In Life, Photos on
1 August 2008 with 1 comment
Today I dropped by Blue Bottle on Linden Lane to recaffientate and noticed a particularly awesome wall of, well, let’s call it “user-generated, collaborative, public art.” I snapped a photo and sent it off to Flickr and went on with my day.
Tonight I got a mail through Flickr from the artist behind the “Just Married” posters, who, of course, has a Flickr account. Sometimes I love the internet.
Heather and I are off on a family vacation for a while, so the posts won’t be coming as fast and furious as they have been. Until we’re back, please do enjoy repeats of my crazy obsession with comments this week.
In Links on
31 July 2008 with no comments
-
Brilliantly written. “If we attempted to pass a law preventing you from saying something terrible, that would be censorship. If you showed up in our living room attempting to say the same thing, we’d have the right to throw you out.”
-
Fantastic insights on comment moderation from a practitioner. “Some reporters might get upset that someone says their writing sucks, but that’s tough cookies for them. Fair comments about our job is allowed, unfair remarks about us as human beings is not”
-
Point-by-point stories to go with my original list. Fantastic.
In Community, Internet, Just One Question, Law on
30 July 2008 with 3 comments
One of the things that always comes up when I talk to people at companies about community systems is the fear that getting involved with the comments on their site makes them more liable. I’ve denied it until I was blue in the face, but they don’t always believe me. So I decided to ask an expert: Jason Schultz, EFF Fellow and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley Law School.
Derek Powazek: Does moderating comments on a website make the website owner more liable?
Jason Schultz: This is an important question that a lot of website owners have. The short answer under U.S. law is that you are right, website owners generally are not liable for comments on their site, even if they moderate them. Here’s the longer answer:
First, one has to ask, “liable for what?” There are essentially three categories of comment content any website owner should worry about: (1) criminal content, (2) copyrighted content, (3) everything else.
For criminal content, once you are aware that it is criminal, you should contact law enforcement immediately and they will tell you whether you should take it down. Either way, they will likely ask you to archive it. But you should definitely not ignore it. Criminal content includes things like child pornography.
For copyrighted content, you should (as you suggest) follow the outline of the DMCA safe harbors. This means registering a DMCA agent with the copyright office, having a posted policy and active email or snail mail address for takedown requests, and complying with valid requests in a timely manner. If one does this, there is little to no risk of being held liable, even if you moderate the comment with the copyrighted content in it.
The only exception to this rule is copyrighted content that is considered “red flag” content - content where it is so obvious that it is infringing, you cannot turn a blind eye to it. How obvious is still being debated in the courts, but one court has held that even hosting or linking to image sites named “www.stolencelebritypics.com” or “illegal.net” was not sufficiently obvious to trigger the red flag requirement.
Finally, there is “everything else” which includes defamatory comments, harassment, abuse, etc. Here, website providers receive immense protection under Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act. As long as the website owner does not herself write or add text to the comment, she is pretty much exempt from any and all liability for hosting it, whether or not it is moderated.
The only exceptions to this rule are where the website owner encourages or suggests the offending language. So, for example, if you were to provide pulldown menus for comments that said “This person is a criminal” or “The above commenter has HIV,” that could fall outside the protections of CDA 230. However, short of something as blatant and directed as that, website owners are generally safe from liability for any derogatory comments posted by others.
Simply approving or denying comments does not make one liable.
There’s a lot of great information on subjects like this and others in EFF’s Blogger’s Legal Guide about Safe Harbor and Section 230 Protections.
+
Jason Schultz is an EFF Fellow specializing in intellectual property and Associate Director of the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic at U.C. Berkeley Law School. Previously, he served as a Senior Staff Attorney at EFF, where he lead its Patent Busting Project and represented creators, innovators, and consumers in a variety of matters involving fair use, free speech, and reverse engineering. He received his J.D. from Berkeley and his undergrad degrees in Public Policy Studies and Women’s Studies from Duke University. He maintains a personal blog at lawgeek.net. Thanks, Jason!
(Props to Michael Sippey who did “Just One Question” interviews at Stating The Obvious way back in the day.)
+
PREVIOUSLY: This is Not a Comment and 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
In Photos on
29 July 2008 with no comments
A new orchid blooms one of the freakiest flowers ever. It looks like a sea creature up close.
In Community, Internet on
29 July 2008 tagged Media with no comments
Jeff Jarvis sums up the debate nicely with an open letter to Bob Garfield.
