An Anderson Cooper KTH (“Keeping Them Honest”)
report on Friday night again underlined another concern about online
reputation.
The report concerned an associate professor at
Florida Atlantic University, James Tracy, who launched on a blog a story that
Newtown had been staged as a government anti-gun conspiracy. The link is (website url) here.
The University says that the blog expresses the
views of Tracy alone, and do not represent the position of the University. Nevertheless, I have sometimes noted the “conflict
of interest” problems inherent when people in positions of authority speak out
in a manner contradictory (real or apparent) to their responsibilities.
Anderson also interviewed Jonathan Kay, author of “Among
the Truthers: A Journey Through America’s Growing Conpiracist Underground”
(Harper, 2011). Kay said that the Internet,
since it encourages or allows user generated content and self-publishing, tends
to contain a larger percentage of content that is extreme in one form or
another. When names are mentioned in
extremist posts, they may for a while move to the top of search engine rankings
on the names, possibly affecting the reputations of the individuals or families
involved. This seems to have happened with
one or two of the families in the Newtown tragedy.
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