Moral panic over blogging
A few months ago there was a controversy among the Muslim bloggers, in which some members of the community found fault with the “open comment” aspect due to the fact that both men and women were participating, and in their opinion this constituted unlawful contact. The upshot was that several blogs disappeared, while another fatwa was issued that they were halal as long as inappropriate (social) contact was avoided, and a number carried on. Even today some blogs have a policy that only men, or only women, depending on the sex of the blogger, can leave comments.
While those objecting to blogging had some legitimate complaint, somebody is now trying to start a moral panic about the appeal of childrens’ blogs to paedophiles. A forensic psychologist, Rachel O’Connell, claims that the daily details of a child’s life and photographs which are regularly uploaded are “a paedophile’s dream”. The predator’s could use an RSS reader to be immediately told of any uploaded photo, and could track the child’s movements in order to prepare for an abduction.
When I first read this, I thought that this was just another thing to avoid for fear of paedophiles. Over the last couple of years there’s been cases where schools have banned videos being made of school plays, in case paedophiles could make use of the films. And this is overkill to say the least – if the children are fully clothed in the films, what use could a paedophile make of them? He could just as easily go into a public swimming bath, where people (including children) tend to wear far less clothing than they do on stage.
Of course, some might say it’s not wise to let your kids onto the net at all, but in the case of blogs, a few simple warnings is all it takes. For example, don’t reveal what town you live in, especially if it’s a small town with only one school. The onus should really be on the blog hosting companies like Blogger and tBlog. Then again, some people might encourage their children not to put up a personal blog because “they’re a load of old rubbish”, which is the reason my mother used to give when refusing to allow us to watch certain soaps (like the notorious Neighbours) as children. At the end of the day, they are just soap operas, without any guarantee of there being any truth in them, with each taking a diminishing slice of the audience. I don’t have any purely personal blogs among my daily blog list. I check OSNews (a tech blog), Sunni Sister, Izzy Mo’s blog, Living Tradition, Avari-Nameh and MUP. Less frequently, the other blogs listed on my main page. They all have some Islamic, political or tech content or some other point of interest, like Umm Zaynab’s parenting column.
And every so often, someone hits the headlines when their boss takes umbrage at one of their employees slagging them off in their blog, and sacks them. This happened a few weeks ago in Scotland, where a worker at a Waterstone’s bookshop in Edinburgh, who disagreed with some aspect of store policy, put comments in his journal calling his employer Bastardstone’s, and his boss the “Evil Boss”. (By the way, there’s only one major bookseller in the UK with “stone” in the name, to my knowledge, so it’s obvious who that name referred to.) There was an outpouring of sympathy for this man. Not from me, though. I do sometimes write about work, and do have a low opinion of some of the people I have to meet, but I don’t shout about it. Partly because this is unlawful ghiba, and partly because I have a duty to uphold the honour of the people who employ me. If someone is ready to disregard this and publicly vilify his employer, he should be grateful when the Evil Boss finally does his long-suffering employee a favour, and relieves him of the job. The only downside is, you stop getting paid as well.
