Assume responsibility

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Interesting piece of news from the people revising the Norwegian press ethics guidelines (Vær Varsom-plakaten): They propose that paragraph 4.17 concerning web discussion groups should be stricter. Today it allows editors to control posts after users have published. Under the revised guidelines editors must edit all posts before they go online. No doubt a very controversial proposal among the leading news sites.

5 thoughts on “Assume responsibility”

  2. Censorship on the internet? Well, forget about it. We’re not in China, are we? Are we?

  3. According to the proposal, as it is reported by “Journalisten”, all posts in discussion groups (run by the media) “should be edited” before they go online. You are both alarmed and raise the censorship flag here, so maybe you interpret that as “should be _changed_”. Or “should be deleted if politically incorrect”. I don’t think that’s what the group behind the proposal means. It’s definitely not what I mean when I indicate that I like the proposal. What they propose is actually the same as many bloggers do when they write on their sites something like “here I make the rules, and if you don’t stick to them in your comments, I’ll delete them”. And this is, after all, not much different from the good old editing principle. As editor, you are responsible for what is published on your site, in your paper. Of course I agree that we in the media have to open up and engage our readers and users more than we used to, but if we throw out the editing principle altogether we are also throwing out a tradition. I don’t think that would be wise.

    If news websites start editing their discussion groups in this way, I think the debates will get more interesting. If they are scared and block all controversial posts, I’m sure the web community will make some noise. Right now, the debates are less interesting than they could be, exactly because the media websites don’t want to invest the resources necessary to raise the level – by editing.

  4. The term “cencorship” is often abused, as noted by oaø there’s a difference between cencorship and editorship.

    This is a comment to the the forum/anonymity theme from the two last posts. On a general note, forcing everyone online to provide a full name would probably rid the net of some of its worst trolls, but in the process we would lose a lot of interesting voices.

    Regarding the case of VG Debatt, whether we thnk it offers interesting discussions or not, it’s hard to argue with its popularity. With about 10000 new postings per day the debates are obviously quite interesting to a lot of people. As is VG itself- an elitistic approach to debates would probably not fit well with their profile.

    My experience with VGD is limited, and I I’ve certainly not dwelled in its darkest and ugliest holes (the boards for Norwegian and international politics ,immigration, and the Middle East). But from what I’ve seen (mainly in the, ahem, Norwegian football forum) there’s a constant power struggle/negotioation going on between participants. Often, one side of the discussion will cry foul and call for a moderator, and when given the chance, the other part will pay “revenge” by the same method. Thus threads are deleted and members banned, but somehow they always reenter the forum under a different nick (even though one has to use a previously unused mobile phone number to register). This seems like a flaw in thheir system that keeps the discussions from growing more mature.

    About the Danish study referenced in the last post, apparently it analysed Usenet groups. Traditionally, this is an arena where there has been more use of/encouragement of using real names than in modern web forums like VGD. In these kinds of forums, almost everyone uses a nick. In such an environment there will always be trolls, and a troll will obviously pick an anonymous name, but it doesn’t seem like trolling increases in proportion with the share of anonymous users. In contrast to what a lot of people have said about the Internet, we don’t lose our socialised selves just because we are “faceless”. It might be easier to step a bit further and be a bit harsher, and we might be tempted to try to win the discussion by using cheap rhetorics and low blows instead of arguing properly (just as we do offline). But most people don’t have a troll in them.

    Also, using a pseudonym is not always equal to being anonymous. People use a pseudonym to keep their opinions from being read in the wrong context, not because it’s not their real opinions. “Dennis” doesn’t want his possible future employee to find out through a Google search that he has spent too much time in a Star Wars forum. Still, in the context of the forum Dennis will probably “play out” his Star Wars forum identity quite consistently, and his Star Wars community friends might very well know who’s really behind the nick “LightSabreLover73”. And although he can’t be looked up in a phonebook, he remains the same person throughout his posted messages.

    However, it’s probably easier to give the impression of a coherent online identity on a blog (and more difficult not to). A blog offers a full toolbox of ways to express (design, linking, images, the structure (a continous body of texts), the organisation (monthly and category archives, semantically structured content that is easily searchable). In a forum, the lack of distinctive features besides text (some offer avatars and banners) makes it harder to tell the different voices apart. Unless someone keeps banging the drum. Which of course, is a popular activity in a big national forum like VGD. Users with extreme views tend to dominate, they shout louder and more passionately. Not more matter-of-factly though.

    When Dagbladet first opened their weblog, hordes of trolls and lunatics started flooding the comment section. Unlike on VGD, one didn’t have to register to enter a comment. Which led to a problem of anonymity and accountability. With no support for registering or entering the URL to one’s own weblog, keeping track of individual users became harder, and probaly a lot of people used this to post several like-minded comments under different names. Dagbladet have continued their weblog campaign, but their weblog architecture still remains flawed and counter-blogosperish.

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