The Shame Game. Perverted Justice (prev.) and Dateline NBC's series of To Catch A Predator specials are of questionable-at-best morality and have received much flak, particularly on the part of the former party. At the Columbia Journalism review, Douglas McCollum shares the case of Louis Conradt Jr., who killed himself upon being pounced upon by police and Dateline's cameras. McCollum also takes issue with NBC's paying of Perverted Justice for their services. And, for the other side, PJ's rebuttal.
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me on Feb 10, 2007 - 163 comments

Bill Is Thinking About The Children. MSN has decided to close almost all of it's chatrooms across the world. It cites concerns about paedophiles targeting and grooming children. Some children's charities are delighted. Some of MSN's competitors are less impressed.
posted by Blue Stone on Sep 23, 2003 - 33 comments

Conformity rules in cyberspace ... countering expectations that near-anonymity would encourage actions outside social norms. An Australian research team entered chat rooms and staged situations (a somewhat skeptically viewed practice, though the article doesn't mention it). Now they're studying users' reactions to avatars of different races and genders -- and for control purposes, a chair: Initial results show that most people approach the female character first and that some of those approaching the chair ask for a sex specification or assume it is female.
posted by dhartung on Aug 24, 2001 - 9 comments

Censorship on a public Blog? - When someone posts a link to content that others find shocking to a public blog (in this case Flazoom.com) how should the blog-master handle it. This got me thinking about how we handle the content at MeFi - which is better? Removing the post a few layers, or bereating the poster with lots of mean comment posts?
posted by DragonBoy on Sep 18, 2000 - 24 comments

"The attachment can also be sent through Internet Relay Chats (IRC), chat rooms accessible over the Web."
good to know those tech writers at yahoo are up on things.
posted by sugarfish on May 4, 2000 - 4 comments