Ray made several comments to the Economist last week after a story that mentioned the MyLifeMyID site. I’ve put both these comments below:
“First the declaration of interest, I am one of the Admins from the mylifemyid site and a director of Virtual Surveys, the company that ran and hosted mylifemyid.Secondly, a couple of quibbles. Surely, the use of the word “purportedly” is a tad tendentious. Over 50 million online ads were placed in locations such as Bebo and Facebook to promote the site, and over 1000 young people have indeed had their say. You are right to say many people dismissed the site as propaganda, but most of them said that before they saw the content. It is hard to describe a website which hosts so many anti-ID Card comments and Government propaganda.Finally, some information. The site reached its scheduled end on October 15, after three months of listening. The content of the site is now being analysed and a report will be presented to the Identity and Passport Service, who have committed to publishing the report on their website.”
and the second…
“Oops! What I meant (and what I thought I had typed) was “It is hard to describe a website which hosts so many anti-ID Card comments as Government propaganda.”
Very few comments were taken down from the site, and these were for abuse of the Ts&Cs, general abuse, or because they had been flagged by users as offensive. There were many posts that made comments about the site, its motivation, the way it was moderated, and except for the handful that fell foul of the abuse rule, they remained on the site.
I take Morel’s point about the case for not removing this type of project at the end of its period of action. We will certainly be recommending that future projects provide some sort of ongoing, public record of the discourse.
For example, I would be happy to debate whether the moderation was neutral or biased, but, without the material being available to all parties, I would be expecting people to simply take may word for it, and that would be unfair (and not necessarily likely to happen).
Ray Poynter, an Admin at mylifemyid”
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Firstly, I’d like to address the comment that “many people dismissed the site as propaganda, but most of them said that before they saw the content”. What forum were you on, Ray? A lot of users who were on the site for a great deal of time were (and still are) convinced it was a proaganda exercise. There were quite a few individuals expressed this sentiment, and while personally I don’t quite agree, I definitely see their point. Many came to the site to contribute and found a number of questions that displayed what they interpreted as bias. The main page of the site even had a video that many felt was blunt PR spin.
Secondly, your point about it being hard to call the site propaganda when the replies were so anti-ID is pretty weak. One must distinguish between comments made by Virtual Surveys and those of its users. The fact that a number of Virtual Surveys posts were very much seen as and attacked as propaganda challenges your view. Just because so many people disagreed and refuted the posts doesn’t mean it wasn’t propaganda, it just means it was bad propaganda. The bias in several posts was glaringly obvious, especially in earlier stages of the forum. So I’ll have to disagree with you Ray, I think people have every justification to describe it as a propaganda exercise. Whether that was actually the intention remains to be seen, but I don’t think you have a leg to stand on when you claim people couldn’t/didn’t call it propaganda.
Finally - you mention that ‘very few’ comments were taken down from the site. Sorry to burst your bubble Ray, but at least one entire thread disappeared from the forum. All sorts of different actions could have been taken that would have resolved any situation you had with an individual thread - editing some offensive language, warning users, locking the thread, etc etc. You chose the sledgehammer option, and deleted a thread that had from what I recall >30 posts within it. There were also lots of posts moved - either to a different forum or to the purgatory known as ‘miscellaneous posts’, where finding the post that had been moved was often rather difficult. There was at times, significant intervention on the forum where a lot more subtle action would have done much better - and so I can’t agree with you on this statement either.
All in all, I disagree with your responses - you have a much more positive interpretation of events than I.
29/10/2008 at 11:40 pm
I guess I am a pretty postive person most of the time!
In terms of the comments about it being propoganda, I was referring to the general blogosphere comments, not to the comments within the forum. I would agree that there were many sceptitical comments within the forum, including amongst the people contributing summaries at the end. However, most third party negative comments were written at the start or by people who had clearly not read the content.
In terms of numbers of comments edited or removed, it depends on what one calls ‘a lot’. I am travellnig at the moment, but when I get back I will try and pull the actual numbers together and post them somewhere (they will also be part of the final, published report). My recollection is that fewer than 3% of comments/threads were edited or deleted - mostly because of abuse. I would call this very few, some people would call any too many.
01/12/2008 at 01:04 pm
And the Economist site also records:
Virtual Surveys director Ray Poynter may try to demonstrate the project’s ‘openness’ by saying “Over 50 million online ads were placed… to promote the site” yet a cursory forensic analysis of the mylifemyid.org web site code suggests very much the opposite.
Though the site is now closed, user may still use their browsers to view a ‘hidden’ file that has been left on the server at http://mylifemyid.org/robots.txt. For those who don’t understand the code in this file, the following information may shed some light on its significance.
Morel’sGhost correctly makes the point about the data on mylifemyid.org being a “public record”. Now, in theory this could have happened without any effort or expenditure by the UK Gov or its suppliers. As many web researchers will know, some sites such as the Internet Archive Wayback Machine (IAWM - web.archive.org) store historical snapshots of web sites. While not perfect, these snapshots are, effectively, public records. And they’re archived at no charge to the owners of the sites they index.
However, IAWM was blocked from archiving the information on the mylifemyid.org site. And so was every other search engin’s web crawler (robot) that abides by instructions to refrain from indexing sites they encounter (which means all the major search sites / archivers). This block was achieved on the mylifemyid server by using a “Robots.txt Query Exclusion” – in simple terms, a file on the web server that tells any indexing web crawler (such as Google’s googlebot) to ignore the site and refrain from indexing it.
As you can see if you scroll to the end of this file at http://mylifemyid.org/robots.txt there’s a line of human-readable comment that says it all:
# [nall]: generally we don’t want to be indexed
Disallow: /
So much for efforts to “promote the site”!
[Technical note: while mylifemyid.org has been ostensibly taken off-line, those who created and/or administered the site left far more data on the server than is appropriate for a site associated with promoting Security and ID for all. An analysis of the robots.txt file reveals that a Drupal file called install.php is still on the server, along with various other files that it would have been prudent to NOT make live on a public site.)