Case Study: Tracing the Source of Web Comments

Case Study: Tracing the Source of Web Comments

When reporter Tim Ewinger at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland read a comment about one of his relatives in an anonymous posting on his newspaper’s website in March 2010, he was disturbed by its inflammatory nature. He also wondered how the writer could have acquired certain inside knowledge reflected in the comment.

The comment, which discussed the relative’s mental health, violated the site’s rules prohibiting personal attacks. It was signed lawmiss. Ewinger decided to find out who was using that pseudonym.

Because users arerequired to register a valid email address before posting comments, Ewinger asked an online editor to look up the actual address of lawmiss. Then, as editor Susan Goldberg later told Bob Garfield on NPR’s “On the Media” program, Ewinger ran the email address through a Google search and found that it belonged to Cuyahoga County Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold.

There were other revelations: Lawmiss had made more than 80 comments on the website since 2007. And lawmiss had commented on three cases in Judge Saffold’s court, including two capital cases.

Goldberg told Garfield that one of the cases involved a firefighter who shot three people to death, and “lawmisswas complaining that he didn’t get the death penalty because he was white, rather than black.” Judge Saffold is an African American.

The other capital case was pending in Judge Saffold’s court at the time. The attorney for Anthony Sowell, who was accused of killing 11 women in serial murders, was described in one lawmiss posting as someone who acts like a buffoon.

Goldbergsaid that with a public-records request, the newspaper determined that Judge Saffold’s computer at the courthouse had been used to connect to cleveland.comwhen several of the comments were made.In a filing later with the Ohio Supreme Court, Judge Saffold said: “[L]ike thousands of other Clevelanders, I do visit the cleveland.comsite, which is the online version of the Cleveland Plain Dealer. The fact that my computer was open to cleveland.com at the same time that lawmiss posted comments is merely coincidence – two things happening at the same time, but with no causal relationship between them.”

The paper decided to tell its readers the identity oflawmiss and the comments about cases before Judge Saffold. It wasn’t an easy decision, Goldberg told Garfield. “We didn’t, in fact, publish the next day. We made sure we got lots of comment, and we made sure the stories were fair. We also did a companion story that also ran on page one about our decision to do it and sort of the ethical firestorm we knew this was going to kick up.”

The Plain Dealer published its findings on March 26. Judge Saffold sued newspaper for $50 millionon April 7, saying it violated her privacy and its own privacy policy by revealing that the lawmiss comments were linked to her e-mail address. Her daughter Sydney, 23, who lives in Columbus, Ohio,is a co-plaintiff.

The judge’s attorney, Brian Spitz, told Dan Bobkoff of NPR that she didn’t deny she sometimes uses the pseudonym lawmiss. But he said she had not commented on anything that had come before her court. Spitz said those comments were written by Sydney Saffold, who shares an e-mail address with her mother. Sydney Saffold told reporter James F. McCarty of The Plain Dealer that she is an active “blogger” with an interest in the court system. She said she had made “quite a few, more than five” of the lawmiss comments.

Spitz said the basis of the lawsuit was that the paper violated its privacy policy when it made public the judge’s identity. “Either The Plain Dealer breached its promise to keep that information confidential, or it never intended to keep it confidential,” he told NPR. “So it’s either breach of contract or fraud.”

The Plain Dealer said in an April 8 news story that cleveland.com’s privacy policy was written by Advance Internet, a separate entity affiliated with the newspaper. The privacy policy states in part, “[W]e reserve the right to use the information we collect about your computer, which may at times be able to identify you, for any lawful business purpose.”

On December 31, 2010, The Plain Dealer reported that the lawsuit had been dismissed and that a financial settlement had been reached with Advance Internet. Although details of the settlement were not disclosed, Judge Saffold said Advance Internet had agreed to make a charitable contribution to OlivetInstitutionalBaptistChurch choir in the name of her mother, Retha Morris, who died in April. The judge said, “This episode was very difficult for my mother to deal with in her last days.”

Advance Internet now blocks Plain Dealerreporters and editors from access to the email addresses of commenters. John Hassell, vice president of content for Advance Internet, said in a statement, “We take privacy very seriously and believe our users should feel confident that private information shared with us will not be made public.”

As she explained in her NPR interview with Garfield (which occurred on April 2, before the lawsuit was filed), editor Goldberg divided the series of events into two distinct components:

• The decision to trace the identity of lawmiss. Goldberg wasn’t consulted about this; “it was just something he went ahead and did. … Maybe it wasn’t a good decision. To me, okay, the decision was made. Now we’ve got to go forward, and what do we do.”
• The decision to report that lawmiss had made comments about cases before Judge Saffold. “[W]hat keeps getting lost in this debate is the right of this defendant who is on trial for his life to a fair and impartial judge,” Goldberg said. “I would imagine that those cases could be subject of appeal. I would imagine that The Plain Dealer would be just devastated by criticism about sitting on relevant and important information.”

