Annotation website Genius has been at the center of a brewing media controversy.

On Tuesday, the whole situation jumped up a notch thanks to a letter from a sitting congresswoman.

Representative Katherine Clark of the 5th District of Massachusetts penned a letter to Genius CEO and cofounder Tom Lehman to express concerns about "the Genius online annotation platform and its lack of safeguards against Internet harassment and abuse."

Image: Katherine Clark

Genius, which started out as a website to annotate rap lyrics, has been building out a larger editorial operation in hopes of reaching a larger audience.

The company now provides a tool that can annotate any page on the web, right on the page. As long as users are logged into Genius, they can see annotations on every article and site.

In February, Genius hired former Gawker features editor Leah Finnegan, who had left that site after both public and private disagreements with founder Nick Denton, as managing news editor.

The new position created by Genius had many in media expecting a journalistic effort that added factual detail or questions to stories and commentary, but recently the annotations have taken an editorializing tone.

Concern over bullying

After a bit of a quiet period, Finnegan has been stirring up controversy recently by aggressively annotating articles found on a variety of websites.

In one case, journalist Sara Morrison annotated an article about a young female writer, Ella Dawson, who has herpes simplex-I, leading some to claim that the comments had crossed from annotation or critique into bullying. Finnegan also provided some annotations on the piece.

The annotations — which Finnegan appeared to defend from the News Genius brand Twitter account — ignited a multi-day conversation on Twitter. Many took exception to the harsh, personal annotations that to many, reprised the habitual harassment that women face online, which ranges from "gaslighting" their concerns to diminishing the importance of women's experiences and writing.

Dawson was the first to ask for controls on the new use of Genius after Finnegan's annotations.

I'm really uncomfortable with the trend of people (esp cis, straight, white people) annotating blog posts and articles using Genius. — Ella Dawson (@brosandprose) March 23, 2016

Not ok with uninformed commentators pasting misinformation and guesses directly onto my content https://t.co/1fmPLKEKgc @Genius @newsgenius — Ella Dawson (@brosandprose) March 23, 2016

.@newsgenius Facebook and Twitter allow users to opt-out, to block users, to remove comments from your own content. — Ella Dawson (@brosandprose) March 24, 2016

.@newsgenius Blocking allows me to control what I see and who interacts with me. Genius violates that. — Ella Dawson (@brosandprose) March 24, 2016

@brosandprose @newsgenius major fucking protip: when anyone tells you that ur product is causing pain u take that into consideration — Corey Kindberg (@coreykindberg) March 24, 2016

This is kinda like saying the facade of my house is public so anyone can come paint it. @newsgenius @brosandprose — Notorious (J3.0) (@alendrel) March 28, 2016

Yeah, no... Don't you see how this is a new tool for creeps and online bullies??? @newsgenius @brosandprose pic.twitter.com/L10wCzKFlD — Rachel Wynn (@StarlightSocial) March 25, 2016

@newsgenius Your mansplaining at @brosandprose does not fill me with confidence that you have any idea what you're enabling. Or care. — Chris Clarke (@canislatrans) March 28, 2016

In another case, Finnegan annotated another young female writer's piece about being single with what many took as false concern — or "concern trolling," — about whether the writer, Alana Massey, needed help.

But..you're not an editor. You're a glorified internet commenter with "editor" in your title https://t.co/DHkB1gchxN pic.twitter.com/JoaQRGjKUG — Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) March 23, 2016

@AlanaMassey God, genius-annotating is such a craven form of critique. — Erik Hinton (@erikhinton) March 23, 2016

@newsgenius @AlanaMassey Why does Rap Genius focus on explaining things but News Genius focus on making fun of things? Odd editorial choice. — Keith Calder (@keithcalder) March 23, 2016

Representative Clark noted that Genius, which grew out of the popular Rap Genius annotation tool, has some positive uses, but also pointed to downsides, including, as Dawson mentioned, that the tool does not allow websites to block Genius.

Clark did not mention Finnegan's Twitter debates with Massey or Dawson specifically, but referred to recent events.

She also called for a response from Genius to address concerns about abuse of the tool to harass people.

"Now that your platform has been shown to enable abusive behavior, do you have plans to implement a robust reporting and remediation process or provide an op-out function?" Clark wrote.

Clark's request mirrors that of many feminist groups asking Twitter and Facebook to make their reporting functions more robust.

Finnegan posted a defiant response to the letter.

Congress shall make no law — Leah Finnegan (@leahfinnegan) March 29, 2016

Lehman posted a response to Genius's Twitter account, pushing back against the "false narrative that has taken hold on Twitter and other outlets" about the tool's misues.

He also noted that Genius had on Tuesday added a new button to make it easy to report abuse.

Clark responded that she hoped the discussion would continue.

Grateful 4 the quick response frm @genius. Looking fwd 2 a dialogue abt ensuring an internet that's safe 4 everyone https://t.co/qxLjcUfm6A — Katherine Clark (@RepKClark) March 29, 2016

On Wednesday, Massey made public an email she sent to Finnegan about the situation.

I sent this email to express the concerns I had with the annotation. It was meant to prevent public debacle. pic.twitter.com/Ziv9xKQFty — Alana Massey (@AlanaMassey) March 30, 2016





Updated: 5:02 P.M. EST, March 28, 2016: This piece was updated to reflect that Sara Morrison along with Leah Finnegan annotated a blog post from Ella Dawson. An editing mistake cited Finnegan as the author of tweets from News Genius's brand account, which the company denies.

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