Prohibiting Free Speech?
November 29th, 2009 by ComputerBob
Anyone who has posted a comment to one of my Journal posts knows that comments don’t appear until I have approved them.
But you may be surprised to learn that you never see the vast majority of comments that are posted to this Web site.
In fact, in just the past year, 14,456 comments were posted to this site that never appeared publicly.
That’s because most of them were spam postings that were either automatically deleted by my Journal’s intelligent spam filter, or manually deleted by me after the spam filter brought them to my attention.
Generally speaking, I approve every non-spam comment, whether I agree with it or not — usually within minutes of when it is posted.
But I delete any comment that I feel is a personal attack or that uses abusive or threatening language — whether or not I agree with the gist of what it says.
For example, several months ago, I deleted a boatload of abusive and/or threatening comments from Puppy Linux supporters that ended up confirming my description of similar disturbing behaviors that I had witnessed in the Puppy Linux support forums.
And several days ago, someone posted a new comment to my very popular I Hate Sears Craftsman Lawn Mowers post. I deleted that comment — even though I generally agreed with the technical points that it made — because it was also an expletive-filled personal attack on another commenter.
As the owner of this Web site, I get to choose which comments I will publish and which ones I will delete. When you’re in my house, you have to play by my rules.
Am I prohibiting others from exercising their right to freedom of speech? I don’t think so, and neither does the author of Strange Ideas About Freedom Of Speech.
But here’s a lively discussion about it in which a few people disagree.
What do you think?
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Tags:
Cybercrime, Ethics, Internet, Law, Personal, Rights, Web Development