May 09, 2007

Harsh Words Die Hard on the Web The US law-school-related blog AutoAdmit contains message boards that are reportedly "essentially, a massive toilet of racism and sexism". Said message boards are suspected in preventing some women, otherwise well-qualified, from getting high-profile legal jobs after they were allegedly maligned, objectified, and even threatened therein. The message board's "Chief Education Director"also had a pending job offer rescinded, following publicity of these incidents. Defending the message board's activities as Free Speech proved ineffective relevant to the rescinded job offer. Some say, "Cry me a river." What do You think? via BlueAdmit
posted by petebest 16 years ago
  • Shoot, that "Chief Eduation Director" link should have been this one. You don't have a preview! The whole freakin' system doesn't have a preview!
  • I'll restate my opinion... The "law student" deserved to be denied the job. Any reputable company that hires someone connected to a site such as that should consider what kind of employee they will be. The lesson... this isn't your grandfather's internet, where you could do anything you want and it would never reach the "real" world. You post it, you live with it!
  • This scares the hell out of me. It has effectively created a way for anonymous users to eliminate competition for jobs by slandering them in a public forum. This may be particularly damaging in the realm of law education and employment. I've heard stories were law students would go to the library for an assignment, find the text they need, copy it, rip it out, and then destroy or hide the ripped out text...all to annihilate the competition. This just seems to add another dimension to that phenomena and make character assassination easier. Well, as was quoted in the WSJ story: "We're lawyers and lawyers-in-training, dude. Of course we follow the law, not morals." Indeed.
  • What do You think? I blame minorities and women.
  • You post it, you live with it! To be fair, he's not been accused of posting racist or sexist content. He's been accused of allowing that content to stand when posted by users. He's claiming he didn't have full admin privileges and made several attempts to have offensive content pulled that were mostly met with resistance. That may be bullshit, but the site's founder and chief admin did back up that claim and took full responsibility for the content. It would suck if the dude was honestly trying to clean up the boards and meeting with no success.
  • Yeah that part seems to come down to who-you-believe, as others have said he removed other threads where the offended party was seeking redress, so to speak. Which would mean he could have removed the offending yaddering. If it's true. It also sounds like Big Important Law Firm told him specifically what they wanted him to do and he said no. I.e., distance himself from the comments, "to reject it and to disavow any affiliation with it. You, instead, facilitated the expression and publication of such language. . . . ” Which seems like a separate matter.
  • I've heard stories were law students would go to the library for an assignment, find the text they need, copy it, rip it out, and then destroy or hide the ripped out text...all to annihilate the competition.
    Not all law schools are like that and not all law students are like that. When I was at law school in the 90s (at UBC) we has one incident of someone hiding a book. The faculty took a fit and made a point of drumming into all our heads that this was not how we were to behave.
  • Following up my own comment, I think what I'm getting at is that the law schools have some institutional responsibility for the hyper-competitive and take-no-prisoners atmosphere that exists at some of them.
  • Anything that prevents the world from having one more lawyer is a good thing in my book.
  • The guy had bad luck. I'm certainly not going to spend my entire day (especially if I'm in law school) monitoring forums that topically don't seem to be inherantly wrong (i.e. Brown vs. Yale). I would peruse the forums when I had a chance and delete nasty comments I happen to see, pointless topics, explicitly sexist/racist/etc. topics, or topics about me, or topics I thought were plain stupid. Which it seems he did. To villify this guy and say he got what he deserves for being an (over full time, as he finished Law School in 3 years) attentive student and made a (in retrospect) bad decision to help his friend Moderate a forum, is perhaps extreme. In the case of Jill, if she tried to notify him directly, (and actually made contact) and nothing was done, that would be different. (Perhaps she did, I just skimmed the article). However, if she contacted him, and only some threads were removed, it's not like he can constantly check in every forum whether or not someone was making nasty comments about her. (Yes, I know he could do a search, but c'mon, who the hell is going to then go in and manually delete all the comments.) I don't think he got what he deserved necessarily, but it is an all too real consequence of his adult decision to moderate said forum. I doubt all law firms will feel the same as this one, and once the furor dies down, it probably will be forgotten. Re: Potential employers (unless you're in client services, where reputations are at stake) basing hiring decisions on what people on the internet write about you... I don't think I'd want to work for a boss who'd base ANY decision on some anonymous person posting in a forum... "OMG! We can't hire Steve for the Accounts Payable position!!! CHICKENHITLERSHOE13 said he raped his own dad AND fartingbutt11 said he saw him do it!!!!" ... c'mon...
  • All good points, Debaser, especially regarding the idiocy of the employer.
  • I've been following this on a couple of the feminist blogs for a while now... and honestly, as much as I hate making judgments it seems like there's a lot of justice in the situation. I have a hard time reading this, for instance, and feeling sympathy for Ciolli. It is a slippery slope. I've been scribbling a blog (which is very heavily indexed by Google) for about five years now. Searches for my full real name turn it up immediately despite my best efforts to scrub my name off of the site. I use a lot of profanity, and have written about a lot of sensitive subjects (leftist politics, some super-personal family stuff [which I'm not gonna rehash here], depression etc.), and because I'm a teacher I have to accept the fact that an employer could potentially read it and make some negative judgements about my character as well. I stand by every word I've ever written there, and I think my case is helped by the fact that I'm not a total douchebag (I save that stuff for MoFi)... but might a potential employer someday read it and decide to not give me a job? Yeah, possibly. Nothing I can do about it now.
  • I suppose it's hard to see the whole picture. And it's even harder to see the borders of the internet, because they barely exist anymore. This reminds me a somewhat of the facebook suspension incident in Toronto in regard to oblivious use of the internet. What really concerns me here is the way people read and the way people write. Sometimes people don't read the sarcasm, misinterpret what is said or read too much into an off the cuff (as is the nature of instant publishing) comment. Further, sometimes people write misleading things which become intense and contentious issues when what they were trying to say had a completely different intent. Not that this is necessarily the case here.
  • > What do You think? He chose to associate himself with the board, presumably with full knowledge of the sort of crap that gets posted. The prospective employer has decided it doesn't want to associate itself with him. It's a good lesson.
  • Sure you have free speech. But the people who read that speech have the freedom to interpret it as they wish and act accordingly. Freedom all around.
  • In addition, freedom of speech does not mean freedom to defame, libel and threaten. I don't know the rights and wrongs of this particuklar case, but I do sort of wonder what kind of people we're getting as the next generation of lawyers.
  • ...the next generation of lawyers. Well, I suppose now we know what they think and do in their private lives rather than pre-internet lawyers where none of these comments or ideas were recorded.
  • I think Bitch Ph.D. (the "cry me a river" link) is aptly named, especially the first part; that one strikes me as parody of "feminazism" out to make "liberal" women look bad. As for the issue itself, lawyers and law students should know better than to selectively moderate their "hobby" site, as they then accept responsibility for the content that does stay there, but then too, well, fuck lawyers if they can't take a joke they make on themselves.
  • This does NOT mean I approve of the content of the AutoAdmit posts in question.
  • Very good point r88.