Black Planet - Ethics

Ethics

Wasow says he occasionally gets questions about whether BlackPlanet is fostering racial separatism. 'Voluntarily socializing with people who share your interests is what freedom is all about,' he says. 'Anybody can join any of the sites. We found we were not segregating the web.'

However, niche community tools such as BlackPlanet do host users who wish to promote separatism, such as gangs, and this has not gone unnoticed. 'Gangs have had a presence on the internet since its inception. This became noticeable during the 1990s when it became fashionable for gangs to use free webspace from internet service providers to put up their own gang webpage.' Finding gangs on GeoCities, blackplanet, and especially Myspace, along with other internet service providers (ISPs), provided the foundation of what today is known as gang internet investigation, a specialized area of expertise in gang investigation.

Gary Dauphin, an original employee of BlackPlanet, argues that while the ethnicity of the site's owners is important to understanding the site, owners of one ethnicity can sometimes serve an audience of another ethnicity. 'BlackPlanet, where I got my start on the Web, was owned for most of its early life by a largely Asian American group, and I would venture that that period was the site's finest hour. The ownership wasn't African-American, but it did understand the underlying call to service implied in running an ethnic site, and moreover, they had high ambitions for their company as a Web community platform provider that raised the bar for BP overall.