A tip of the hat to Amanda Congden over at Sometimes Daily for talking about our take what Amanda dubbed the “bratty blogger blackmail incident.”

I was alerted of the incident’s crossover to other spheres of conversation by the fact that it showed up in Amanda’s podcast, and was then pulled into the conservative political blog, “Enlightened Redneck” for further commentary.

Oddly enough, Amanda and her co-host adopted our angle (in that we believe using social media as a weapon is fine, within the limits of common sense and proper ethics), but Danny Glover at Enlightened Redneck didn’t make any such provisions:

It’s also not a new temptation or exclusive to the new media world. There’s a reason that people remember Mark Twain for saying, “Never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel.” Publishers have been getting even with their enemies in print for centuries.

But the use of social media as a weapon — an utterly unsociable practice — is a potentially greater threat because anyone can be a publisher these days. Bloggers should roundly condemn such behavior whenever it surfaces because it will make all of them look bad.

I think whenever we extend this metaphor of weaponry to describe use cases for social media tools, it’s important to make the distinction every time it’s brought up that it’s not always an evil thing to use it in that way (see: #iranelection).

Perhaps it’s my personal views on individual responsibility, or maybe most others to take this topic on haven’t thought through all the implications of the metaphor; the tool isn’t who’s responsible for what the tool does, it’s the one who wields the tool. This is true with tools from your dad’s shed, and it’s true for the ones in your social media tool chest.