Slashdot Mirror
When Should a Website Edit Its Users?
rw2 asks: "Can a weblog edit users comments without opening itself up to liability in case of a slander suit? I run a political weblog and have a policy similar to slashdots in terms of the comments posted belonging to their owners. I'm worried about instituting something like lameness filters as it seems like as soon as you start regulating what your users post you have agreed to edit them for other reasons as well. Can someone point me to a good resource on issues like this. Those of us who aren't owned by publically traded companies are better off avoiding potential problems rather than hire lawyers to help us wiggle out later." Honestly, this greatly depends on the type of weblog you run and the community behind it. I don't think a one-answer-suits-all-sites solution exists, particularly for the reason that what may be inappropriate for one site may be more than appropriate for others. What say you?
Moderation is not the same as editing. IOW, delete the lame crap, but don't alter any posts. Lots of places delete inappropriate stuff; no big deal.
The Gardener
--
Freedom of speech is mostly guaranteed in the US Constitution. However, I do not have to supply the forum for you to practice that speech. If I run a website or any other media forum (newspaper, etc), then I have the right to say what goes into that forum.
If I write a book, I'd probably have to go through dozens of publishers before being accepted. Certainly they're not forced to publish your work. Why should any other medium be any different?
Stifle is an anagram for itself.
Practice editorial censorship on idiot comments made by g**ks with insufferable intellectual pretensions. Otherwise you're just going to have a lot of shrill cranks drowning intelligent commentary in their din. I mean, look what happened to slashdot when Bruce Perens was allowed to create an account.
You dont want that.
That said, if memory serves you lose your status as the equivalent of a common carrier and become responsible for the content as soon as you perform subjective modification or exclusion.
Dropping messages which violate an established set of rules is one thing, as was recently upheld in a lawsuit against Yahoo. But if memory serves, subjectively editing and dropping posts is what made a slander lawsuit against Prodigy successful. By having selectively removed posts, Prodigy was, in effect, endorsing the remainder.
Google should be your friend on both cases - the Prodigy case made a fairly big buzz in its time, and I have to think there must have been a dozen more since.
Click Here to read about the time when slashdot was forced to delete a post about scientology. It's interesting and relates to your question.
It's good that you're thinking about this now, because I suspect political arenas would attract more lawyers and highly inflammatory idiots than most. That combination is asking for lawsuits, IMHO.
Too bad they don't have a lameness filter on the submission box though, that would theoretically keep most Jon Katz articles from ever making the front page
The potential upside in reference to your question is that since the lameness filter happens before the comment becomes a post and part of the static page (atleast here on Slashdot, I'm not sure on your site, I don't have an account and you can't post unless you do), You probably won't be sued unless its by someone who's going to sue you anyway.
Just my 2 cents.
-- Dan
You can publish all the user posts but you're not obliged to publish those you don't want to. From that point web owners are not any diferent than normal publishers. All risk are avoided if you stick to the publishing part, since you only publish what you want too. Messing with people's post will nowhere be accepted. Deletion is not a problem since it's surely your right not to publish things you don't want. For the rest, your visitors will decide wether they feel you do an honnest job. If you'don't they won't come back :-)
Filtering out whole posts based on some ranking (think /. moderation) is just as alright as it's a method of ranking entire posts and not within a particular post.
However, if you are in the habit of editting or posting snippets of postings, then you are exerting editorial control and perhaps are liable.
Usually, as long as the posting mechanism is automated without passing thru a human being, you can claim to being a common carrier. Newspapers and dead tree editions dont have this benefit as they pick and choose which stories they carry as they have limited print space. An online forum doesnt do this, and acccepts everything.
Once again, IANAL, so take all of this with a pinch of salt.
You run the weblog, you have the final auth concerning the posts.
I know that sounds overly simplistic but anything that falls outside the scope of protecting yourself legally you can decide what goes and what stays. Whether that means letting people stray into OT conversations via moderation or lack thereof is up to you. If you feel you have a legal issue to deal with, consult a lawyer that specializes in libel and slander.
Again concerning the non-legal issues... If you feel strongly enough about something that bothers you on your BBS (note I didnt say something you disagree with) wield your authority. If you do your best to be fair, people will appreciate that and anyone who doesnt like it can be reminded that another discussion board just like yours is only a google search away.
BOSTON SUCKS!
