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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?
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.
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
Define "inappropriate stuff". If the process is automated, then there is nothing you can do. However, if you (or any moderator) has subjective privieldge over what is and what is not appropriate, then the line is blurred.
There is obviously useless stuff, "f1r57 p057", links to inappropriate websites, and the sort. But if it isn't an automated process, then subjectivity can interfere with moderation.
What happens when someone simply pisses you off? Do you abuse your power and delete their post? What if the users start to withold posting out of fear of being "edited" or censored.
Perhaps write a clearly defined policy regarding what is and what is not acceptable. Adhere to that policy very strictly and make sure everyone is completly aware of it. Then, when some big wig company asks you to censor/change something, just wave your policy at them.
I guess.
Price, Quality, Time. Pick none. What, you thought you had a choice?
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.
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.
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 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.
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)