These are questions that seem to be coming up more and more frequently as we live increasingly large parts of our lives online: When is it okay to publicize someone’s identity for things they said on Twitter, and what kinds of consequences do we think are appropriate for online bad behavior?

The post by Jezebel co-founder Tracie Egan Morrisey — which was entitled “Racist Teens Forced to Answer for Tweets About the ‘Nigger’ President” — was a followup of sorts to a previous post that highlighted a number of racist tweets posted to the service following Obama’s election victory on Tuesday night. None of the users who posted them were specifically identified, but in the more recent piece, Morrisey identified several students at a number of schools in the U.S. who posted similar comments. The story also went into some detail about them, noting that one student “plays football for Xaverian High School, a private Catholic prep school in Brooklyn, NY,” and that others also play sports for their schools.

What is an appropriate response for a single tweet?

The point of doing this seemed to be that most schools have codes of conduct, particularly for those who represent the school on sports teams, and racist tweets would appear to be in contravention of those rules. But is publicly identifying these students — who are legally children — on a website like Jezebel really an appropriate response to what in some cases was a single tweet? In an email, Morrisey said that she felt there was no issue with writing the story, since the students in question had already publicly identified themselves through Twitter profiles and Facebook profiles:

We actually did not “out” the identities of these tweeters — they did, through their public Twitter accounts and Facebook profiles. They used their real names, listed their schools and their locations, and thus broadcasted these details to the entire world by virtue of putting them on the internet.

We chose to get in touch with the school administrators who are charged with educating these individuals because the institutions not only have mission statements about their educational goals, but they also have student conduct codes.”

Some commenters on Jezebel clearly disagreed with the site’s decision. One comment that got a lot of votes from other readers asked “Is this what we’ve come to?? Internet shaming children, blasting their crimes across the web?” And others who specialize in online behavior, including sociologist Zeynep Tufekci from the University of North Carolina, also said they found the public shaming troubling:

@mathewi Wow. Publicizing racist tweets like this is not healthy or good for combating racism, or educating teens or letting them grow.

—
Zeynep Tufekci (@techsoc) November 09, 2012

Many of those who took part in a Twitter discussion of the issue with me on Friday believed that the students in question should have to face the consequences of their actions — after all, the internet is a public place, they argued, and even children need to realize that making such comments could affect their lives. Others said that public shaming of racism is the only way to effectively fight such beliefs, and therefore what Jezebel did was appropriate.

@mathewi the Internet is not anonymous. Online comments have real world consequences. Best kids learn that lesson early.

—
  (@kathodgson) November 09, 2012

Is there no room for online mistakes any more?

One of the things that troubles me about this incident is that it shows how quick we can be to judge a person — especially someone in high school, who may be acting badly for all kinds of complicated reasons — without any real understanding of what is going on, or what the repercussions may be. Making people face the consequences for saying things online is a noble goal, but is there no room even for children to make mistakes without the full force of the internet being brought to bear? As far as I can tell, Morrisey didn’t even try to contact the high-school students she profiled, or their parents.

@pwthornton @mathewi @AdrienneLaF Or maybe they're just clueless kids who think it's cool to say wild stuff without grasping implications?

—
Elaine Clisham (@eclisham) November 09, 2012

A quick internet search of one of the individuals mentioned shows that this incident is the top result for their name. Maybe that will fade over time, especially since some of those involved seem to have deleted their accounts — or maybe it won’t. Couldn’t the same thing have been achieved by calling the schools to identify the students, without doing so in the article itself? Morrisey denied that there was any attempt to “shame” those involved, and yet the headline talks about forcing these students to answer for their alleged crimes. Is this kind of online vigilantism really going to solve anything?

@mathewi These Tweets are hateful & vicious but Jezebel could've made those calls without publishing names and school affiliations.

—
Liz Pullen (@nwjerseyliz) November 09, 2012

Similar issues came up during the recent public outing of a notorious Reddit “troll” named Violentacrez, who was profiled in a Gizmodo post, and the similar revealing of a Twitter user who went by the name ComfortablySmug, who posted inaccurate information during Hurricane Sandy. The Reddit moderator was seen as fair game by many because he created threads devoted to child pornography and other offensive content, but ComfortablySmug was a less obvious case — as we noted in a post and an internal debate that we published about the issues raised by such online lynch mobs.

Both of those individuals were adults, however, and presumably understood the consequences of their actions before they engaged in them. How much should we expect high-school students to suffer for what might have been an offhand comment or an attempt to impress their friends? How much public ridicule or online condemnation is too much, and when does it cross over into outright bullying? These are issues we are going to be confronting more and more as we live out our lives online, and the answers are not obvious.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users Cotidad and See-ming Lee

That was the counterintuitive thing about last night: If you were watching a major news network or following Twitter, you were pretty sure that Barack Obama was your next president by 11:15. If you were instead relying on NYTimes.com and 538.com for the news, you might have gone to bed thinking the election was still up in the air.

The networks began projecting Obama had won a little before 11:15 p.m. as the votes from Ohio rolled in.

NBC News declares Barack Obama as the projected winner of the Presidency of United States. More at NBCNews.com #NBCPolitics

— NBC News (@NBCNews) November 7, 2012

Fox News projects #Obama re-elected president fxn.ws/Svj9UI via @foxnewspolitics #election2012

— Fox News (@FoxNews) November 7, 2012

That was also Obama tweeted the following…

This happened because of you. Thank you.

— Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

…and tweeted and Facebooked the photo that has now become the most-retweeted tweet ever.

Four more years. twitter.com/BarackObama/st… — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) November 7, 2012

Yet the New York Times — and Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, which accounted for a massive amount of traffic to the New York Times this week (with 71 percent of visits to NYTimes.com’s politics section also including a stop at Silver’s blog) — were silent, with the NYT’s homepage headline alternating between reporting Obama’s win in Pennsylvania and saying that the networks projected Obama had won the election. My husband was working late, and when I called him at 11:15 p.m. to discuss the Obama win, he said, “Are you sure? The Times doesn’t have anything.” At the same time, people outside on my street were cheering. The New York Times did not project that Obama had won the election until 12:03 a.m.

Breaking News: President Barack Obama Wins Re-election, The New York Times Projectsnyti.ms/TvricB — The New York Times (@nytimes) November 7, 2012

At that point, this was happening in Chicago, per the NYT’s own election blog:

Romney supporters were clearing out:

Nobody tell Rove, but the Ohio GOP has conceded and gone home. twitter.com/daveweigel/sta…

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) November 7, 2012

And the Empire State building had turned blue.

#BREAKING: The Empire State Building is BLUE. #ObamaWins

— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) November 7, 2012

Nate Silver has built his reputation on accurately predicting elections, and it looks as if his model got all 50 states right last night, though votes in Florida and Virginia are still being counted. But if you were looking for commentary from him last night, particularly after the networks announced an Obama win and the Obama campaign started celebrating, he and the NYT were not the place to get it — even though readers were seeking him out.

Instead, a lot of discussion of the results was coming from Karl Rove, who was arguing on Fox News with the network’s own anchors that they’d called Ohio too early.

The delay makes some sense: Silver has to be cautious, and the New York Times has to protect its own reputation. It can’t call the election too early and it doesn’t want to risk a Dewey defeats Truman moment. But Nate Silver is the man of the hour, the NYT’s top brand and probably traffic driver yesterday, and he could have brought even more traffic to the site between 11:15 p.m. and 12:03 a.m. if he’d been saying, well, anything.

@fivethirtyeight Little slow, eh?

— Tyler Hicks-Wright (@tghw) November 7, 2012

He, or another Times writer, could have written about why the Times hadn’t called the election yet and explained to readers what they were waiting for. But last night the paper was too slow to get in on the action, and readers who wanted a really good sense of how the election was unfolding had to turn to other sources.

Update, 4:19 p.m.: The NYT’s recently appointed public editor Margaret Sullivan commented on the NYT’s slowness on her blog. “Journalism history is full of cautionary tales about ill-fated instances of jumping the gun – whether the famous “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline in The Chicago Tribune or, much more recently, the many newspapers and cable networks who got the presidential results wrong in 2000,” she writes. And “unlike the television networks, which depend on their combined exit polls in calling elections, The Times prefers to look at real numbers in addition to exit polls, said Janet Elder, an associate managing editor who is part of The Times’s election ‘decision desk.’”

In the past, any truly public analysis of the performance of the candidates had to wait until the event was over, when the usual political operatives and pundits like former Clinton advisor James Carville would be called on by CNN or Fox News to pick a winner, criticize the moderator, or handicap future debates. We’ve always had real-time, horse-race-style discussion of these events, but it has almost always taken place in small groups — in bars, or at local viewing events, etc. Never before has there been a way to eavesdrop on a giant conversation about such a thing as it happens.

