When Should a Website Edit Its Users? 159
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?
IANAL (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
erm... (Score:2, Interesting)
and our rule is NEVER edit a post, only delete it... i've been told it's against the DMCA
This is when slashdot did it... (Score:5, Interesting)
Slashdot probably safer than AOL (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Lameness Filter? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Moderation (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Some honest tips from a troll (Score:3, Interesting)
Editing comments (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
To be honest... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Ask the owners of the Home Theater Forum (Score:2, Interesting)
That site is the absolute BEST discussion forum I have ever seen in my life. Take a look at their rules/policies, and you'll quickly see why. And the moderation is extremely fair. I have not seen ANY evidence of abuse or hypocrisy anywhere on that site.
Quite frankly, it frequently puts Slashdot to shame in the quality of content and signal-to-noise ratio.
Still, I find Slashdot an amusing place. Sure, most Slashdot folk don't have a clue about home theater hardware hacking, but hey, it's fun!
So far, the HTF has not been threatened by any lawsuits that I know of, even though they deal with movie studios and their employees.
An idea: why not just say it's a buggy system? (Score:2, Interesting)
Sure, maybe you have a backdoor that lets you delete things you don't like, if you don't have the ability to implement such a "feature" directly. It would naturally be something you wouldn't want to do all the time, but if someone starts goatse'ing your site, just delete thier posts using your backdoor. So the system "loses" posts of a certain character length, or that contain the word goatse, or that are from a user who's username is a certain combination of characters? And who's to say that it's NOT a bug that's causing the posts to be deleted? (Of course, I'm assuming your source code isn't available by request
I realize there are alot of moral issues with this idea, but hey. I'm just trying to think of a way you could delete things. I don't know that I agree with my own idea, feel free to knock it down or improve it. But you know, I don't know of anyone who's held MS liable when Word crashes, thus "censoring" what I'm typing. I don't give it a second thought.
Re:Moderation (Score:3, Interesting)
I fell into this trap myself. I had no moderation for two years, then all of a sudden, some jerk kid started posting things ranging from racial slurs to out and out attacks on what others wrote. My "regular" participants started writing to me off the list complaining, wondering what was going on.
I posted a request to keep it clean. That only sparked a bunch of personal attacks on my character. So, I started deleting the moron's more offensive posts. When that didn't deter him, I started deleting some of his less offensive posts to show him that I meant it. Some of those posts were pretty good, too, showing some insight in between the insults. Looking back, I regret deleting some of them, but...
I've now switched to a moderation system of approve or throw out. I've calmed down quite a bit since then and don't throw out anything slightly insulting any more - if there is a good argument behind it. If it isn't adding anything, like "You don't know what you're talking about, idiot," then it's gone.
Since I started moderating, the fool tried posting a great deal, with a lot of insults toward me, the first couple of weeks. He seems to have finally gotten the idea and tries once every week or two.
Deciding to moderate was a very hard decision. I didn't want to cencor anybody, and I still don't. But some of the other readers made a distinction between "free speach" and appropriate behavior. Free speach is vital when it comes to being able to talk about a governing body. However, the example one person gave where free speach is not an absolute law would be should somebody come into my home and verbally abuse me. To do so would be begging to be kicked out.
Nonetheless, I tried to be reasonable with him, but he obviously doesn't bow to any kind of authority whatsoever. I would have liked to have had a dialog with him off-line, but since I don't require valid e-mail addresses, and he didn't supply any, I was unable to contact him other than by writing articles "to" him.
Also, right from the start he used anonymisers and/or hacked into cable modems. That got me very interested in securing my box as best I could. I shut down FTP (only one person was using it), and pretty much everything else in
Other than the usual MS CodeRed and MS Nimda attacks, there doesn't appear to be anything out of the ordinary, so I could let out a sigh of relief that he's just a kid who knows how to use a limited range of tools (anonymisers to cause havoc), and not one who understands how thinks work (like a cracker). Nonetheless, my paranoia level has risen above the black helicopter level since then.
What did I learn? Don't bother trying to reason with the morons. Just moderate them away without acknowleging their existance. They seem to live to insult others and watch their reactions. If there are no reactions (other than their obnixious posts disappearing), they should eventually go away. (I'm hoping so, anyway.)
Re:Rules of our website (Score:2, Interesting)
This is the one thing about the "either you censor everything or nothing" idea that bothers me. If someone posted the home address of someone that wasn't a public figure tagged with some hate it could actually endanger someone, even if it was mod'ed to -1. I can see how in a public square you could say it and you could even make a 1000 copies and paste it all over town, but there are controls there. People could take them down off the telephone posts and we should have the same ability in cyberspace without opening ourselves up to litigation. It shouldn't be required, I can see how posting the same private address for a public protest would be ligit, but it should be safe to take it down.
Re:There is no issue here (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:There is no issue here (Score:3, Interesting)
It's that simple. Period.
No it isn't. As someone with a public guestbook myself, I know the difference between something "offensive" and something "abusive." When someone posts the same idiotic joke hundreds of times in a row, I delete them all. You go ahead and ignore messageboard abuse and see how fast your board fails.
-Legion
Comment cancellation as on Usenet, Real Life (Score:3, Interesting)
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 [slashdot.org], 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.