If a post contains irrelevant/offensive content the proper course is to delete it. Do not attempt to edit it.
Editing someone else's words without their express permission will highly annoy a significant fraction of those who get edited.
It also could open you up to a civil suit on libel charges if the edited post changes the sense of the post in a way that defames or injures the reputation of the poster.
Newspapers do edit letters and opinions before publishing them without express consent but they (1) use professional editors (2) have lawyers (3) have limited page space. Even so, they often annoy opinion writers and risk lawsuits by changing the writers' original statements.
If you are running a bulletin board your best practice is to let people speak for themselves.
There's nothing long with Editing something as long as your approve of the rest of it. As soon as you edit something, you've "agreed" that you're taking out material that you, the editor, finds unworthy of your publication - be it a weblog, a book, a magazine, or a television show.
Because of this, the remaining portion is now just as much your work as it is theirs. It's like touching just a single paintbrush to the Mona Lisa: while you can't claim you've painted the Mona Lisa, you could claim that you've done "art". In essense, by altering it, you've created something else, and that represents you and your views.
Now then, back to your blog. I say that no one could hold you libel for posts you didn't edit, but then, there's a problem - namely - that people against the material on your site can ask why you didn't exercise the right to edit the material, and claim that everything represents your opinion if you have the ability to edit and aren't exercising that ability.
Oh well, it's a tough call. Just some feedback.
You do make a good point. Slashdot didn't have nearly as many trolls as they did until after they put in a moderation system and all this fancy crap. Remember, people reading this site are by its claim "nerds" and geeks and they love the challenge of finding ways around Slashdot's hypocritical moderation system. Its really no different than your average geek trying to hack their TiVo or iOpener or something. Slashdot's editors seem to think it is some kind of personal war.. hehe. It's actually pretty humorous to watch. No matter how hard you try someone will just be urged to try harder and suddenly you're going to find yourself in a pissing war which will take down the entire weblog with you. That's what has happened to Slashdot. If on the other hand you keep it quiet, find who is posting the crap, and just ban their IP address range you don't attract attention very easily.
When I'm doing legal research, my first stop is Perkins Coie LLP's Internet Case Law digest. In this case, you should probably look under defamation.
I've noticed that I tend to moderate up most things, and only mod down Goat Sex type posts. I don't even do the "First Post!" type comments down. The Goat Sex guy may have had a point at one time, but it's been made, let's move on now. Nothing to see here.
On the other hand, someone is always going to get ticked off no matter what you do, sometimes even if you do exactly what they espouse they want. This is called Damned if you do, Damned if you don't, and Damn them all anyway.
Part of the problem, as I see it, is that if you give yourself and out to edit or remove comments, that same out conversely gives you a liability to do that on demand from someone else. I was reading the other day that a judge ruled that as a general rule, postings to forum sites are generally accepted to be opinion, not statements of fact (IANAL). As such, these are not for the most part actionable in any case, though you can START an action anyway.
The real problem here is the legal system that allowes for suit for just about any reason. You may not win, but for (in Texas) $144.00 you can submit a complaint to a court, send a Sheriff to drop off papers to appear in court, and scare the living bejesus out of almost everyone involved. Take a walk through case law on a site like findlaw, and you will see the most amazing suits for what seems to you and me to be the silliest reasons. One guy's family sued a plane manufacturer for not putting in the operating manual for the plane that gas was required to fly, and his family won the case.(I think it was Cessna, it might have been Piper. The guy was killed when the plane crashed after running out of gas. May have been overturned later, but look at the cost of fighting it!) I don't know that making the filing of a suit harder is the answer. A more technologically cluefull bench would be a start, and perhaps sanctions against those lawyers and their clients that bring silly stuff to court may help. I don't have an answer for this problem, and I don't pretend that I do.
I guess this all boils down to this: no matter how you do it, be consistant. No execptions to posted rules at all ever, unless ordered by a court. No matter what you do, someone sometime will bring an action against you no matter what it is you do.
Remember, I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice. Some restrictions apply.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
I think you are fairly optimistic. It's not desirable nor sufficient to ban an IP address range. What about dialups? What about cable modem DHCP rearrangements? Besides which, CmdrTaco believe very strongly in freedom of speech. Since he also believes in the freedom to read only that which you want, he also has a rating system.