But note well, my friend, that all of these people are speaking to you with intelligence, experience, generosity, and civility. You know what’s missing? Two things: First, the sort of nasty comments your own piece decries. And second: You.
His closing thoughts led me to think about the long view of this debate and post this:
+
We’ve had hundreds of years of experience in the newspaper industry that have taught us how to take the messy thoughts in a writer’s head and translate them into news. This process involves humans (interviewees, editors, copyeditors) and machines (typewriters, computers, printing presses).
We’ve had less than 20 years of experience taking the messy thoughts in the heads of readers online and translating them into posts. Is it any wonder we’re still figuring it out?
And I don’t just mean technology. I mean process, etiquette. Bob keeps ringing the “you didn’t even read it!” bell, but how would he know? Maybe the story didn’t do the job of communicating well enough.
You have to take a systematic approach. The system of journalism has hundreds of years of experimentation to learn from. Online, we’ve got about a dozen. We’ve made some progress - and Bob’s story would have been better had he included it - but there’s a long road ahead still.
We’ll figure it out. And conversations like this are part of that process.
+
Elsewhere, Meg Pickard from the Guardian UK comes in with a fantastic post that reminds us that good community systems are tripods with three legs: Human, Technical, and Editorial. You have to focus on all three to be successful.
I look forward to hearing if any of this outpouring of experience makes it into future episodes of On The Media. I’ll be listening, and talking back, for years to come.
+
PREVIOUSLY: This is Not a Comment and 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
In Links on
29 July 2008 with no comments
-
Jeff Jarvis on the comments controversy sparked by OTM, with an appearance from Bob Garfield himself in the comments, still not getting why he’s wrong.
-
Programmatic detection of stupid comments. Has anyone tried this?
-
An interview I did with TOC on MagCloud. Favorite line: “If you tell people in the publishing industry that they’re really in the community business, they’ll say ’shut up, hippy’ and go back to monetizing their audience metrics.” I kid because I love.
-
I’m interviewed on page 2. Too bad about the false dichotomy. It’s not amateurs vs. pros, it’s artists who embrace new opportunities vs. people trying to hold back the tide.
In Community, How to, Internet on
28 July 2008 tagged Media with 28 comments
The other day Bob Garfield had a good kvetch about dumb comments on newspaper websites on his show, On The Media, and I posted my two cents, but I still don’t feel better. I think that’s because Bob’s partly right: comments do suck sometimes.
So, instead of just poking him for sounding like Grandpa Simpson, I’d like to help fix the problem. Here are ten things newspapers could do, right now, to improve the quality of the comments on their sites. (There are lots more, but you know how newspaper editors can’t resist a top ten list.)
-
Require Accounts
Anonymity is important in journalism, but not for comments.
There are a lot of good reasons to allow anonymity, especially in the news. Sometimes a source needs to speak out against an employer or the government without being named. Fine. But there is no reason, really no reason at all, to allow people to post comments without having to first sign up for an account.
Simply requiring an account will remove 80% of your comment problems. If allowing anonymity is important, you can allow the user to remove their name on a specific comment, while still requiring them to be logged in. (In other words, the user must log in so the system knows who they are, but they can opt to leave a comment as “Anonymous” if they choose. Anonymous comments could then be held in a special moderation queue for approval to guard against any bad uses.)
-
Set and Enforce Rules
Nobody likes finding out about a rule after they’ve broken it. Write a human-readable set of community guidelines (Flickr’s are excellent). Make all new members agree to it when they sign up, and link to it prominently from every comment form. This way, if you have to take action later, you can say “We warned you.”
Then enforce the rules. Delete bad comments and publicly promote the ones that are great. There’s a common misconception that moderating comments makes you more liable. This is not true. Managing your community does not have any baring on your DMCA compliance, safe harbor standing, or any other legal issue.
-
Employ a Community Manager
If you can’t name your community manager, it’s probably you.
You wouldn’t let a writer put their work in the paper without having someone check it, so why let commenters do so? If you’re going to have people posting comments to your site, it should be someone’s job to moderate them. Think of them as the editor of the Comment Desk.
You don’t have to read every comment before it goes online, but it should be somebody’s responsibility to remove any comment that runs afoul of the posted community guidelines. Like graffiti in an urban space, bad comments lead to more bad comments. But the Community Manager should be more than a cop - they should be a vital connection between the staff and the community. They should lead the community by example, participating in the discussion and being helpful, and also do a daily “community weather report” for the staff, feeding the community’s input back into the newsroom.
