established the fact that I believe bloggers to be journalists, let’s say they are and that everybody in the world holds that belief for the sake of this blog post. Cool. But that still begs the question, what is a blogger? Who is a blogger and who is just a simple Internet forum poster?

On users of websites that are composed of solely user-generated content considered bloggers? Sites like YouTube do maintain that their users are bloggers (or vloggers, in YouTube’s case), but what about open forums such as Reddit (a totally user-generated forum split into smaller forums, or “subReddits,” for various interest groups or topics for users to discuss)?

Obviously it would be nearly impossible to police sites like Reddit, which claims to have had nearly 86 million unique visitors last month. The site is huge, and moderators of each subReddit treating each user as a journalist who is able to be sued for things they post would be unrealistic.

The line between blogger and journalist may be blurry, but the line between blogger and casual poster is even blurrier.

Online Defamation Examples

I’m going to use examples from Reddit since I’ve been completely glued to a makeup subReddit for whatever reason this lazy Sunday. (Girl needs lipstick).

An issue that Reddit dealt with during the Boston Marathon bombings was getting as much information out as they could. Users in Boston were monitoring police scanners and posting key quotes. A user living in Watertown during the manhunt of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev even started an "ask me anything" thread, where other users could ask him questions and he was able to post pictures and updates all in one thread.

Prior to the release of Tsarnaev’s name, Reddit users collectively decided that they could become detectives for the day and targeted a man who was certainly not the bomber. The man was innocent, 22-year-old Brown University student Sunil Tripathi, now thrust into a spotlight that he had no business being in. Tripathi was found dead in a Rhode Island lake after being wrongly tied to the bombings. Reddit staff publicly apologized to Tripathi’s family for the forum’s horrible manhunt.

What I imagine the collective Reddit thread's faces to look like during their manhunt

In a much less tragic, much more creepy and much more localized story, the subReddit for people interested in Ohio State University also started a manhunt of sorts. A female user posted a thread in October about a man who had harassed her multiple times around campus. The thread blew up, and numerous more women began posting about how they, too, had been harassed by a man who fits the bill and had used the same pickup lines on them as well. A user claiming to be Sean himself even began posting on the thread.

Luckily, in this case, it raised awareness of an issue that Ohio State students face. Sites like Jezebel and Bro Bible picked up the story. As it turns out, Larson keeps a public blog about his exploits as a pickup artist, posting his experiences (or fictional stories packaged as his real experiences) about taking girls home and, well, everything after in uncomfortable and lewd detail.

Screenshots taken from Bro Bible and Jezebel respectively

Could legal action be taken against Larson if what these girls say is true, and he is exploiting women for money on a blog? Could legal action be taken against these girls should they be lying?

If we expect to treat bloggers as journalists, at least in legal terms, we’re going to stumble down a potentially slippery slope of “Well, what else makes a blogger?” However, if we leave bloggers unchecked, damage could be done like in the extreme case of Reddit’s shameful and almost unbelievable part in the death of an innocent college student.