Slashdot has not been ruined. If you think it's been ruined, you must be reading with your score set to zero. Don't do that. Read with a minimum of one. A comment from an Anonymous Coward is almost *never* worth reading.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I'm something of a free-speech absolutist myself, so I would say that at least ideally, the only time editors should be doing any actual editing is cleaning up duplicate posts, and perhaps mving posts from one forum to another one that's more appropriate, in multi-forum setups.
Beyond that, Slashdot-like moderation by users is the way to go. Slashdot's system has its flaws (the amount and direction of moderation should be independent of description, though there's definitely a need for both), but it's the best general idea that I've seen.
The DMCA section 512 guarantees protection if you do NOT alter the contents of the users posts. See
The DMCA section 512
I belong to a website where there's tons of political talk, personal sharing, advice etc. being posted all the time. The basic rules are:
(a) You cannot out anybody. If you give out a name or location, that post gets edited or deleted. People who post that sort of thing are often warned about it, and have the option to fix it themselves within the 30-minute "edit window" for a post.
(b) Hate speech is usually deleted. This is a sticky situation, and usually it requires a ton of people complaining to the site administrator that such and such a post is offensive. We don't automatically filter out any words, and each post is often treated separately.
(c) Spam. Nobody wants it there, so it's toast the moment it goes up.
(d) Copyright violations. This is one of the regulations for the hosting corporation, and so we usually have to replace text with a link to it. Sometimes we get away with it if we're siting a literary passage for a debate or something.
(e) Every now and then, if something is truly indecent, it'll get cut. That's too bad, because I had this really great run of posts that said "Don't click this!" and pointed to our goatsex friend. It was quite funny, but one silly twit who couldn't take a joke complained and it got taken down. Fortunately, that was almost two months after the fact so nobody there was liable to read that post again anytime soon anyway.
(f) Every now and then we self-police, and gang up on somebody if they're being really cruel. Many people enjoy their anonymity there, and use the opportunity to talk about a lot of personal stuff, so if a particularly mean poster uses that stuff against them, they'll usually face criticism and pressure to be a little nicer.
(g) We also have a board dedicated to flaming. This is great because once discussion gets heated, every poster on that particular board who isn't interested in hearing it can redirect the posters in question to the flame board to air out grievances. Needless to say, our flame board is pretty popular.
I think the important thing isn't so much what gets a user edited, but whether or not that user knows about it beforehand and is given fair warning. Yeah, it ends up being subjective, but one of the reasons people like to go to this place is because they can safely discuss things. Our administrator is great about leaving political talk alone -- I've been ranting and raving about how stupid this whole Afghanistan war is, for instance, and there's been no deleting of any of my posts. That said, I've had to stand up to some pretty harsh criticism, but that's okay -- as far as political speech goes, it's really free. Even though we do self-police, we never ask someone to change their opinions on issues in debate.
On other method that gets used, new users go through a trial period where they can't post on every board, even though they can read them all. This gets them a chance to see how our particular dynamic goes before they are allowed to post. It's arbitrary (two weeks), but it does filter out many people who aren't genuinely interested in the site themselves (spammers, trolls, etc.). This is a new measure we've taken up, and it's pretty controversial right now, so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone unless they KNOW something like this could fix some problems they're having.
As a website administrator, you've got to dedicate yourself to figuring out your own sites needs and getting everyone to stick to them. Oh yeah, and be prepared to be underappreciated and called a fascist pig if you ever do edit, even if it is the right thing for your site.
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Bleah! Heh heh heh... BLEAH BLEAH!!! Ha ha ha ha...
We do mod comments, yes, but we're fair about it.
I can say this with some certainty because, like all moderations, ours get metamoderated -- so if we start unfairly modding people up or down, we get email a couple of days later letting us know we screwed up!
I can't speak for the other Slashdot editors, but as for me -- of all my mods in the last several months, only two have gotten Unfair judgements. Both were trolls that had posted links that looked like they went somewhere informative but didn't. Apparently the metamoderators didn't bother to check the links, oh well. So I stand by my record of massive Fairness.
Basically I spend mod points where I see that I can save our regular moderators some time. Slashdot gets a lot of crap posted anonymously that is obvious trolling, flamebaiting, or offtopickism, and it would get itself modded down to -1 anyway if we flooded the system with mod points. My taking care of it lets our users focus a little more on picking out what they consider to be the good stuff to mod up, rather than just having a troll cost them a point (and the opportunity to participate in the discussion).
