Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social Not Working? forum: topic
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Moderation or censorship? Or: keeping a civil diversity of outlooks
Heather Etchevers
Friday, 13 March 2009 08:06 UTC
This seems like a good forum to bring up the topic of moderation. As one of the NN bloggers, I recently discovered that I benefit from the capacity to remove comments on my posts without a trace. In the forum discussions, removing comments does leave a trace, and occasionally leads to very disjointed threads.
The reasons behind removing comments range from blatant, bot-powered advertisements for undesirable pharmaceuticals or services to a more grey area of user-powered advertisements for services or products that become undesirable through frequency of repetition as well as comments that can be personally hurtful or offensive. Controversial threads do not automatically invite egregious moderation of comments: for example, this one.
The current set-up allows anyone to flag a comment they deem inappropriate to the moderator, with a required box for the reason. The moderator then chooses whether or not to forward, possibly after rewording, that reason to the person whose comment is to be removed.
If you were or are a forum moderator on Nature Network, what would your policy be?
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Moderation should be limited to..
1. removing spamlinks,
2. swear words (four letter words only, not the entire comment if it can be helped, unless that is all there is to it:), and
3. totally irrelevant content (talking about turtle consciousness in a thread about plasmid sub-cloning).
As for the offending, rude, insulting comments forumers should be allowed to fight it out till it gets out of control → swear words.
There. Good moderation in a nutshell.
It has served me well in a forum elsewhere, where the crowd is less polished than this, so it should work.
In this forum, however, I have discovered that the crowd is polished, but egos are supreme too, and it probably has something to do with the fact that people have generally used their real names and associations. Taken together (do I sound like writing a MS:), they tend to get offended easily, and moderators feel a need to preserve these peoples’ egos, otherwise they will go away. So, moderators delete the content even with a hint of offense.
What is a delibration if it can not be heated?
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And there ought to be a way for me to edit my posts. sapligns :-)
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Deleting comments without a trace just doesn’t quite seem right to me (unless they’re spam or whatever), because sometimes other people had responded to the deleted comments (often as part of a longer, more on-topic comment) while they were still up, and suddenly the thread makes no sense any more. I prefer the forum method of leaving a “this comment has been deleted” message up, so at least a newcomer would know why the thread makes no sense.
Personally I have no problem with occasional profanity, although others will obviously disagree. Come to think of it, the whole issue of what’s offensive and what’s fine is such a personal thing… I quite like the “flag for moderation” system, because obviously offensive comments will presumably be flagged by multiple people, whereas something that’s more subjective will only pop up once.
I’ve had commenters on my blog flag their own comments for moderation if they realise they’ve included a typo… yeah, not gonna bother with that!
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Ah, moderation – the eternal question! ;-)
In the early days of blogs, comment threads were regarded as public places. The democratization of discourse that the technology brought filled the air with high notions of Freedom Of Speech and such. A few years later, today, people are thinking about it very differently. Freedom of speech is not the same as free-for-all.
One has to make a distinction between a public place and a personal space. The moderation rules will be different. So, for instance at NN, the forums are public spaces (I think so, is that correct?), while each individual blog is that person’s personal space.
If you comment on AOL or YouTube, you are commenting in a public space, and you can pretty much say whatever you want.
If you post a comment on my blog, you are my guest and should follow the rules of my house. Consider my comment threads to be my living room. Would you really say THAT in front of my Mom, wife and children? Actually, my Mom, wife, brother and children read, at least sometimes, my blog.
So, as an owner of a personal blog, I set the rules. I can make rules known in advance, or just be completely idiosyncratic and do whatever I please depending on my mood at the moment – you can complain as much as you want: my house, my rules. Early in the life of my blog, mainly before I joined scienceblogs.com, I wrote mostly about politics, the 2004 U.S. election was raging, my posts were deliberately provocative, and my comment threads were sometimes very nasty – and I was OK with that. When I joined Sb and started writing much more about science and the media, I toned down myself a notch.
What I do now is not really internally consistent, but works for me. Most of my posts are in ‘normal’ tone, being friendly, or dryly informative, or trying to be fun, etc. If you post a comment that is not nice or totally off-topic, I will delete with no warning. Three strikes and out: do this three times and I will ban your a$$ off my blog forever.
