When we talk of social tools, especially here, there's often the assumtion that these tools are being used in a beneficial way, to collaborate share and engage.

Yet there are circumstances, when, fired with enthusiasm for a shared purpose, one attempts to engage with no response. Some even turn off the ability to add comments,  rendering perhaps a pulpit, more than a social space. I've even seen social efforts being pilloried in these kinds of blogs, with all sorts of defamation as content. I've even encountered bloggers who go overseas where cyber crime laws are more lax to take advantage of the freedom. 

The no-reply syndrome, isn''t peculiar to bloggers, a great number of social purpose website are non-responders yet there seems no way to rate performance to determine if a social tool is being used antisocially. Is for example the whistleblower type of campaign in a blog, a good or a bad thing? We might, in raising awareness of a social issue, be causing harm to someone not responsible for it.    

In fact, I can think of only one instance of attempting to tackle such an issue, a very useful tool designed to help people in the UK write to their political representatives - WritetoThem.com.

Now although many people will use more conventional means, it does at least offer the chance to give feedback, as we  know many politicians fall short in this area. A social activist might also expect to deal with politician regularly. Provided that is, it's used responsibly, since it could also be used to bear false witness.

I know with regard to blogging,  that Google for example, takes care to remove personal information, yet on the other hand seems rather oblivious to smear campaigns.

What does this all mean? Could it be perhaps that blogging amounts to mere words on a screen which are meaningless if nothing on the web is subject to being proven?

Unlike a newspaper or TV station, there is apparently no public accountability, so our blogger or group of bloggers with an agenda to do harm might actually invert the social tool for a very different purpose, a whispering campaign and the rule of the mob.

I've seen it, maybe others have too?