Game-time commentary: Good or bad?

That kind of game-time handicapping is great fun when it’s the Super Bowl, or the Academy Awards, or some other event with less at stake (although football fans might disagree about that description). But presidential debates — in theory, at least — are supposed to be important elements in the political process, which help undecided voters make up their minds and therefore can ultimately affect the course of political history. Does Twitter help or harm that process?

Hey Obama -- TRAIN WITH HILLARY. This is ROCKY III and she's your Apollo Creed. #eyeofthetiger

—
Patton Oswalt (@pattonoswalt) October 04, 2012

Some would argue the political process is something of a circus anyway, and that carefully stage-managed events like the debates are already a sideshow with little political value — and therefore the additional theatrical element added by real-time commentary isn’t going to have much effect. Many parts of the process are probably also ephemeral, and likely to die out relatively quickly: will there be long-term political repercussions from Mitt Romney’s mention of shutting down PBS, fueled by all of the parody accounts devoted to Big Bird and other characters that Twitter produced? Unlikely.

An optimist would say there is something very real to be gained by having people watch such debates for any reason — even if it’s just to follow along with the wisecracks on Twitter — because then at least there is a chance they might accidentally become more informed about political issues. According to Twitter’s graph of discussions during the debate, some of the biggest peaks in tweets-per-minute came when the two candidates were discussing Medicare. Were most of those jokes or partisan attacks, or did they actually contribute to anyone’s understanding of the issues? That’s hard to say.

The spin cycle is now measured in minutes

The rise of Twitter as a political force has definitely accelerated the metabolism of a campaign by orders of magnitude, to the point where political analysts now talk about a news cycle that is measured in minutes or hours instead of days or weeks. Is that ultimately a good thing for politics or democracy? Some have argued that it is beneficial in part because trumped-up stories or blind alleys can be defused much more quickly, or burn themselves out rather than dominating the spin cycle. But a chorus of Twitter responses can also add fuel to something that might not actually be meaningful.

“I can’t watch a debate anymore without having my iPhone in my hand. I don’t feel like I’m having the full experience if I’m not reading the reaction in real time.” — NBC News chief digital officer Vivian Schiller

On the plus side, some pointed out that Twitter users watching television and following along with the real-time discussion were clearly better off than the professional journalists who were attending the debate — and theoretically were supposed to provide some kind of expert analysis later — since all of those reporters were stuck in a separate room with a balky audio and video feed. And as Alex Howard at O’Reilly noted, it might have changed the debate in some interesting ways if some of the smart commentary and questions from Twitter users had actually made it into the debate itself.

During the debate, even some Obama supporters (at least the ones in my stream) seemed to quickly come to the conclusion that the President was off his game, that he was tired or even uninterested, and that Romney gained the upper hand by being more forceful. BuzzFeed’s Ben Smith actually declared Romney the winner only 42 minutes into the event. Those impressions were then reinforced by the pundits on the post-game talk shows. Within an hour, the story of the debate seemed to be that Obama had “lost” and Romney had “won,” even though some said the Republican candidate contradicted himself at a number of points.

Is any of that going to have a lasting effect on voters’ decisions, or the way that the campaigns react? Or is it just ephemera that will be gone in a matter of days, as Twitter users become infatuated with some other celebrity event or perceived injustice? It’s clear that for both voters and politicians, and the political operatives who run their campaigns, the Twitter-sphere’s instantaneous reaction to events is a reality they have to take into account — and it could be changing the way we engage with political issues in some important ways. Whether that’s good or bad remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr user Aih and Shutterstock/iQoncept

The Politico piece, about an incident on Friday involving presidential hopeful Mitt Romney, calls it the “21-minute news cycle.” As Dylan Byers describes it, Romney made a comment at a campaign stop in Michigan about how no one had ever asked him for his birth certificate — a crack that appeared to refer to the controversial “birther” debate over where President Barack Obama was born. Within a matter of seconds, a reporter attending the event had posted the remark to Twitter, where it was then retweeted hundreds of times over the next few minutes (according to data Politico got from the Twitter-analytics service Topsy).

