Do you censor comments?
Censorship in online community is as old as the community itself. But we have came across long way, online community now isn’t what it used to be way back in the start. The biggest reason web 2.0 created buzz is, changes brought in community. Now online community such as forum, blog, social networking sites are more democratic(well at least in the theory). I guess the term “Crowdsourcing” evolved, just because in web 2.0 everybody have voice regardless of personal or organizational standing/status. But if you take a closer look at different blogs and community, you will soon find out the so called free flow of opinion dose not exist in most of the cases.
You will notice bloggers censoring opinion just because the comment is negative, personal attack, controversial, left by a newbie, conflicting interests even just because the blogger don’t like the commenter. Not only that we see hideous crime like modification of comment. Modifying/altering someone comment is simply sinister, there is no excuse for that.
Anyway we should bring back our focus on comment delete. As a blogger you have obvious write to delete a comment for these reasons-
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Spam, but be sure the comment actually fits in the criteria of spam. As you know I am not talking about that “SPAM” meat loaf. Wkipedia’s “spam in blog” article will help you to understand, if you have confusion.
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Unrelated bashing. For example– I am running a topic on Six Apart vs. WordPress comparison article and the comment is totally irrelevant bashing some blogger.
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Racism or sexual content. If your blog isn’t a sex blog, there shouldn’t be any of that content too, including comments.
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Legal decree to remove comment.
When you should not delete comments-
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Personal attack yet relevant to the topic you are discussing. Hey you are a blogger means, you should be ready to face crowds opinion and some hot air. If you consider removing a comment just because you feel like personally attacked, think again! you are censoring a opinion. Let the crowd decide who is right who is wrong. If you are right, you will prevail, even without deleting that comment. On the other hand when you delete that comment, indirectly you just proved that you have something to hide(May be the commenter was right after all).
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A comment maybe controversial but relevant to the discussed topic.
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An opinion that might raise conflicts of interests. For example- A commenter gave an negative opinion about a certain organization/individual. And somehow you have personal/business or any other interest in stake with that organization or individual. You should not delete that opinion just to satisfy the organization/individual’s interest.
Apart from deleting comment, there is another trend in blogosphere i.e. banning from the site. So as far as I see if you delete comment (except for those above mentioned obvious reason) and ban people for preventing further comment, you are suppressing opinion. So instead of doing all these hypocrisy, why not simply just quit blogging and maintain a personal diary? cause blogging is about expressing opinion without any personal prejudice.
January 18th, 2007 at 3:28 am
I’ll keep that in mind when considering which comments I should delete. Thanks for the info.