Why Naming Names is a Problem Even When the Names Have Been Named
Last night Moe Tkacik, a blogger for the Washington City Paper, put up a post about the Assange rape allegations that mentioned the names of the women who claim he raped her. When the #mooreandme folks got wind of it, they hammered her, and she replied with this (edited slightly for clarity):
I did not get the memo about how we were supposed to be all State Department “see no evil” abt accusers’ names at this point. From my perspective, names were just the obvious way of keeping their stories straight. They’ve been all over internet, tweeting etc about this.
Today the editor of the website Jezebel, called out for doing the same thing in a post a while back, replied with this:
Her name has been public for 4 mos. Let’s not pretend otherwise.
So okay. Here’s the deal. Two things:
First, and most obviously, a “public” fact can always be made more public. There are people in the world who