Political brush fires can erupt within minutes

Several minutes later, Politico and BuzzFeed had both posted items on it making the connection to the “birther” debate, and BuzzFeed had posted a video to YouTube of Romney making the statement. Within minutes, the Romney campaign had issued a comment saying the remark was taken out of context and that the candidate did not mean to dredge up the birth certificate issue again — a statement that was followed quickly by one from the Obama camp, which accused Romney of doing exactly that. Over the next few hours the news made its way to TV news shows and elsewhere, but most of the heat from the incident had more or less died down by the end of the day, and Byers noted that the event is a perfect example of how things have changed:

“Four years ago, the fallout from a controversial remark would have taken hours, if not a full day, to unfold. In 2012, social media, which enables reporters to file in real-time and puts increased pressure on campaigns to speed up their response time, has brought the pace of the news cycle down to a matter of minutes and seconds. The ‘one-day story’ — itself an archaic term in the 21st century — has become the one-hour story.”

This phenomenon is something we discussed at the paidContent 2012 conference in New York earlier this year, during a panel that I moderated with Vivian Schiller of NBC News and Josh Marshall of the political blog network Talking Points Memo. As Marshall described it, social media — including blogs such as his, which started the process that was later accelerated by Twitter and Facebook — have not only sped up the news cycle but have added new “vectors” that political analysts of all kinds have to take account of. In other words, instead of just paying attention to the New York Times and one or two political talk shows, everyone has to pay attention to Twitter as well, and to new sources of political content such as BuzzFeed and Huffington Post.

You could argue that the tendency for inconsequential or even irrelevant incidents to get blown out of proportion has increased thanks to Twitter and the appearance of “viral content” sites like BuzzFeed (which has been making a big push into the political sphere since it hired former Politico writer Ben Smith) and that is probably true. But then, such incidents also got blown out of proportion by television talk shows and news programs and newspaper columnists before blogs and Twitter and Facebook came along. In many ways, all those tools have done is speed up and enhance a process that has been under way for decades.

Irrelevant stories also burn out faster

During our conversation in June about social media and political coverage, Schiller also argued that the speed with which Twitter and other networks operate can be beneficial as well — since it can help defuse or tamp down an incorrect or ridiculous report that might otherwise have taken hours or even days to disprove through traditional media channels. As Byers noted in his story, the Romney comment might have turned into a multiple-day issue, as newspapers picked it up and it worked its way through the usual sources of political commentary, but instead it was mostly out of gas within a few hours. As reporter Sasha Issenberg put it:

“These little stories catch fire on Twitter more quickly than they did even with bloggers in 2008, but it also means that they burn out faster.”

There’s another element of Twitter and social media that could be beneficial during an election campaign, and that is the way that such tools allow for sources directly connected to events to comment and affect the news flow — something that could help alleviate the “pack journalism” effect that Jeff Jarvis and others have complained about, in which thousands of reporters congregate at a single event and repeat the same kinds of information over and over. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has written about how social media can be an effective tool to combat this phenomenon during events such as the “Arab Spring” revolutions in Egypt and elsewhere, because it allows other non-traditional sources to become part of the narrative.

This phenomenon of having “the sources go direct,” as blogging pioneer Dave Winer has described it, is probably one of the biggest disruptive effects that Twitter has introduced into political journalism — and its impact, both positive and negative, is only going to become more obvious as the nation gets closer to the election. Whether it is primarily good or bad depends a lot on your perspective. Is it bad because there is more sound and fury that signifies nothing, or is it good because irrelevant stories burn themselves out more quickly and the sources of information have become broader?

Post and thumbnail images courtesy of Flickr users See-ming Lee and Nils Geylen

Cain clearly hopes to follow the model of Glenn Beck, who launched his own streaming video network, GBTV, last year. That site, which is soon to be renamed The Blaze TV, employs a tiered paywall starting at $4.95 a month, and HD videos are available across devices. CainTV is free.

A video posted to CainTV.com previews some of the topics the channel will cover. “The time has come for a new kind of entertainment,” the video begins. CainTV is “real American everything.” Next up, with jaunty music in the background, is comedian Rodney Lee Conover, who says, “Hi, I’m Rodney Lee Conover and you’re watching CainTV.” The video pans to a clip of Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown law student who advocates for birth control to be covered by insurance plans and whom Rush Limbaugh called a “slut” and “prostitute” for her birth control advocacy. Cut to Conover saying in a falsetto, “I’ll have to leave college if they make me pay for my birth control pills!”