-
Sculpt the Input
Just because your users can post comments doesn’t mean you can’t help them shape them.
Back in the day, when we had people posting comments to Fray, we were constantly tweaking the form’s automated responses. If you tried to post something too short, it asked you to expand on it a bit. If you posted something too long, it asked you to edit yourself down. If you posted in ALLCAPS, we de-capitalized it (Flickr does this now). These are easy things for computers to do, and they make a huge difference.
-
Empower the Community to Help
If you think bad comments bug you, they bug the good commenters twice as much.
Yes, you should be paying someone on staff to be the Community Manager. In addition, you can also enable the community to help. Give every post a “This is Bad” button. Then give the community manager a private page where they can see the comments with the most bad votes and take appropriate action.
For bonus points, give each post a “This is Good” button, too, so they can also tell you about the good ones. Remember that your members are not the enemy: they want to help you keep the place clean, too.
-
Link Stories to Comments
The worst thing you can do is separate the “community section” away from your content. That creates a backchannel, where people feel safe being inappropriate because, why not? They’re at the kids table, anyway.
So link stories to community conversations as closely as possible. This will give the conversation a central topic.
-
Enable Private Communication
The internet didn’t create the angry letter to the editor, but it definitely put it into overdrive. And that’s okay - sometimes people need to vent. Your job is to direct the venting.
Some papers’ comments are so crazy because there’s no other way for the reader to respond. People will gladly communicate with you privately if you gave them a way to do so.
So create a form people can use to email the editors, and link to it from the comment form. Say: “If you’d like to say this privately, go over here.” (Props to Vox, where there’s a “Send private message instead” link on every comment form.)
You may get some angry email this way, but it’s better in your inbox than on the website where it will just start, or add to, a fight.
-
Participate …
Get your writers involved in the conversation. People chill out a lot when they know they’re being listened to by the writer (and they act out a lot more when they think no one’s listening). I know, writers can find this an onerous addition to their workload, and have probably already decided that they hate their comments. Too bad. This is part of journalism’s evolution, and you’re either on the boat or you’re not.
One great way to get writers on board is to give them the ability to moderate comments on their own stories. They can do this on their blogs, they should be able to do it on their stories, too. (With supervision by the Community Manager, naturally.)
-
… But Don’t Feed the Trolls
Members participating with good intentions are generally pleased when the authority figures are participating. Unfortunately, that can also bring out the trolls - bad users who are playing a game called “suck up as much of your time as possible.”
School your writers in the ways of online community. If someone is trying to get a rise out of you, don’t fight back, no matter how tempting. A good Community Manager can help train writers on how, and when, to join the fray.
-
Give Up Control
Newsrooms are top-down places, but the internet is not. Get used to the fact that people online won’t do things just because you told them to. In fact, the only thing you can absolutely count on is that something will happen that you didn’t expect. When it does, you’ll be defined by what you do next. Be ready to be surprised.
As you can see, embracing community tools on your site takes work. If you just turn on comments with open-ended tools and no oversight, of course the result won’t be pretty. That’s because you haven’t done the job of an editor - to lead by example, direct the conversation, and sculpt the results.
The real reason comments on newspaper sites suck isn’t that internet commenters suck, it’s that the editors aren’t doing their jobs. If more newspapers implemented these 10 things, I guarantee the quality of their comments would go up. And this is just the basic stuff, mostly unchanged since I wrote Design for Community seven years ago.
Imagine what we could do if we could get past the easy stuff.
+
PREVIOUSLY: This is Not a Comment
UPDATE: Just One Question for Jason Schultz: Does moderating comments on a website make the website owner more liable?
In Internet on
26 July 2008 tagged Media with 9 comments
(With apologies to René Magritte.)
One of my favorite radio shows is On The Media. I’ve been listening to it for years. Their critiques of traditional media are astute and often funny. But when they talk about the internet, they reveal themselves to be the old codgers they are.
This week, host Bob Garfield did a piece ostensibly about the problems newspaper sites have with website comments. Unfortunately it just came out sounding like another old journalist kvetching about how everyone on the net is an idiot. You can listen to the story here.
The story has many problems, not the least of which is the total absence of any actual commenters. But the main one is that Garfield lumps all commenters, and commenting systems, together. On the web, not all comments are created equal.
