Blog Comment Etiquette - Where do we draw the line?
I was interested to hear via Mashable that Wikepedia “has banned multiple IP addresses related to the Church of Scientology for extreme, one-sided editing in an attempt to remove Scientology criticism from the Web.”
This follows on from numerous bans by Facebook of both individuals and groups and even of campaigns. Of note here, as reported by TechDigest, was the banning of the Burger King ad campaign where the premise was that, "deleting ten friends would get you a voucher for a free whopper.”
The bans in all cases resulted from the offender crossing certains boundaries of morality, taste, decency or business etiquette, as set and defined by the social media portal concerned. Surely, few would argue that these boundaries should be clearly and textually defined, so that users can be in no doubt what is acceptable.
Ari Herzog suggests that government and Business, alike, follow IBM’s example of setting up, social computing guidelines. In IBM's case, the guidelines were written for employees, to specify how social networking sites might be accessed and used in the workplace, yet the need can also be argued for clear guidelines relating to the nature of blog and forum comments.
This blog is relatively new and I have taken Pro-bloggers advice not to open the comments section till it has matured, somewhat. Yet, already I have received some unsolicited comments, which are far off topic for example, spam links for Viagra and comments in foreign languages which are no doubt spam for similar products.
Free speech is to be encouraged but not when it is totally out of context (in which case it is usually spam) or when it transgresses others' rights. To be encouraged are comments which are on-topic and which question the blog content using intelligent, critical argument while quoting evidence or which add information valuable to readers. In such cases most moderators would welcome signature link-backs to closely related sites. However, when it comes to blog comment etiquette, comments which may be unacceptable may include:
- Those which are undisguised spam
- Those which use offensive language
- Those which contain racist, sexist or otherwise offensive material either textually or by implication
- Those in which the criticism is in the form of a personal attack rather than being a balanced critique of the issue in question based on intelligent argument (i.e.falling into the realms of bullying)
- Those in which copyright is infringed
- Those written in a language which is foreign to the blog or forum, which therefore cannot be moderated
- Those which seek to build their own brand by destroying another (e.g the Burger King/Facebook Campaign)
My moto is free speech with safeguards to avoid a free for all for those who seek to transgress the rights of others. However, moderators can hardly complain if they fail to issue guidelines to site users in the first place. In this regard, I certainly intend to draft guidelines relating to blog comment etiquette on this blog, as soon as the comments section is opened to the public, in the not too distant future.
Stay tuned.
Sandra Charan
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