But every now and then I write a harsh or provocative post myself – in such posts the rules of engagement are different: I allow much more rowdiness, I laugh if PhysioProf uses the F-word seven times per sentence, I will engage the people in vigorous and sometimes ugly debate myself. This is a place to vent. I hear about it from my Mom later, chiding me gently for not being nice to people, but I think she groks why I sometimes need to do this, she is just protective and afraid for my safety. This is the case of a buddy-night at my house, a rowdy party on an evening when my wife and kids are not at home so we can use foul language if we want to.
There are times and topics when politeness should be the norm. There are others, when dirty language should rue the day. I am on record that the people who decide the level of politeness at any given time should never be the people who have the power over others. Demanding politeness of others is almost always a demeaning method of putting others down, shutting minority voices out, and preserving the existing power structure. But that is in private spaces only.
Public spaces (e.g., forums) have to have explicit rules and moderators following those rules to the T. I use different rules on my own blog (personal space), on the PLoS Blog (corporate space) and on PLoS ONE papers (official record). On my own blog, I can be capricious. On the PLoS blog, I can demand politeness. On PLOS papers, we have devised very complex moderation rules and it sometimes takes months of discussion before I manage to get some comment deleted or someone banned.
Newspapers, clueless as they are about the Web in general, when they allow comments, do not understand that they need to moderate comments – they are still in the 1990s mindset of “freedom of speech” that the blogosphere abandoned years ago. Thus, their comments are often as bad as those on AOL or YouTube, and then their journalists don’t want to blog any more and complain about the nastiness of “bloggers” and other silly stuff. By having and using moderation rules, THEY get to set the tone of their site. If they want to have a place for constructive discussion, they can make it be so (and some newspapers have done it well, e.g., Greensboro News & Record) with just a little bit of effort.
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So, um, should we flag sunee Dadhwal’s comment as inappropriate? :-)
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Well, obviously I can’t say anything about moderation, since in this post on my blog, things got out of control when I wasn’t looking (I was at a conference and only intermittently online)… impressive experience for a newbie.
Over-moderation on public forums makes me uncomfortable, I’ve discovered. I’d prefer to be able to read rude comments – as long as there are no swear words and personal insults in them – and replies to those comments.. because I can make up my own mind, and so can a lot of other people. I also fear that the impression of too much moderation will make people turn away from discussions.
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I think that personal insults are inexcusable. I don’t mean mild insults like “You idiot!” but real nasty stuff. They have no place in serious discussion and are an admission that the poster has nothing to contribute.
Bad language can be OK, but it depends a bit on the overall tone. I don’t think bad language alone is a reason to moderate a post unless there seems to be real aggression coming through.
Spam is mildly irritating. It can be mildly amusing at first (as with the current infestation – you wonder where it’ll pop up next – but if present in quantity it makes a discussion unreadable.
I’m in two minds about whether to leave tracks of deleted comments or not. When I see “This comment has been deleted” I always wonder what I’ve missed and how bad it was. Perhaps simple spam should just be deleted with no trace?
There needs to be some agreement between the community and the community managers about what is an appropriate level of moderation and that is why I think it is important to have this kind of discussion.
If NN was a real world place would it be a discussion in a pub on a Friday night, a discussion of a presentation at a conference, or a session in the bar at the end of a conference? Or something else entirely? Or all of the above?
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…Or all of the above?
In that case, how would we know what it is at any given time?
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We’d need little icons to show the status of each place.
You are now entering the conference discussion area. Please be nice to each other.
You are now entering the rough-house bar. Anything goes, but no fist-fights please.
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Apart from the no-brainer issue of obvious spam, I think there are no easy answers or solutions to the question/problem of moderation for forum and blog comments. I don’t like the idea of establishing sets of rules, because, well, I don’t like rules in general, and also because rules are almost never applied fairly. And nothing brings me more personal unhappiness, both in meatspace interactions and in the blogosphere, than noting and obsessing about unfairness, whether I am directly involved or not. As a colleague pointed out yesterday, I bear the responsibility for being unhappy about perceived injustice … I “take on” or gather the offense, in an active, conscious process.
As Bora has admitted, the process of comment moderation in personal blogs can be capricious, which very often means that it is not remotely fair or even-handed, IMO. Knowing that, and knowing that I resent unfairness and that it makes me unhappy, I have a choice to make about commenting. More and more often these days, I make the choice to not comment; perhaps this is a good thing in my own circumstances, but it’s probably not the best trend for improving the diversity and open dialogue of the blogosphere.
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