Yes, if you open your site to comments from people who do not have to register or create an account, you’ll get a lot of unfiltered craziness. That’s because you’re not doing your job as a host. Imagine a newspaper of infinite pages with no editors where anyone with a keyboard could contribute. Sounds fun to me, but not a recipe for consistent thoughtfulness.
That’s why online comment systems have evolved. Take Slashdot’s karma (which has been around for almost 10 years, so there’s no excuse for you to not know about it), which allows readers to rate and filter each other’s comments. Or Amazon’s product reviews (again, around for over 10 years), which are filtered by human editors and then rated by other shoppers. Or wiki systems (again, over a decade) like Wikipedia that allow many people to collaborate on one document.
The story completely missed moderation queues, reputation management systems, or any of the hundreds of comment systems built over the last decade to address this very problem. Garfield seems to base the entire story on some bad comments on the OTM site, a site that provides a completely open, no signup required, comment system. But instead of asking “Is there a better way to do this?” he goes for the much easier story: “Gosh internet commenters sure are dumb!”
This refusal to distinguish between different comment systems is exactly the kind of sloppy journalism that they regularly criticize on the show. I was disappointed to hear it from a source I’d respected for so long. Thank goodness for Ira Glass, host of This American Life, who pushed back on Garfield, saying:
You’re old enough, and I’m old enough, that you were very comfortable with the one-way communication. And I hear you say this, and I feel like you are anti-democratic. You are a royalist. You are upset with democracy itself.
Thank you, Ira. But it’s not just that Garfield is being a snob. He’s also being blind to the real differences in online communities. Chastising all internet commenters for the actions of the loudest, craziest ones is no different that swearing off all newspapers because of Jason Blair.
Of course unmoderated anonymous comments on the internet can be incomprehensibly awful and frustratingly stupid. They can also be heartbreakingly sincere and shatteringly honest. That’s because they’re written by real people, and real people are complicated, messy, and weird.
Garfield and the crew at OTM should know that the process of making journalism is messy, too. They should see comments as part of that process. It’s not the product that matters, it’s the participation. Comments online are just like conversations in newsrooms - sloppy and stupid and often wrong. But they’re the raw stuff that great journalism starts from.
If On The Media really wanted to address this topic, they should explore why some sites have really positive, amazing conversations. What are they doing right that other newspaper sites could learn from? Why were the stories posted to Fray so emotional and honest? How is it that, with so many participants and so much press, Wikipedia is still so qualitatively great?
Oh yeah, and they should pick up a copy of Design for Community, my book from 2001, that’s about exactly this, and more relevant than ever.
I’m sure this story will inspire many comments on their site. There are only a few so far, and most are thoughtful and well-written. (The dumbest one is definitely my own, in which I suggest next time they interview someone under 30.) Let’s hope that, counter to the tone of the story, they’re actually listening.
+
UPDATE: 10 Ways Newspapers Can Improve Comments
In Links on
25 July 2008 with 4 comments
-
Answer: No. “I do not know of any rabbi or Jewish cemetery that would refuse to bury a Jew because their body had a tattoo. That would be a terrible violation of the Jewish principle of Kavod Ha-Meit, giving honor to the dead.”
-
Again: No. “There is no basis for restricting burial to Jews who violate this prohibition or even limiting their participation in synagogue ritual.”
-
Believe me yet? “Even though getting a ‘decorative’ tattoo is considered a sin for a Jew, it doesn’t disqualify one from being buried in a Jewish cemetery.” I’ll add, it’s not my only sin. My neighbor’s wife is HOT.
In Life, Photos on
24 July 2008 with 11 comments
About a month after I started the process, and a couple weeks since Jason at Cyclops did the shading (less painful getting, more painful healing), my first tattoo is done. I’m still startled when I see him in the mirror first thing in the morning, but I think we’re gonna be friends.
Additions to my ever-growing list of answers to the “Why a squid?” questions:
- Because the chicken was too expensive.
- Because I’m a multi-tentacled creature of the deep.
- Because squid are smarter than dolphins.
In other squid-related news, I saw a nature documentary the other day that featured a little squid with a brown bottle on the ocean floor. He carried it around in his tentacles wherever he went. And when he was tired, he crawled inside. It was a tiny cephalopod mobile home.
There’s a metaphor in there somewhere that I really like.