The video moves on to other topics that CainTV will cover: A documentary about border control; dialogues between Claymation Barack Obamas and Ronald Reagans; the hypocrisy of Democratic politicians. There are also segments for kids, including an animated show about a baby Tyrannosaurus Rex who hatches from a red, white and blue egg. The baby dinosaur, named Tex, says, “I love my family, this land and Thanksgiving each fall.” Finally, CainTV promises “lots of Cain.” Herman Cain, wearing a cowboy hat, says, “We the people are coming.”

The announcement itself turns on a “Privacy Bill of Rights,” which sets out seven principles such as transparency and individual control. The Bill of Rights is part of an administrative white paper that will lead to legislation giving the Federal Trade Commission further tools to oversee companies’ use of consumer data.

The other big news yesterday was that advertisers and major internet companies will let consumers opt out of tracking “cookies,” a form of browser technology that lets companies follow people as they move around the internet. Companies’ use of cookies has produced a series of outcries following reports that Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Facebook and others sometimes used them without permission.

Some reports have described the industry deal as a “Do Not Track” agreement but there is no firm evidence yet that the companies will stop the use of behavioral tracking altogether. According to the White House report:

The meaning of Do Not Track and the best mechanism(s) for implementing it are still under discussion and will require continuing discussions among stakeholders

The agreement will reportedly include 90 percent of industry advertisers, including firms like Google, Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), and AOL (NYSE: AOL).

The White House announcement was made in concert with the Digital Advertising Alliance, an umbrella group that has been scrambling to promote a self-regulation system for privacy. The DAA described the deal as “another important milestone in the advertising industry’s 40-year history of effective self-regulation.”

So what does this all mean? For now, the lack of details in the grand privacy announcements means it is unclear when (or if) consumers will be able to turn of behavioral tracking entirely.

But in the short term, the “Privacy Bill of Rights” is a political winner for both President Obama and for the tech companies with which he is ideologically and financially allied.

More specifically, it allows the President to appear out front on the privacy debate at a time when Republicans also want to make political hay out of the issue. Here, for example, is a screen shot of a political ad for Obama 2012 that appeared right when the news broke last night:

For the internet companies, the announcement will permit them at least a partial reprieve as they lobby to minimize regulatory oversight. Their ability to do so is shrinking, though, as other political actors continue to step into the privacy arena.

On Wednesday, for instance, California’s Attorney General announced an agreement with six major companies, including Google and Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN), over the way the mobile industry handles apps and personal data.

And the same day, dozens of state attorneys general sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page, expressing “strong concerns” about the company’s impending privacy changes.

The White House is holding a press conference on the Privacy Bill of Rights on Thursday.

Square makes a card reader that plugs into an iPhone or Android phone along an application that lets pretty much anyone take payments using credit cards. Politico reported Monday that the Obama campaign plans to use the devices during the run-up to November’s election, which was confirmed by a Square representative.

It’s a nice boost for Square, which has been trying to buck the NFC-based mobile-payments system that several other industry giants have been pushing. Unlike those other approaches (which I think will eventually have merit) Square’s technology is much easier to get up and running: companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG) that are trying to gain acceptance for Google Wallet need people to buy an NFC-equipped Android phone as well as convince retailers to stock the right equipment.

The report doesn’t suggest specific new laws-but it does suggest that industry self-regulation by online advertisers isn’t enough. To put the report’s recommendations into effect, the White House has set up a task force led by the general counsel of the Commerce Department, Cameron Kerry, who is also the brother of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass.

Assistant Secretary of the Commerce Department Lawrence Strickling said at a privacy conference last month that the report is the beginning of a “dialogue” that will ultimately produce a final position for the Obama administration on privacy issues. While Republican leaders in the House of Representatives have expressed general support for privacy, they are unlikely to support expanding the regulatory purview of the agencies most likely to be in charge of enforcing new privacy rules, such as the Federal Trade Commission.

The news follows a report that the Federal Communications Commission is continuing to investigate a privacy breach by Google’s Street View cars. The company’s cars collected personal information that was transmitted over public WiFi networks; Google (NSDQ: GOOG) issued a public apology for the mistake in May. It also follows the suggestion that another government agency, the Federal Trade Commission, is considering regulations that would offer internet users a “do not track” option similar to a “do not call” option.

Update: I wound up watching bursts of the signing via the White House iPhone app as I left the train, only hearing later about Vice President Joe Biden’s newest wordplay. That took comments from people I know and news reports — not a direct link to the “F word” clip from the White House. When news makers cut out the middleman and when anyone can be a broadcaster of text or multimedia, it shifts the role of those who cover news. Just how is still being determined.