Linden Lab *Still* Hates Academic Freedom *and* the Free Press
by Urizenus Sklar on 03/12/06 at 1:05 am
It seems like just yesterday we were complaining about the Linden policies on academic freedom and free press. Not long after, we addressed Lindens about the matter face to face, and I do mean like in Real Life (remember that?). So we were eager to see what changes would be made to the Research Ethics in Second Life policy. And guess what? They still hate acacemic freedom, and they still hate free press. Let’s start with their rules for the conduct of academic research:
If you are engaged in a classroom or research project, or plan to write about the Second Life community as part of your project you must contact Linden Lab via email at education@lindenlab.com. Please send a detailed proposal for us to review. If we feel you have a valid project, we will alert the community to your proposal. After we hear from the members, we’ll make a final decision on whether/when you can begin. You will be asked to sign an agreement that you will adhere to our mutually agreed-on conditions of your project.
Excuse me? This is what Institutional Review Boards and human subjects committees are for. Academics conducting research in whatever setting involving human subjects have to go through a rigorous review process by experts on research ethics, and I’m sorry I don’t see any fucking experts in research ethics at Linden Lab. There is absolutley no reason for the Lindens to be vetting research that might, for example, be studying how Lindens treat SL residents like rats in a cage.
You say you are a reporter and don’t care about such things. Well then please keep the following in mind:
Members of the press can write generally about Second Life without following this process. However, if you plan to interview any Second Life residents please contact our Marketing Department.
Hope all you reporters are following that! (Tip of the bowler to prok for noticing the revision.)
Prokofy Neva
Dec 3rd, 2006
Actually, I hope all the reporters are ignoring all that, it’s ridiculous, and it’s a press policy worth of Milosevic or Saddam or Putin. Do you think Adam Reuters went to Catherine Linden and asked permission to interview Edgar Bronfman *snort*?
Or perhaps Adam had an uber-clearance to start with?
Forcing the timid or disoriented press into the arms of the Lindens marketing department (note how media is treated merely as a function of marketing) and by extention, their helpers in the hired PR firm) means getting the Lindens and hired hands to steer, steer, steer — and that’s what they do, giving the choice plums to their innermost insiders.
I do hope real reporters will walk around these robots.
I wonder about all these educators in SL. I don’t see any real peer review or quality control even by Lindens, that’s the funny thing. I think what they mean by “alert the community” is only about those projects that have to do with interviewing large numbers of residents with questionnaires. Occasionally they’ll have notices up about these.
I recently saw a guy put all his questionnaires on a piece of land I sold, and I don’t know if he contacted any Lindens.
Cardie Mahoney
Dec 3rd, 2006
Re the surveys on land, might not have been your land Prok, bt I did stumble across an area offering 500 linden to fill out a thirty minute survey. Finally something more worthwhile than campcing chairs for newbies I guess.
Random Writer
Dec 3rd, 2006
Interestingly enough, there’s nothing they can do about this, unless they add an NDA into thier ToS which would gather more media than talking to residents. (I.E. What is LL trying to hide by keeping thier residents mouths shut?)
With SL as a public game (we won’t even start on letting anyone, thier dog, cat and frog in), it falls under public information category of reporting, and reporters need not be established with any certain terms to write.
Until LL adds something to a ToS about it, there’s nothing they can do about residents talking outside of LL’s realm. It may however, with fear of retaliation, cause some to be anonymous, while others yet are waiting for the day that LL tries to retaliate against them for this sort of thing to open up a can of worms lawsuit. (Taking assets from a player, not going bankrupt and not being forced into the policy… can you imagine Anshe Chung in a lawsuit like that?)
Petey
Dec 3rd, 2006
Note to self:
Next time, before I publish pictures of a group of African Bushmen hunting 40 foot tall furries amidst unbelievable virtual debauchery, make sure I have permission, else Linden Labs will be angry with me over the Internet.
Heartun Breaker
Dec 3rd, 2006
With all due respect to our Linden hosts, SL is a public venue… much like a shopping mall. The individual shop owners may invite in whomever they want, and may consent to interviews as they wish. Even if LL passes a TOS rule against it, this has all been hammered out by the Supreme Court and any rule they pass will not stand.