In short, I do a little bit of grunt-work, so that our users can be more choosy and careful, genuinely improving the quality and controlling the tenor of the site. And the built-in feedback of our M2 system will let me know if I ever stray too far from how the users think the site should be run.
Also, for the record, "bitchslap" refers to a specific script in the codebase which retroactively sets all of a user's comments to score:-1. Important point: it's only ever been used on user accounts that posted using scripts. And it hasn't been used in months, AFAIK, since the existing moderation/metamod system has been working so well.
There are a lot of comments talking about the legal ramifications, but you don't want to forget the personal/social ramifications to your community.
/. where its popularity, has lead to effective anonymity. When most /. readers read most /. posts, they don't know or care who wrote it. This isn't true of smaller forums where there is a stronger sense of community.
Your community is not about you; it's about your subject first, then about all the people who find your subject interesting, and about getting them together to communicate. This is important to remember. A lot of community owners find themselves so entranced by their status as benevolent dictator that they quit being benevolent. It's usually an ego-related thing. This is the worst-case scenario. Avoid it.
If you delete posts that people generally expect to be deleted, you'll find your community happy and rewarding. This includes spam, obvious mistake posts with no content, personal information that shouldn't have been communicated, and cases where someone set out to purposefully cause trouble with the system or the community.
If you delete posts that even one person finds useful, you'll find yourself in the middle of a controversy. Think about it from the user's point of view. A user may spend hours developing a post, even days contemplating what to say in a situation. Maybe they didn't take hours to write the post that you edited or deleted, but users don't want to even think about the possibility that their words may disappear. Delete a few posts without warning, even in a site that announces that it's heavily moderated, and you may find the community goes quiet for a few days. This sort of thing happens all the time.
This goes triply for editing posts instead of removing them. I would never participate in a system where my own, attributed words could be changed around as the site owner sees fit. Would you? Why would you? Why would anyone?
Also remember that a good, strong community will police itself to a degree. This sort of thing is not possible on someplace like
For a long time, newsgroups were the only net community going, and they were so prone to abuse that the communities in them had to develop a combination of thick skin and newbie-flaming. In fact, many people wrote that the flame was an important, necessary tool for the survival of these communities; if people wrote things that the community didn't like, they flamed, and this was their only defense mechanism. And for a while, it worked, until the net grew all out of proportion...
The point is, you may feel that you desperately need to take action as the site owner and moderator, but your best action may well be to leave well-enough alone and let your community take care of it.
There is no need for moderation/censorship/editing on a message board. None. Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.
As a participant in a forum or message board, if you see something "offensive" - IGNORE IT - DO NOT REPLY. If you are the owner of a message board and you are not willing to accept posts that you don't like, then DO NOT RUN A PUBLICLY ACCESABLE MESSAGE BOARD.
It's that simple. Period.
If your ego is so big that you really MUST be in control of what people say, then draw up a bunch of rules and institute a registration process requiring a valid e-mail address. Then, when someone says something you don't like, or violates one of your silly rules, you can play dictator and revoke their posting ability.
The real problem here is ego. Trolls, flamers, assholes, etc. post crap in order to get a reaction and get attention. 99% of them do not have the patience and/or attention spam to conduct a long term campaign. Ignore them and they will go away. IGNORE THEM AND THEY WILL GO AWAY. Unfortunately, too many people are unable/unwilling to follow this simple advice.
I've seen it a million times in usenet newsgroups and various message boards. As soon as people see an "offensive" post their ego immediately kicks into high gear and they launch a retaliatory attack. The whole place becomes mired in attacks and responses to attacks. In the end, the "regulars" blame the trolls and flamers and cite this as another good reason for moderation, conveniently ignoring the fact that all they had to do was ignore the idiots and they would go away.
I don't know about the rest of the metamoderators, but I consider any post that has their arguments qualified reasonably to be valid, despite the opinion.
Consider the following two comments, which lets say I found listed as "Flamebait":
Comment #1
Linux is no good. Microsoft is much better.
-That would be flamebait because it has no qualification - it is just to make people angry.
Comment #2
Linux is no good because there are no browsers that do as much as IE. Microsoft is much better.
