Cloak of Internet Propels Deceit, Sneak Attacks

Technology's Remoteness Brings Decline in Civility

When an aide to Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich Jr. (R) went online to fuel damaging rumors about the Democratic mayor of Baltimore, he entered a world where public and private boundaries are treacherously blurred and normal etiquette can easily evaporate.

Joseph Steffen, who was forced to resign last week for his postings and chat room e-mails, is a high-profile example of the conflicting freedoms and dangers of the Internet. It is a medium that allows unbridled communication but also seems to encourage a measure of mean-spiritedness.

Like millions of Americans for whom the Internet has become part of daily life, Steffen may have believed that what he wrote online was private and as a result felt freer to say things he would not have said in person. But when his online discussion of the intentional spread of rumors about Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley became known, his "private" statements led to a very public dismissal.

On a typical day, 70 million American adults are logged on to the Internet, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, which studies the technology's social impact. Americans send millions of person-to-person e-mails a day, and the content is often fast and loose. "It's the era of drive-bys, where the Internet can be used for sneak attacks and dirty tricks," said Pew Project Director Lee Rainie.

In e-mail messages, chat rooms and instant messaging, "people take the gloves off much more quickly than they do in person," said John Palfrey, executive director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School. He said that is familiar to most anyone who chats with others on an e-mail list, in which people "flame" one another repeatedly but are very polite when they meet those same people at a conference.

People are less comfortable maligning someone face-to-face because they don't want to see the reaction of the other person. On the Internet, where people think they can remain anonymous, there are fewer inhibitions.

"There is something about the remoteness of the medium, the speed of typing and reading, the ease of hitting 'send,' the instant gratification . . . that leads people to be less polite online than they might be in person," Palfrey said.

In a survey of 840 U.S. companies last year by the American Management Association and the ePolicy Institute, 58 percent of workplace Internet users said they sent and received personal instant messages, and 16 percent of those workers said their messages had included gossip, rumors or disparaging remarks.

In chat rooms, people often find that the way to get noticed is to trade new information, spread rumors or post more strident messages, Rainie said.

School principals, elected officials and newspaper ombudsmen say that complaints via e-mail are harsher and less civil in tone than other forms of communication.

Even young people, whose interactions on the Internet are mostly positive, are increasingly engaging in "cyber bullying," antagonizing and intimidating others, according to the Media Awareness Network, a Canadian nonprofit media literacy group.

But if the Internet encourages nastiness, the near-instant information it delivers also creates more transparency and accountability. Job candidates, for example, have to assume that they have been Googled by their prospective employers.

It is now easier for many employers to retrieve e-mail and identify the senders, capturing for posterity much of what is sent on the Internet. Experts say Internet users should assume that anything typed is a permanent record. E-mails are often subpoenaed and have become a routine part of lawsuits.

This nexus between private and public communication can be costly: career-altering disclosures, political humiliation, even criminal sanctions.

Last week, a civil rights organization made public e-mail messages in which officials in the District's school voucher program and the U.S. Department of Education discussed how to obscure facts that could be politically damaging.

The next day, a conservative reporter who had asked President Bush a loaded question at a news conference resigned after liberal bloggers uncovered his real name and raised questions about his background. And in 2000, a Herndon man was forced to resign from a Fairfax County School Board advisory committee after derogatory e-mails he wrote were made public. He had used an ethnic slur to refer to then-Fairfax school superintendent Daniel A. Domenech and called a panelist at a town hall meeting "an inarticulate buffoon."

Academics are quick to add that the Internet has also inspired positive connections. Families can research rare health problems, for example, and form support groups. And it may be easier to use instant messaging to ask someone out for a date the first time, Rainie said, "so you don't have to stammer your way into it."

Whatever the use, the Internet has changed social relations, he said, and expectations have not yet caught up. It used to be that the written word, such as a letter, was taken more seriously than the spoken word. But people have become so accustomed to using the Internet for everything -- working, shopping, planning vacations, chatting with family and friends -- that they view the computer as an extension of themselves, according to Deborah Keary, a director at the Society for Human Resource Management.

"They write things the way they say things, which is off the cuff, and other people mistake it for something else," said Jennifer S. Granick, executive director of the Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society.

Staff researcher Bobbye Pratt contributed to this report.