I am establishing an SL First Ammendment Defense Fund. Donate your lindens directly to me.
Eloise
Dec 3rd, 2006
I happen to subscribe to a number of the education in SL mailing lists since, as well as writing for the Herald sometimes, I’m also a teacher.
I won’t do a Prok and repeat the discussions verbatim, but most of the people on the lists accept that there are limits that LL imposes to research in SL. In fact the most famous of them (as reported in Nature) seems to ignore the ToS and describes that it does… it captures names without consent. The biggest issue that most of them have is the time it takes. By the time you’ve done your institutional ethics board then the SL agreement many projects can be passed, and the researcher moved on.
There is a move from within SL’s academics to have a group of researchers appointed as an SL research ethics board, mimicking the system that is used in real life, with a Linden or two contributing as well. I can imagine at least one person screaming special interest here – but would you like totally unregulated research within SL? Is there actually something wrong with the people doing the research being regulated by others that do similar work? (Criticism of the system should also address why it’s used in every country I can find out about IRL if it’s so fundamentally flawed. I accept it is far from perfect, but we need a better system if you have suggestions.)
Giving this as a route to allowed research within SL means that the Lindens are less clearly aware of the research, even though they will be told about it, but addresses that issue of scalability rather quickly.
I actually did some research within SL in April/May 2005. Second Life was relatively tiny and it took about 6 weeks to get a reply to the “I’d like to do some research, what’s the process” email, and a further 6 weeks to get a reply confirming my research was OK. For interviewing 6 people from a standard notecard format which included a full disclosure statement and about 10 open ended questions, targetted at people that I knew it was slow to the point of almost breaking the research because of the deadlines for the work to which I was working. I managed though, but the system hasn’t changed, and the demands on the person you have to talk to have increased a little…
Urizenus
Dec 3rd, 2006
I don’t understand why we need to institute another layer of review inside second life. Why not just have researchers certify that the work they are doing in SL has passed the IRB of their university. Even at that, I don’t see why the Lindens need to be informed that research is taking place — it is none of their business.
What is especially infuriating about this to me is the fact that they do NOT place similar restraints on corporations conducting market research in SL, quite probably using the very same research techniques. So what is the message here: if you are doing research for profit go ahead, we don’t mind, but if you are doing it to advance knowledge and you aren’t going to make money on it then we have the right to review it even though we are utterly unqualified to do so.
On the press business and asking permission to interview people and not using chat logs without permission…if that’s how they feel then why the fuck do they bless Destroy TV, which logs EVERYTHING that everyone in earshot says with their names and archives it forever.
I love Destroy TV, I really do (not as much as Pix does) but what really pisses me off are the double standards in their policies. They have had YEARS to come up with a coherent and consistent policy about this stuff and they simply refuse to do so.
Eloise
Dec 3rd, 2006
Whilst I see the point you’re making, my experience suggests perhaps the academics are more phlegmatic about double scrutiny because they are used to it? If you’re doing research solely within your institution (grabbing the students for example) you are OK with one layer of scrutiny. For a lot of other research you get two layers though, your institution and the place you’re doing it. To be sure that’s often a rubber-stamping exercise, which appears to be how the avatar interaction research got through (they said ‘we just said we had IRB approval so can we do it’ and LL said yes), but it’s not always such a simple process.
For example, one of my close friends was doing research into liver cancer. She needed approval from the university’s ethics board AND the hospital’s ethics board, because the hospital wasn’t a teaching hospital attached to the university. I see the double test as normal on that sort of basis – it applied to most of the people I knew doing research on people.
Now… raising the standards of market research through the same screening process, that I’d LOVE to see. As for why they permit Destroy TV, apart from distracting Pix and mellowing her, who knows? Why isn’t Prok screaming about the double standards, because you’ve got to say it looks that way even to me? (Although I hope Pix and DTV are happy rubbing pixels together:) )
Prokofy Neva
Dec 3rd, 2006
>There is a move from within SL’s academics to have a group of researchers appointed as an SL research ethics board, mimicking the system that is used in real life, with a Linden or two contributing as well. I can imagine at least one person screaming special interest here – but would you like totally unregulated research within SL? Is there actually something wrong with the people doing the research being regulated by others that do similar work?
