Blog Accountability

I saw this story about a blogger who is really angry at Lycos for deleting her emails and then treating her like a total jackass. The read is compelling and Lycos comes out looking, to put it mildly, like a group of not very nice people.

Of course, the various outraged commentors worked through the clues in the post and actually end up finding the guy they think wrote the nasty emails on behalf of Lycos to the wronged blogger. There are all sorts of links to his now-slash-dotted personal sites. This guy will forever be tied to one of the worst customer service experiences in recent memory. If customer service is his true calling, and he ever expects to work for a company that knows enough to Google his name, he's screwed and will never be able to go on a power trip like that again. Justice is served.

Now what if everybody's wrong?

There are two possible sources for error here:

1. The original post - I don't know the person who wrote the original post. He/She seems like a personable, trustworthy person and one certainly empathizes with him or her. But the About Us page on the blog doesn't exactly inspire trustworthiness. And I don't want to be accused of going all Oliver Stone here, but how do we know this person is telling the truth? What evidence is there, other than excerpts from an alleged email thread? Was there a taped phone conversation like we heard in an analogous Verizon customer relations fiasco? How hard would it be to make this up out of whole cloth? Or (perhaps more likely) to take some poetic license and make the Lycos rep seem ever-so-slightly more of a jerk than he actually was? You know, just to make sure the point gets made.
2. Angry Mob Web Forensics - So on the assumption that the original post is absolutely true as stated, we have 200+ commentors who are livid at the absolute assiness of this Lycos guy. They want to make the world a better place and/or avenge themselves and others for all the times they were treated rudely. So hundreds of angry, righteously indignant, Web-savvy Hardy Boys go hunting for the alleged perpetrator, and manage to find some guy associated with Lycos whose name is Mike and who appears to work in customers service. Now there is an actual person to hold accountable! And so the torrent of backlash against this guy commences. Good, we say. Clearly he had it coming, we say. But what if there was another guy at Lycos whose name was Mike? How objectively and thoroughly does an angry mob do its homework? When you say the word "Angry Mob" does it make you think of Gil Grissom from CSI or peasants with torches and pitchforks?

If either or both of the above injected some degree of inaccuracy into the situation, then it is conceivable that some guy will be forever tainted by something that didn't happen or wasn't done by him.

I want to be clear here: I have no real, actual information that this thing is a hoax and that some guy is getting dragged through the mud for no good reason. But I have no real, actual information that proves this guy is getting his just desserts either.

It would be so easy to let this sort of thing get out of control.