I password-protected the discussion threads attached to the article about Chris McKinstry’s death, a few days after I published them. I’m suddenly getting a lot of criticism about that. (75 comments in three hours!)
It’s true that after about 5 days, I password-protected the archived discussion threads from the “?off” online forum. I had never intended to keep them online indefinitely. I wrote my blog post as a “news story” because it was newsworthy to a couple specific online communities: people who knew Chris, people from ?off, etc. After a few days, I figured that most people who would care had already heard the news. Hits had tapered off significantly. At that point I figured the impact of pulling the archived threads would be minimal. And I hadn’t heard any complaints until tonight.
The night ?off went offline, Joel Spolsky contacted me with a link to a CDC article suggesting that certain types of publicization of suicide may encourage additional pople to attempt it. At first I assumed that Joel’s concern was motivated by a desire to protect his professional image. After a little more discussion, I decided that he truly believed in this theory, and that this was probably not motivated by self-interest. (Honestly though, his self-interest seems like a pretty understandable motivation. Now my name is linked on the web to some guy’s untimely death, and I’m not sure how I feel about that.) I declined to remove anything at the beginning, although I did ensure my writing met the CDC guidelines for responsible reporting. However, I couldn’t ensure that the ?off threads met those standards.
I’m not convinced of this theory myself, but I can’t rule it out either. Let’s say the theory has a 1 in 3 chance of being correct, and that 1 in 5000 people might be suicidal. Well, that means that if I got 30,000 viewers to that page over the years, a couple people might attempt suicide because of it. I decided that any risk of influencing someone to attempt suicide is worse than no risk at all. Right? I figured the archived discussions had lived out their newsworthiness, and didn’t really need to be on the Internet for all eternity.
I have had a small number of people request access, and I’ve given it to every one of them. Most of those were people who knew Chris personally, or who had some other connection to the issue. For example, one person deals with depressed people on the web, and wanted to see how ?off handled this so that she’d have an idea of what to do in the future.
If you do want access to these threads, please email me and I’ll be happy to provide it.
