Here’s why I think Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, should be reprimanded. First, here is what Greenbaum did:

The Post-Dispatch had posted a story last Friday on its blog about the “craziest thing you’ve ever eaten.” You’re all geeks, so we’re guessing that your minds are going all sorts of places. So were the commenters on that post. Kurt Greenbaum, director of social media for the Post-Dispatch who had made the post, noticed that one commenter had posted a “single word, a vulgar expression for a part of a woman’s anatomy” (let your imagination run wild). The comment was deleted, but this particular user must have been enthused about his cunning lingual abilities, as he went back minutes later to post it a second time.

That’s when Greenbaum got irked. In a new blog post, Greenbaum described to the world about how he noticed the IP address of the poster in question—WordPress sends e-mail alerts anytime someone comments on a post with IP and Whois information attached—and identified it as belonging to a local school. Instead of merely accepting that this person had the maturity level of a seventh-grader, Greenbaum just went ahead and called the school. A few hours of investigation later, the school was able to identify and confront the employee. That person supposedly resigned “on the spot.”

Greenbaum crossed a line defined in the newspaper’s privacy policy when he shared private information (name, email and IP addresses) on a user with a third party about one of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s commenters.

We will not share individual user information with third parties unless the user has specifically approved the release of that information.

Greenbaum’s action opens the St. Louis Post-Dispatch to significant civil liability. What’s worse is Greenbaum allowed being “irked” by a troll to affect his decision making. It is simply not rational to call the employer of offensive trolls, violating your own clear policy in the process.

Online communities have to be able to trust a website won’t react emotionally to the thoughts or ideas of commenters the website may find offensive. In the case of profanity, WordPress has a built in “banned words” feature Greenbaum should be qualified to know something about.

The only action media organizations should take against offending users is deleting and banning them. The only time a news organization should reveal the identity of users should be in a court of law and most certainly never in retaliatory blog posts or phone calls to the employers of your readers.

UPDATE 11-20-09: Ooops. Here’s a more edgy version of this post.