The "Open for Questions" section of Barack Obama's transition site looks like a solid first step toward the sort of Internet-enabled open government that the president-elect made a theme of his campaign. Users pose questions, and then the community votes them up or down, on the model of social filtering sites like Digg. But Mother Jones notes that the top questions at present are basically softballs—mostly variations on "Explain all the ways you'll be more awesome than George Bush." Conspicuous by its absence is any reference to the weekly news cycle's biggest Rod, the disgraced Gov. Blagojevich, who stands accused of attempting to auction off Obama's Senate seat to the highest bidder.
That's because, as it turns out, Obama's supporters are not just voting down such questions, but flagging them as "inappropriate"—the interrogatory equivalent of YouTube porn—to remove them from the voting pool. Questions about this crowdsourced censorship are also, you guessed it, flagged as inappropriate.
It's worth remembering, as we trumpet the potential of networked democracy, that diffusion of responsibility is the goateed evil twin of distributed peer production. If Obama or his staff were blocking uncomfortable questions, the effort would almost certainly backfire. If his supporters do it, well, who is he to gainsay the voice of the people? And as some of the nastier viral videos that circulated during the campaign have already made clear, a more "participatory" media space allows political figures to take the high road in confidence that someone will take care of slinging the mud. The same technologies that increase public accountability can also, depending on a particular site's design, act to dilute it.
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