City Officials Tried To Force Wikimedia To Remove Truthful, But Unflattering, Content From Its Wiki Page

Free Speech

from the well,-this-should-make-everything-worse dept

The best Streisanding is the Streisanding you give yourself, as the adage goes. The adage is even enshrined at Wikipedia, where it points to the creator of the term: Mike Masnick. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.

The best thing to do to counter negative content is presenting your own side of the case. The worst thing, however, is trying to bury it, especially when the burial attempt involves public figures. Internet case law has made this obvious for more than two decades. The people who think the Streisand Effect will never affect their actions are people who think the internet can be controlled with a combination of “being angry about stuff” and bullshit takedown demands.

That brings us to the latest in inadvertent self-sabotage, this time involving members of the Durham City (North Carolina) government, which thought it could force Wikipedia to identify the editors who posted the (squints at request) factual information. Here’s Lena Geller with the details for Indy Week:

At the request of several elected officials, Durham city attorney Kimberly Rehberg last month asked Wikipedia to unmask the identities of users who have published accurate but unfavorable information about said officials to the crowdsourced encyclopedia—a move that experts call inappropriate and troubling.

In a certified letter to the Wikimedia Foundation dated June 29 and obtained by the INDY last week, Rehberg explained that she was writing at the “express request” of Mayor Elaine O’Neal and city council members DeDreana Freeman and Monique Holsey-Hyman, each of whom took issues with content on their Wikipedia pages. 

Ah, the ol’ “took issues with content.” Not that there was anything illegal or incorrect about the “content.” No, they only “took issue” because the (factual) “content” makes these entities look bad.

“Express request” or not, there’s nothing Wikipedia needed to do to respond to these bullshit requests other than check stuff out and (when the edits proved to be true), ignore them.

But these officials demanded three contributors be unmasked by Wikipedia. The people involved with the bogus unmasking request are all people who definitely prefer their internet existence be laundered by the biggest players in the internet content business.

I mean:

Holsey-Hyman is being investigated by the State Bureau of Investigation following a developer’s allegation that she attempted to solicit a bribe in exchange for her vote on a rezoning proposal. She has also been accused of improperly attempting to enlist city staff to work on her reelection campaign. 

[…]

Freeman made news in March when her defense of Holsey-Hyman during a contentious city council meeting led to a profane shouting match that reportedly turned physical.

Hey, speaking as a nominative amateur here: if you don’t want bad stuff about you spread all over the internet, the obvious solution is to just not participate in bad stuff. And if you do, maybe try to explain yourself to your constituents instead of demanding a host of factual reporting unmask contributors and/or remove factual reporting.

When you do the latter, you do the RICO Streisand. “Hearts and minds” is the name of the game, one first explored when the US government was napalming Vietnamese children into early graves. You can regain the trust of constituents by being open and honest about unwise decisions. You can only alienate people by pretending your misdeeds should be buried by those reporting on them.

This is not a justification for unmasking. And I sincerely hope (or my own interests as a contributor for Techdirt) that one of these involved asshats thinks that internet users should be punished for publishing facts and decides to go federal.

On Wikipedia, the allegations and shouting match are summarized without any apparent factual error and with links to news articles as references. 

The only question now is whether legislators like these can be voted to extinction. It was long presumed people doing things like this were too stupid to survive in the wild, but the threats of wild have long been mitigated without any corresponding effect on innate stupidity.

The internet is everyone’s playground. It shouldn’t just be an attempted tool of oppression for people who don’t understand how this all works. Being this bad at a simple thing like this strongly indicates no one should be spending their tax dollars on your ideas, much less your continued employed. Criticism comes with the job. And trying to out critics just so you can (presumably) make their lives miserable is exactly the sort of thing the United States has been against since its founding.

Filed Under: dedeana freeman, durham, durham city, elaine o'neal, kimberly rehberg, monique holsey-hyman, north carolina, wikipedia
Companies: wikimedia foundation