Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Canadians vs. "Hateful" Website

Posted by michael on from the where's-the-cowboyneal-option dept.

We received the following: "Brad Fitzpatrick runs the freevote website with the help of a a few friends. It's simply a website where you can create a voting booth and take a poll about any subject you're interested in. Recently, some Canadian news sources have been creating quite a stir about his site, talking about how it violates hate crime legislation. Why? Because irresponsible people, specifically a group of canadian high schoolers in this case, have been logging onto his site and supposedly have been creating 'hateful' voting questions." Interesting definition of "hateful".

1 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. A preemptive disclaimer... by bradfitz · · Score: 4

    I've already started to see some comments to the effect of, "That's great that they run a site, but they should monitor the content somehow..."

    We _do_ monitor the content.

    There are many mechanisms running behind the scenes that screen the content based on sets of "bag" regexes and then flag booths. At any time, booths can be in the "Probably okay", "Probably bad", "Verified Good", or "Verified Bad" state, along with a date that the booth was set to that state last. There are then jobs working all the time scanning booths more and adjusting the states of booths that have changed since their last update.

    FreeVote volunteers and employees then manually verify booths that are in the "probably bad" state and place them in either "Verified Bad" or "Verified Good".

    In addition, visitors to the booths can rank the quality/content of the booth, and that raises more flags we look at.

    There is a ton of moderation being done on the site, both automatic and by hand. More code has been written for our admin area than any other part of the site.

    The real problem is the combination of:

    a) people's immaturity
    b) people's intolerance

    I'm not sure either one is solvable.

    My issue with Canada is that they're extremely intolerant. A bad booth will go up and immediately they start threatening lawsuits and calling my advertisers complaining, even if we shut it down within a day or so of its creation.

    I don't start websites to make money --- I do them all for fun. I really hate having to deal with this crap because IANAL, I don't want to be a learn, don't want to pretend to be a lawyer, and just hate dealing with this stuff.

    So depressing.