This is a really, really ghastly and bad idea. And if this “one person” you imagine screaming is me, I hardly think I’ll be alone. How dare *you* raise the straw man of “unregulated research” anyway? People doing academic research in academe work within accredited institutions that have their own peer review and their own review boards. A software company in California should not be overreaching into that domain and claiming they have relevance or expertise. They are a common carrier. They aspire to be “the Internet.”
To be sure, many discussions have emerged about Internet-based social research with anonymous people, you can read about various ethics guidelines in the links on this Linden document at the end, but these are all *peer-based* in academe itself — not with a commercial entity selling server space in a virtual world.
I’m going to clear my throat here and ask just what the academic credentials of Linden Lab *are* anyway. As we discussed in another post on my blog about the Lindens’ annoying use of the term “emergent behaviour” (by marketing department execs or liaisons who have no social science higher degrees), the Lindens, if they have some PhDs among them, have PhDs in stuff like computer sciences or rocketry or physics, not psychology, sociology, or anthropoly.
I’ve heard Pathfinder Linden describe himself as having “an academic appointment” — if you read his website carefully, what he had was a position as research associate related to doing tekkie stuff. He was information technology director and worked with physicians; he doesn’t have a doctorate himself. He has a B.S.
http://neuro-www.mgh.harvard.edu/john_lester_cv.html
Having computer and Internet expertise is enabling lots and lots of people to integrate with other fields and have even those with degrees higher than them become dependent on them due to their technical knowledge and gatekeeping of the servers.
I am not a person who hammers on credential issues whatsoever. I’m a big believer in non-credentialed people taking on the havens of the credentialed. Isn’t that what Second Life is supposed to be about?
But I would think that in something involving academic research, you’d want more than the level of a Torley to write the document about it for the knowledge base, and you might want someone with more degrees in the kind of research actually wanting to be done in SL than what Pathfinder has. Just sayin’.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 3rd, 2006
As for Destroy TV, that’s a very good example of how the Lindens let the Sheep do what they’d regulate in someone else (like me).
dandellion Kimban
Dec 4th, 2006
does anybody really believes that I (or anybody else taking its own freedom seriously) am going to ask for a permission to walk the world, talk to people, think about it, draw my own conclusions and theories, and write about it? really?
prokofy neva mention milošević. I live in the country that got rid of him. saw many policeguys face to face. do you think that I will agree to any virtual dictatorship?
ok, I’m overreacting , and my apologies for that. but, this story touched the nerve.
after all, it is unlikely that any of lindens is dreaming of becoming a dictator or big brother. this is more likely they are about to put all the inworld activity under the rule of marketing and profit. sadly, that is perhaps even worse that trying classic dictatorship. especially, cause the excuse for that is freedom of other rats, pardon residents.
Tad McConachie
Dec 4th, 2006
As a SL reporter, I cheerfuly ignore LL’s demands to contact their marketing department before writing my stories. I don’t remember asking permission to interview Zee Linden either. If LL cracks down on the press they will have hell to pay, and it’ll make for great news!
In fact, I think it’s generally a reporter’s responsibility to actively subvert authority which impedes freedom of the press.
That said, I don’t think LL has any intention of censoring the press, I think the clause sited is legalese intended to cover their collective Linden ass.
Simon Lameth
Dec 4th, 2006
This rule sounds, shall I say, Electronic Arts-y.
Prokofy Neva
Dec 4th, 2006
Yes, they are dangerously bordering on the EA.com overreach, which is why I thought it was important to take a look at the revisions, analyze what they are doing, and complain now before it gets set in stone.
I’m not understanding yet what the double standards are that I’m supposed to be protesting, and where.
One Second
Feb 28th, 2007
Linden and pressfreedom
Theres an interesting report over at Second Life Herald about the conditions that Linden is placing on both academic use of Second Life and press reports about it. In particular, theres this condition:
Members of the press can write gener…