Sir: Please repeat your online privacy debate with more diverse voices
Last week we discussed the lack of diversity in The Economist‘s debate on online privacy. After reflecting on it over the weekend, it still bugs me, so I decided to write a letter to the editor:
Sir,
Women, people of color, students, and migrants all have important perspectives on privacy, and I was disappointed that you didn’t include any in your recent online debate. Please consider repeating it with a more diverse range of perspectives.
They probably get a heck of a lot of letters. So as well as emailing it to them, I’m going to use act.ly to call it to their attention via Twitter.
act.ly is an easy-to-use Twitter petition site created by Jim Gilliam. In Can Petition Tweets Change the World?, Nancy Scola looks at some of act.ly’s successes and suggests that “adoption and adaptation has proven most successful where the target of the petition is an organization, a company, or any other party that is worried about its reputation and is responsive to a wide swath of the population”.  I’m not sure how responsive The Economist is but hey, it’s worth a try!
The act.ly petition is at http://act.ly/2d8. One of the clever things about act.ly is that all you need to do to sign a petition is to tweet a link to it. So if you’re on Twitter, just tweet
@TheEconomist Please repeat your online #privacy debate with more diverse voices http://act.ly/2d8 (please RT)
or modify the text however you prefer.
So please join in!
jon
PS: If you’re not on Twitter, you can leave a comment here or email them at letters@economist.com.