After The Plain Dealer’s revelations about lawmiss, the attorney for murder defendant Anthony Sowell asked the Ohio Supreme Court to remove Judge Saffold from the Sowell case. Acting Chief Justice Paul E. Pfeifer did so on April 22. He wrote in his order, “An objective observer who has read the online postings might reasonably question why comments about a defendant and defense counsel appearing before the judge were posted on the judge’s personal online account, even if the judge did not make the comments herself.”

Discussion of the case

As Goldberg suggested in her interview on NPR, this case should be approached as two separate cases, each with its own moral agent.

In the first case, the moral agent is the online editor who decided to use internal software to determine the email address of lawmiss. Goldberg, who was not consulted, has said in an interview for her own newspaper published March 26 that “[y]ou can argue we should not have uncovered lawmiss’ identity, and maybe we shouldn’t have.”

The same Plain Dealer story, written by reporter Henry J. Gomez, also quoted media ethicist Bob Steele of the Poynter Institute and DePauwUniversity as being troubled by the decision to investigate who was using the lawmiss pseudonym. He said that at the time the investigation began, there was “no immediate, profound danger to someone” and “no clear suspicion of judicial misconduct.”

Gomez also interviewed Rebecca Jeschke of Electronic Frontier Foundation, an online privacy rights group. Jeschke said, “I would think twice before participating in a message board where I had to give my email address knowing that management could access it at any time. It seems appropriate in this case, but … it’s hard not to imagine scenarios where it’s abused.”

Gomez also found that other news organization already were hiding online commenters’ identity from their news staffs. Steve Yelvington of Morris Digital Works, the online division of a company with 13 daily newspapers, said: “We are careful to firewall our business records from our journalists.”

Gomez’s story noted that in a May 2009 column in The Plain Dealer, editor Goldberg encouraged “freewheeling conversation” on blogs and stories at cleveland.com. His story said, “She also wrote that she was not in favor of requiring posters to use their real names because she feared that, given the culture of the Internet, doing so would stifle online conversation.”

In the second case, Goldberg is the moral agent. After consulting with the paper’s lawyers and other editors, she made the decision to tell the public that the lawmiss comments came from Judge Saffold’s email address.

Goldberg said she felt compelled to act once she knew lawmiss was linked to a judge and that some of the comments dealt with capital cases heard by that judge.

“…I don’t know how you can pretend you don’t know that information. How can you put that genie back in the bottle?” the editor told Gomez for her March 26 story. “What if it ever came to light that someone using the email of a sitting judge made comments on a public Web site about cases she was hearing, and we did not disclose it? These are capital crimes and life-and-death issues for these for these defendants. I think not to disclose this would be a violation of our mission and damaging to our credibility as a news organization.”

In his interview with Gomez, ethicist Steele agreed with Goldberg’s decision to report the information, despite his objections to the way the newspaper discovered lawmiss’ identity. Steele said: “Should The Plain Dealer be shining light on this? I say yes. I don’t think The Plain Dealer could walk away from the puzzle with so many pieces turned face up right now.”

Sources:

• James F. McCarty, “Anonymous online comments are linked to the personal email account of Cuyahoga County Common Pleas Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold,” The Plain Dealer, March 26, 2010.
• Henry J. Gomez, “Plain Dealer sparks ethical debate by unmasking anonymous cleveland.com poster,” The Plain Dealer, March 26, 2010.

• Connie Schultz, “Web site posters anonymity an invitation to mischief,” a column in The Plain Dealer, March 28, 2010.
• “Anonymous justice,” Bob Garfield’s interview with Susan Goldberg on National Public Radio, April 2, 2010.
• Leila Atassi, “Cuyahoga County Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold files $50 million lawsuit against The Plain Dealer and others,” The Plain Dealer, April 8, 2010.
• Dan Bobkoff, “Judge takes paper to court over online comments,” National Public Radio, April 10, 2010.
• Karen Farkas, “Judge Shirley Strickland Saffold is removed from the Anthony Sowell murder trial,” The Plain Dealer, April 22, 2010.
• Plain Dealer Staff, “Saffolds dismiss lawsuit against Plain Dealer, settle with Advance Internet,” The Plain Dealer, December 31, 2010.