-That would be valid - I would metamoderate a flamebait rating as "unfair."
Hopefully, I'm not alone in using criteria other than my opinion to moderate and metamoderate. But you know...I've been moderated down before despite adhering to my "make a qualification" policy.
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
You said:
This is why I believe it should be possible for a user to retract his comment - not edit, retract - just as it is possible to cancel a Usenet post. People may have seen the post, quoted it in their replies, and perhaps even archived it, but the post will no longer be available on the newsgroup itself. In fact, the unavailability of a post at the top of a thread is a common phenomenon on Usenet, where posts simply expire without the intervention of the author, so this feature needn't be shocking to Slashdot users if ever it were implemented.
This is a lot like what happens in Real Life (I choose that phrase because Taco likes to use it when defending his site policies) where you can't unsay what you said, and some people may never let you live it down as long as their memory serves them -- but you can certainly stop saying it and, if you're humble enough, you can take it back. Now, you might say that, in real life, one takes something back by saying something else, and that's true enough; however, in real life, one has the option of no longer saying something, whereas, in Slashdot, whatever you say is repeated everytime a request for the page containing your comment is served, even if you later change your mind. I think the ability to take something back (post cancellation/removal) would compensate for the inability to change one's position (post editing) as clearly as in Real Life.
Now, it seems to me that if Slashdot were to honor the poster's copyright, as the notice at the bottom of each Slashdot page claims it does, then it would have to comply with a user's request to remove a comment of which she herself was both the author and the copyright owner. In light of that consideration, would it not be simplest for this functionality (removal of a post by its author) to be available on the board so that administrator intervention is not required? Given that, in the recent Slashdot review of a book on the design of community websites, defined by the author as websites where users interact with one another directly, our very own CmdrTaco is interviewed as an expert, I think it's safe to assume that he's already thinking about this sort of stuff. ;-)
Now, I can't know how easy or how difficult it would be to add post removal functionality to Slashdot because I've never looked at the code, but I think this would be a welcome Slashdot feature -- one that would make this community seem more like the ones in so-called Real Life, and indeed more like others on the Internet itself.
Simply: Speech on a message board is worthless and not legally binding. If you want freedom of speech, yell out your window - and you're more likely to get in trouble for that.
This was on Tomalak's Realm a few days ago.
Newsbytes: California Appeals Court Upholds Message Board Speech.
Also another link: SJ Mercury: From November 28, 1999; `Cybersmear' lawsuits raise privacy concern.
PS, please read the articles and understand them. I know it is a very hard thing to do, but I've even made them hyperlinks.
Jamie, my former colleague, you may be most sincere, but there is a logical flaw in your argument. To wit: I doubt there is anyone who would ever post:
This is the classic "Who watches the watchers?" question. In one's own mind, almost certainly, everything one does is fair. This is not to criticize you personally. However, I think you miss the fact that your statement doesn't establish anything objectively.Again, the logical flaw is that, suppose you didn't care what those e-mails said? Supposed you believed you were RIGHT, and any email simply failed to recognize your obvious correctness?
"For Brutus is an honourable man; So are they all, all honourable men,"(Marcus Antonius meant that sarcastically, the idea being that even if Jamie, err, Brutus, was an honorable man, it didn't necessarily mean that the other editors, err, Romans, were honorable men).
Suppose a skeptical person doubted your philosopher-king status? For example, we know that Michael Sims had a very different view of the "fairness" of his actions with regard to slamming down comments about his destruction of the censorware.org website. He would undoubtably argue that all his actions where justified, that every comment he slammed as a troll was a troll, and so on. This is the essence of the conflict of interest. I know some of the anti-spam activist have doubts about comments of theirs criticizing your coverage, which got marked down. Can you blame them for their doubts? (even if you are in fact an honorable man).
Y'know, you may not realize it, but Slashdot looks a lot different from "down here". Especially when one thinks an editor is abusive about an issue which affects one personally.
I have suggested that editorial moderations be clearly marked. And I agree with other (anonymous) writers here that the fact that editors have infinite moderation points (of course only use them morally, justly, and with great wisdom ...), deserves mention in the FAQ. These changes
would alleviate some understandable distrust.
Well, I've rambled, perhaps way too much here. Too many topic which stirred a chord in me. and perhaps not worth the effort. But definitely, I suggest again making clear where editorial moderations have been done.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)