Bruce Kimmel (D-At Large) is a Norwalk Common Council member.
NORWALK, Conn. – Imagine this: You go to the polls next November to vote for mayor, a slew of Common Council candidates and five folks for the Board of Education. You’ve read a bunch of leaflets, watched a debate or two, and even met some of the candidates. Armed with this information, you fill out your ballot on Election Day, fully believing you’ve done your homework and exercised your First Amendment right with the proper due diligence.
Now imagine this: Unbeknownst to you, some of the candidates you’ve voted for have spent the last few years writing on blogs – under pseudonyms – spewing what you would consider nonsense and, in some cases, find repugnant. But, of course, neither you nor virtually anybody else could possibly know this. Had you known, you might have had second thoughts about supporting those candidates.
For the record: I am an elected member of the Norwalk Common Council, I regularly comment on blogs, and I often enjoy reading them. Also, I have always used my parent-given name when participating in electronic discussions because, in my opinion, employing a pseudonym would violate the public trust between city officials, whether elected or appointed, and the public.
To take this further with something that recently happened: When the city’s Housing Authority and Redevelopment Agency received a $30 million federal grant to rebuild Washington Village in South Norwalk, there were comments on a local blog that I considered racist. The comments essentially suggested that the federal funds would end up in the pockets of gang leaders.
Since the writer used a pseudonym, it was really impossible to figure out who wrote the offensive comments, which somehow were deemed acceptable by the blog monitors. But the question for me was a little more complicated because this particular anonymous person commented on a variety of local issues and seemed well versed in what’s going on in Norwalk politics.
So I wondered, could there be some elected or appointed official behind this particular pseudonym? And what if there was? What then? Unfortunately, neither I nor virtually anyone else was in a position to know who this person was.
As attentive readers have surely realized, I have used the word “virtually” twice because there are indeed a few people who know most of the real names of the various electronic commentators who spend a good deal of time addressing the issues facing Norwalk while hidden behind fake names. I’m referring to the folks who administer and monitor the commentary on news stories.
The job of these monitors is basically twofold: To ensure that the content of comments conforms to a set of standards; that is, to exercise some type of quality control over the mudslinging, and to make sure that commentators do not use multiple aliases and thus artificially skew the tone of discussions.
But I think they need to go further because it’s common knowledge that elected and appointed officials in Norwalk often comment on local blogs using pseudonyms. Although I was not surprised when I first heard this, I still found it a bit unnerving. Here’s why:
What if someone wrote something highly critical of one of my votes on the Council? Of course, that’s OK. But what if I decided to get even by adopting a pseudonym and then proceeded to trash the author in a manner that salvaged my reputation and destroyed his. Sounds crazy, and of course it is, but I believe that could happen according to the prevailing rules regarding anonymity.
I appreciate the need for pseudonyms for the majority of residents who wish to comment on the news. However, I do not believe elected and appointed officials should be allowed to comment under any name but their own. I realize this would be a difficult policy to implement because there are ways to get around basic monitoring protocols. But the effort needs to take place.
(Another complex issue is the responsibility of monitors. What if they have knowledge about a candidate, based on the candidate’s anonymous comments, that conflicts with or totally undermines the public persona of that individual? Should they remain quiet?)
Our Freedom of Information laws were crafted long before technology advanced to its current level. Conforming to the letter of FOI is no longer sufficient. If the spirit of our transparency laws is to be followed, then it would seem to me that those folks who administer electronic communication should require elected and appointed officials to use their real names when commenting on the news.
Leave a Reply
You must Register or Login to post a comment.