Slashdot Mirror
Yahoo Censoring Their Message Boards?
lost_packet writes "Today's Boston Globe has an article about yahoo removing posts from their chat boards. quote:"The truthfulness of these messages wasn't in dispute, said Yahoo chief executive Jeff Mallett. But the company took down the material to reduce its impact. Yahoo has to ''be careful'' because ''what we publish can influence a lot of people's lives,'' Mallett said in an recent interview." " The scary thing about this is that if you remove messages, you are supposedly liable for the rest of them. Its definitely a sticky situation.
A lot of people don't quite seem to get it...
The scary thing about this is that if you remove messages, you are supposedly liable for the rest of them. Its definitely a sticky situation.
The fact that Yahoo! knows this (any lawyer should) and still decided to remove messages based on content is an indicator of things to come.
Common carrier status enforces free speech in a public forum by exempting the carrier from liability due to content (Correct me if this is wrong).
They're not worried about liability. They either think that they can moderate the hell out of it so well they won't have any problems, or that if anyone sues 'em they'll fight it to the teeth and win.
If they want to spend all their time moderating, more power to 'em, I say.
But if they win a case because they fought tooth and nail, they could end up setting a precedent that overturns the liability status due to moderation, thus making common carrier pretty worthless.
In other words, lets say Joe sues Yahoo! because Bill posted something evil about Joe's mother on their board, and they didn't remove it. Yahoo! goes balls out to win the case, based on the fact that they didn't post the content, and does in fact win because they have a lot of money and can hire all sorts of lawyers to blow the opposition away.
Suddenly, there's a precedent set. Now, even if you censor the hell out of your board, you're still not liable for any content you leave behind. Naturally, the owners of any public forum who wanted to censor before, but didn't because of common carrier status and exemption from liability, will censor the heck out of their boards now, AND STILL be exempt from liability.
That is a bad thing.
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Now, the moderation system here works wonders. That is, it works wonders to moderate down '1st post!'-ers and other trolls.
But what if sensitive personal information was posted? Say, Hemos' phone number and sexual preference? Or the password of a few Government mainframes? (I'm not saying they're of equal sensitivity, mind... :) )
How would the Slashdot crew react, then? Should the posts be removed under the basis of, I don't know, unfair use of a public BBoard system, thus exercising editorial control however limited? Should the post be left there? Should a system be put in place for messages to be permanently deleted from the system by a sort of moderation process? (Say, if it hits 5 -1's, it's deleted, or a special moderation category.)
I hope such a situation never arises on Slashdot, because I like the system as it is, moderated by the people, and every message available for reading. (I read even -1 comments, because sometimes they're insightful if not well-spoken, or downright funny.)
But, well... What if?
"Knowledge = Power = Energy = Mass"
It's amazing, isn't it? Due to a loophole in the way things work, Yahoo can actually legally do this. So can Slashdot. Or CNN. Infact, any business can. But why? The simple answer is that constitutional rights only cover what the government can do. A government official (which includes the police), or anybody on public property, can excercise free speech. Unfortunately, that's where it ends. When you're in my home and say something I don't agree with - I'm within my legal rights to give you the boot. You can do the same to me. Infact, to some extent (IANAL - any out there reading this?) your employer can tell you what you can and cannot say.
Now, don't take this the wrong way - I draw a distinct line between "legal" and "moral". The two are not synonimous in my book. Yahoo should not be calling their message boards "public forums" when infact they are not. I think it is morally reprehensible that they're silently deleting messages to protect their butts. Ironically, by doing this they may be exposing themselves to more damages than if they had left the situation alone! ie: If you could have stopped somebody from posting a libellous thing, and didn't, doesn't that implicate you as well?
Censorship is a thorny issue... welcome to the private side of it.
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There is a huge problem socially, too. Censorship of mailing lists destroys those lists much faster than a few strong messages. Once you start down that slope, it is apparently impossible to draw a bright line describing where censorship ends.
In these stock trading boards in particular, I think people are looking for information that might be called 'insider information' to somebody with a rabidly litigious bent. Almost everything else on these boards is, frankly, garbage (and most of the alleged insider information is, too). By censoring the articles with 'impact', aren't you censoring the articles that people actually want to read, leaving only the garbage?
The Lockheed case is remarkable. What was posted was apparently the minutes of a meeting between Lockheed and its client in the Pentagon. The official apparently ripped them apart, as reported in a recent issue of Aviation Week. It turns out that this is not uncommon, the procurement offical in question has a very combative style, and she has been known to have similar meetings with other suppliers in the past. The information posted was never denied, it wasn't deemed to be classified, it was just embarrassing to Lockheed.
Censors, in general, have become more and more stringent with time. People posting to the channels will test the limits, forcing the censor to weild his authority more and more often -- and again this will destroy the use of the channel. I don't think that this has happened yet at Yahoo, but it has happened in other fora.
I agree with other posters that Slashdot's system works remarkably well. I was more than a little dubious at first, but the checks and balances coded into the system have prevented the abuse that censorship usually leads to.
I think that Yahoo will come to regret having started on this path -- or, more likely, will reconsider quickly.
thad
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
1) Moderating the offending post up to #5.
2) Rob getting a few messages bringing this post to his attention.
3) A Perl script or the Apache server 'crashing' for a few minutes, during which some posts would be inexplicably LOST from the system.
4) Posters outrage that the offending post just happened to be one of the ones 'lost'.
5) Rob adding meta-meta-moderation to keep it from happening again.
6) JonKatz posting an article about civil rights in cyberspace.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.