Comment on the Comment Policy
Recently, we enacted a comment policy to provide notice about what kinds of comments we will publish and what kinds we will delete on Poligazette. The full comments policy can be seen at the bottom of each comment thread. Since implementing this policy, we have received a few complaints, some infantile but others with potential to be substantive. Today, one of the larger and more reasonable left-leaning blogs, TalkLeft, announced a similar policy.
What is striking is the similarity of the problems all sites seem to face, regardless of their particular ideological slant. Too many comments seem to be “drive-by” spam that simply cut-and-paste some standard piece of text that is non-responsive to the post or simply throw around insults. Deleting such comments isn’t suppressing opposing points of view, it is simply a matter of having standards. It is no different from a magazine or newspaper that is selective in which letters to the editor they choose to publish.
Some call this “censorship”. It is not, at least not in any pejorative sense. It is simply trying to keep those who want serious discussion from being drowned by an avalanche of trolls and also trying to protect post authors from having their posts hijacked by intolerant ideologues and their various personal vendettas. It is and will remain our policy to allow and encourage comments that agree or disagree, provided that they do so substantively and without attacking others. As a gesture of good faith on our part, most previous bans on commenters have been rescinded — everyone gets a new chance.
The purpose of this post is to provide an opportunity for discussion about the comments policy. This comments thread is an “open thread” insofar as comments about the comments policy are welcome here, though they are not on other threads. This does not mean all bets are off. Please keep your comments about the comments policy substantive. Comments on this thread which attack site administration, insult others, or are vulgar or abusive may still be deleted.
Frankly when an Author shows deliberate and highly repetitive bias, and that bias and their motives is called into question. - that calling into question is debating what the Author has to say and is thereby discussing the posts contents. We call reporters, news stations, politicians, comedians, etc on their obvious bias. Why censor it here.
Sure I can see filtering out the - your post sucks - type of comments; I can see toning down the harshness or language. But for a site that supposedly invites cross discussion - why filter out when someone questions blatantly obvious double standards.
I don’t think the policy does anything of the sort. What it does is prohibit attacks on the author personally. Substantive challenges to what the author may be arguing are encouraged.
Not in practice, but view it as you will, you asked I answered.
Well, all I can say is that I am not aware of ever having done what you describe. I certainly have no intention of doing it in the future. If you can offer more details by email, please do, as it may be helpful in avoiding misunderstandings in the future.
I think the comments policy is fine. Poligazette has not been deleting posts that disagree with the author of an article. On the contrary, differing views are welcome and encouraged. It’s quite obvious that anyone who simply wants to say "I disagree with this article and here’s why… " is always welcome to do so.
I would still call it censorship simply because it reminds you that there are some dangers involved.
It is mighty easy to be a bit biased and have a stricter enforcement of the policy with view points that differ from yours than comments that happen to be in line with your chosen candidate/policy. I’m not talking about clear cut cases like wishing an STD on an 17 year old girl. It’s inevitable that you (or me if I were running a site) will have at least a little of these biases in gray-area issues.
The best way to guard against that is to constantly be slightly uncomfortable with what you are doing.
In the specific case of ad hominid attacks, they come in a variety of degrees. "GWB is stupid" is certainly one, "Obama is out of touch" is a gray area (to really avoid it being ad hominid you’d have to say something like ‘Obama’s stance on policy x is not supported by the majority of US citizens’). Neither do I think should be censored. Where I’d draw the line would be might hard for me to pin down. It might very well be a ‘know it when I see it’ scenario, but not being able to place objective bounderies around things would make me very nervous, and I hope it does for you as well.
@ interested/jason. One of the big problems here is that by the very act that was taken against the comments, we can’t see them or verify for ourselves if the action was appropriate. That leads to this type of situation where there is a claim that can’t be proven one way or another
I’m sure it would take some ingenious coding, but maybe there is a way to simply mark a post as bad, and have it blocked from normal view, but keep it in the system so anyone who really wanted to could look at that comment, so interested could say: ‘here, on comment xyz I really think you stepped over the lines’, and then I or MvdG or someone else could say, ‘no, it really was inapropriate because of …’ or ‘yeah, you know that wasn’t any worse that this other comment that you allowed through…’
I guess the down side of that is you start having to make decissions about decissions and can waste a lot of time… tough problem to crack certainly.
I would caution against getting overly dramatic here. Whenever we do delete a comment, it doesn’t mean that the person is being stopped from expressing a viewpoint. It only means that they are not allowed to express that viewpoint in that way here. They remain free to avail themselves of the seemingly infinite number of other forums.
This is just a relatively small blog. Let’s not pretend that it is anyone’s sole source of news or anyone’s sole outlet for personal political expression.
Quite frankly there isn’t a single point in this comment policy that shouldn’t be common-sense to any blog owner or commenter.
Vulgarity, personal attacks, unrelated and/or spammed comments… these aren’t good things and if a blog admin wants to delete them it’s absolutely in their rights to do so. It’s not censorship (any more then white-washing a tagged wall) and, quite frankly, if a commenter can’t say their peace within these rules it’s likely they should have just kept their mouth shut anyway.
The writers here at Poli work hard at what they do and as much as I disagree with many of their viewpoints if they think something should be deleted I’m not about to "call them out" on it. Neither should you.
Well of course the editors have the right to delete whatever they want and they are the ones working hard to maintain the site. BUT,
"One of the big problems here is that by the very act that was taken against the comments, we can’t see them or verify for ourselves if the action was appropriate."
I completely agree with Kevin H.’s statement above. Please read that sentence again. Some commenter’s post gets deleted, but the answers to that commenter remain. It then looks like the commenter was the one that got attacked. So to outsiders reading the conversation, the situation is puzzling and even disturbing. It kind of bothers me, if I happen to read something and I’m confused about the treatment, I want to know what actually happened.