Reply
Thu 12 Feb, 2004 02:07 am
I grudgingly have to concede to fresco that philosophy can play a role in everyday life, if only to limited scenarios. I'm a moderator on a poll/forum site that is supposed to fuel debate between people with differing veiws and give everyone a more open-minded veiw of the world that usual - it has accomplished this goal better at some times than others, but that's a separate issue really. Every so often, there's some nutcase that comes on saying that GWB is part of the illuminati, or that Arabs are subhuman, or people that post about white supremacy and have swastikas in their avatars and so forth. There is currently a (rather stupid) rule on the site about not making "personal attacks" on other members along the lines of slander/parody or threats. (This was prompted by a very humorous profile theme dedicated to one particularly irksome member a while back.) However, the rule doesn't say anything about saying generally that all Arabs are subhuman, or generally that all white people are meant to enslave everyone else. While I think that such opinions are despicable, I respect people's rights to voice them so long as they aren't violating the personal attack rule or spamming up the boards and so forth, but most of the other mods disagree. I'm mostly going off of precendent really - having been a member of the site for over two years, I've seen plenty of these types of people get torn to shreds in the forums by ordinary members without any mod intervention at all. I don't think they should be spared, but I don't think it is our right to censor them outright either.
So I just want to hear your guys' opinions. Where do you draw the line? Where do you sacrifice one moral philosophy for another in this situation?
Was that irksome member named bobsal or Dr Kak by any chance?
No.... it was some stupid teenage girl that kept prattling on about stupid stuff and whining when she got bitched out.
First of all free speech and the forum are unrelated. Free speech means they can start their own forum, not that they can use yours to do what they want.
What's important to remember is that a forum costs money. It is a resource that costs in terms of time and money.
So your criteria should be really simple:
Whatever you want to host.
Just like a phone call. If I start prank calling you would you feel obliged to sit and listen to my "free speech" or would you hang up?
If it is the type of speech that you do not want on the site get rid of it. The user will still have free speech, just not the preivilidge of using the site as the medium.
Now to foster good discussion and debate you will probably have to tolerate opinions and posts you do not agree with.
Where you draw the line is a judgement call you need to make.
some sites will remove users for something so simple as being off topic, it's up to each site to decide what interaction they are willing to pay for.
Oh, I understand that, craven. The issue is that the point of the site is to facilitate discussion of possibly unpopular opinions and make extensive use of free speech to have free discussion. So I'm not really asking in terms of forums in general, but in forums specifically aimed at incorporating free speech itself. That's not to say we don't also facilitate censure.
Also, it's one thing for the owner of the forum to pull the plug on things they don't want to hear, but it's another for a remote user of the forum to be offended by what another remote user says. Who do we defer to?
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace