- Blog Police (Image via Wikipedia)
Despite the post name, this is not about getting rid of your principles (although that could be handy for folks considering a career in politics). Rather, it is about when it is acceptable to delete comments from a blog post.
To start off, let me get the easy ones out of the way. As I argued in an earlier post, deleting spam and web droppings seems perfectly acceptable. No blog has an obligation to serve as free advertising for spammers and web droppings have as much right to remain as bird droppings. Now on to matters a bit more controversial.
In general, there seem to be two main areas on which to assess whether a comment should remain or be banished by deletion. These are, obviously enough, tone/style and content.
In regards to tone/style, those that are excessively negative tend to provide a basis on which to delete in a principled way. Examples of negative tone/style include being needlessly hateful, needlessly condescending, or needlessly hostile. As others have noted, being negative (or, to be more technical, an ass) out of proportion to the provocation seem to provide grounds for considering deletion.
Not surprisingly, drawing a line that will allow consistent deletion can be a challenge. Despite this challenge, a consistent principle seems to be rather desirable. After all, as in law and ethics, the rules should be consistent and non-arbitrary. That way people know, in advance, what sort of behavior is acceptable and what is not. From a practical standpoint, this also helps avoid conflict over such matters and this is generally a good thing for a blog. After all, the idea of having a blog is to attract readers and active participants rather than drive them away.
Blog moderators will vary in what is considered tolerable in regards to tone/style. Those that prefer a rougher approach will tolerate more negative tones and styles. Those who wish to have a nicer environment or prefer a blog that seems more professional in character will no doubt tolerate less.
As a general principle, it does seem reasonable to expect civil behavior. Since there is already a well established set of principles in this area, it makes good sense to assume (unless otherwise noted) that these general principles apply on a blog. For example, being hateful, using needless vulgarities and being excessively condescending all violate the intuitive standards of civility.
However, to the degree that these are a matter of etiquette there is a great deal of flexibility. After all, what counts as rude or negative is often a matter of context. For example, some people are quite comfortable with the casual use of “obscene” words and see them as part of everyday vocabulary. So, while it seems reasonable to accept the general principle that excessively negative comments should be deleted, what counts as excessively negative will need to be defined by the blog moderator, preferably by working with the community of the blog.
On my own blog, I follow the “common sense” rules of civility: don’t be needlessly hateful, keep the obscenity in check, avoid being excessively condescending, and show the degree of respect that one would like to receive in return. Since I lack Victorian sensibilities and have been hardened by years of online gaming, I tend to be fairly tolerant of some rough talk-provided that there is some merit to the comments. This provides a nice transition to the matter of content.
Deleting on the basis of content is perhaps the most controversial (with some notable exceptions like spam). In some cases, it will seem quite acceptable to delete comments. For example, comments that entirely lacking in relevance but are full of racist, sexist or other hateful remarks are excellent candidates for deletion.Not surprisingly, many blogs have rules against such comments (as well as against comments that can cause legal trouble, such as threats and libelous claims).
In these cases as well as less extreme cases, a reasonable principle seems to be to weigh the positive value of a comment (its merit measured in terms of what it adds to the discussion) against the negative aspects of the comment. These negative aspects can include both style/tone and content. For example, a comment might be relevant to a post and raise a legitimate criticism of said post, but it might be presented in a condescending tone and might also contain insulting content.
As is to be expected, if the positive value of the comment is determined to be outweighed by its negative aspects, then deletion would seem to be justified. This can be justified by the obvious fact that the person making the comment could have written the comment without the negative aspects and thus made her point without all the negative tone/style or content. There is, after all, generally no need to be an ass and no one has a right to expect that such needless “assing” will be tolerated.
On my own blog I am inclined to tolerate a fair amount of negative content or style/tone, provided that it is offset by an even greater amount of positive content. Rather than deleting such comments, it seems that a better approach is to at least make an attempt to persuade the person to be less negative and thus contribute more to the discussion.
Some blogs take the approach of deleting comments that disagree with the slant, agenda or goal of the blog. For example, a liberal blog moderator might delete any criticisms that are conservative in nature even if the comments are well reasoned and civil.
While blog moderators have the right to do this, this does not seem like an appropriate approach to such comments. Of course, my view is based on the assumption that an open discussion that allows criticism is both valuable and desirable. Other folks, obviously enough, see “discussion” as a tool for advancing a specific agenda or view and thus have no tolerance for any opposing views or criticism. That, I believe, is the wrong way to run a blog on both moral and critical thinking grounds. I’ll leave my reasons here for the discussion that is likely to follow.
In the case of a philosophy blog, this sort of approach would seem to grossly violate the traditional spirit of philosophy. As such, on my own blog I never delete comments because they are critical of my views, arguments, or beliefs (or those of others).
I’ve been deleted for being irrelevant or repetitious or without any reason at all. I suspect that my real sin was disagreeing with the blog owner.
Spam, advertising, obscenities, and hate talk (racism,, homophobia, anti-semitism, islamophobia, etc.)
should be deleted.
However, I don’t think that negative or aggressively stupid or arrogant or rude remarks should be deleted, even if they lead to the person who posts them being banned. They should be left in place, with a comment by the moderator, either warning the writer or simply banning him, as an example for others who post.
Leaving the comments in place with a warning or a ban-notice leads to a clearer sense of what are acceptable limits in the blog.
I think it’s safe to say that hatred is categorically wrong. All hate is needless. So it can’t be informative to say that people shouldn’t be “needlessly hateful”. They shouldn’t be hateful at all! Instead, you might have meant “needlessly offensive”, which is different. That’s the expectation of comraderie, fraternity. The idea is that we should not say things if their sole point is to offend.
Still, a lot depends on what you think is needed. Everyone who is condescending or offensive is going to say that their offensive speech was needed — either to make a point, or (more often) to make a joke. The offense is often necessary for the point.
Lots of these instances of “needful” offense are actually pointless, or (what’s the same) make points that are more or less pointless: e.g., empty pretentiousness, blowhards with talking points, etc. These are good fun to deal with (hence, I agree with amos, I prefer not to delete). But there are contexts where it is perfectly right to be offensive or condescending: e.g., to distance myself from the target, for the sake of protecting myself from real harm, or in order to send out a sharp signal concerning what I think constitutes appropriate social behavior.
The silly stuff tends to be associated with people who are acting like unreasonable assholes, while righteous offenders are reasonable people who are at wit’s end. But it’s not clear how to distinguish someone who’s at wit’s end from someone who’s an asshole. The only way to do it is to have a very clear sense of what the exchange of reasons has looked like, and a reasonably clear idea of what your standards of civility are.
I’m not convinced that the “costs and benefits” approach will do the trick. Because we’re talking about blogosphere conversations, we’re usually not dealing with cases where the measure of harm and good can track any reliable features of a person’s well-being. The cost-benefit analysis is going to be confounded by the fact that people are moody egotists, so they’ll interpret the costs and benefits in whatever way tilts in their favor. For the sake of self-control, people need standards for civility, and it’s those standards are what we ought to be analyzing the costs and benefits of. Subsequently, these standards will help to tell us what makes for a disproportionate response — they will, hence, reveal to us the essence of what it is to be an asshole.
Here’s an essential lesson in civility, that ought to be a platitude (but isn’t): being civil is not the same as being pleasant. It’s not just a manners thing, it’s also a content thing. For the fact is, some norms of reason do double-duty as norms of civility. For instance, some people are liars and slanderers. They can be very pleasant liars, very pleasant slanderers. But such pleasantness is not civility — it’s subterfuge. Lies (and, arguably, mistakes in general) need to be met head-on with the resentment that they deserve, out in the open. The only proportionate response to these kinds of mistakes is open resistance, outright shameless defiance.
screw off [<--- left here as an example of the sort of thing I would delete if I weren't leaving it here as an example]
^ That’s a case study in what it is to be an unreasonable asshole. Have at it!
Here’s a good, live example about deleting principles. Have a laugh at this.
I just got thrown off Richard Dawkin’s own web-site “The Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science”, which describes itself as “a clear-thinking Oasis”, for writing this:
“Dawkins is our modern promotional agent for Darwinism. This short article is a timely warning against the old practice of selling.
Dawkins is annoyed with the Church because it ignores Darwin. Darwin is Dawkins favourite thinker at the moment. But, as you shall see, Dawkins needs the essential spiritual teachings of the Church. So what does Dawkins do? I will tell you:
Dawkins rejects the objects and characters of the Bible menagerie and replaces them with Darwin’s. But Dawkins wants to keep the Church’s message. So, he does it like this -
“God” is replaced by “Copy”, “human” is replaced by “gene”, “sin” is replaced by “selfishness”, “resurrection” is replaced by “survival”, “sins, money-lenders and miracles” are replaced by Dawkin’s new product – “memes”, and “altruism”, – well, altruism – that remains the same, but no-one notices.
As we can see, Dawkins leaves the message of the Bible intact, there is no alternative for him we must suppose. To close the sale, Dawkins makes fun of the old characters of the Bible so that he can all the more easily replace them with his own. And those are the intentions of a shifty Christian in a twentieth-century sell!”
John: I’ve never been particularly impressed by the concept of “memes” myself.
It seems like an unsuccessful attempt by people accustomed to describing the world in fairly exact scientific terms to describe very complex historical and sociological phenomena, the transmission of ideas.
John, that’s a good example of a fallacious argument. For one thing, it’s not clear that it’s a coherent analogy. Compare the two stories:
“God created humans. Original sin is the cause of human suffering. Jesus died altruistically, and was resurrected so that he could redeem humanity from original sin.”
If your analogy worked to the point where your conclusions held up, then we should be able to make sense of it by replacing the key words:
“Copying created genes. Selfishness is the cause of genetic suffering. (Memes??) died altruistically, and survived so that they could redeem humanity from selfishness.”
But that makes no sense. So we can’t!
Anyway — since the point of Dawkins’ site is to have a “clear-thinking oasis”, it would make sense to point out that the above argument didn’t pass the bar. Still, I would rather people take the time to point out the errors, if they have the time. But it ultimately depends on what kind of pedagogical expectations a community will set for itself.
I’m sorry this isn’t relevant to the topic, but the little sub-discussion. Well – relevance wasn’t mentioned as a factor for deletion!
Actually – that makes a surprising amount of sense! John Jones has given us a fascinating analogy.
It is from the evolutionary process of copying that genes emerge.
Not only does selfishness cause suffering, but the existence of suffering has caused us to evolve and develop genomes which can survive in selfish environments by being prone to ourselves causing suffering, and ourselves feeling suffering relevant to certain social stimuli. Furthermore,Our genes suffer through the selfishness of other gene-complexes – they suffer extinction.
The shift from biological to technological and social evolution, at the cost of more primitive ideas, really might redeem us from selfishness and end suffering.
[Deleted by moderator]
Benjamin wrote:
In Philosophy an analogy is not an homology, it does not map with any congruency on its analogue. The focus of the analogy is on a single point that draws the widely disparate elements into a unity.(The food of the dog and the dog are both healthy, healthy is used analogically of both of them equivocally of the food perhaps:cf.Stanford E.P. on Medieval Theories of Analogy) Aristotle and Medieval thinkers both Christian and Muslim have dealt with this topic extensively. The significant point here is that both Dawkins and Jesus are both inspirers of their followers. The term messianic is used of both of them analogically without the implication that the facts of their lives are parallel in any fashion.
Ditchkins might have homological implications, not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Are we dealing with Jones the Whimsy here?
Michael, right — except that John’s conclusion suggests that it is a homology. John argues: “As we can see, Dawkins leaves the message of the Bible intact”.
Everybody
John Jones’s last post was a perfect illustration of the kind of thing I have to worry about here, which other people don’t have to worry about.
He claimed a copyright on his post. I can’t allow people to claim they have that sort of right over what they post here (as a comment). The reason is that if I do, then it sets a precedent whereby somebody could withdraw their permission for all the comments they’d ever made on this blog. And then I’d have to trawl through the blog deleting their comments, thereby potentially rendering conversations that have taken place here meaningless, etc.
No doubt lots of you will probably think this very unlikely. Well, maybe so in the case of John. But it has happened to me before, and I’ve seen it happen on other blogs on several other occasions (it tends to happen where there is a big falling out, and a blog moderator comes down on one side, and then the “injured” party takes umbrage).
Just to make things clear, this doesn’t mean that people commenting here can’t do whatever *they* want with their own comments (they can of course). The worry occurs because of the thought that they can limit what we (TPM) can do with the posts (can we transfer them to a new database, for example?).
This is actually a common issue if you’re commenting on a blog or discussion forum. Often if you seek out the “small print”, you’ll find that one of the T&Cs is that you’re granting the owner of the blog/forum at least limited rights over whatever you post.
John – If you want to repost your comment without the copyright claim, then no problem, go ahead. Quite understand, of course, if you don’t want to.
Finally, I think I’ll probably write some T&Cs (including rules of expected behaviour), which I’ll circulate to the other bloggers here (for comments).
Loyalty is a myth that people try to achieve these days but with no success. Many strong elements in society prevent people to practice it. Unfortunately if we try different dimensions in life perhaps we can change that sad reality ferris wanli minn abstraction in new dilemma of life. Why not if we can just choose to change our life style to be more successful and assertive, we need to follow our beliefs no matter what the winds of society try to drift our thoughts.
Maybe I’m just an extremely naive 30 something, but for the life of me I can’t figure out why people think words, in and of themselves, can be obscene, without any regard to context. All the other reasons to delete (or not to) make sense to me, but cuss words or mere expletives? I don’t get it. It seems to be the one place where even professional philosophers just look around and find out what others don’t like, and then decide they don’t like it themselves just because others don’t like it.
The term “asshole” has been used a few times on this post, but I bet “fuckhead” might cause a stir. I’m obviously using it anyways, to see if context wins out in this case. To me, they mean much the same thing.
Is there really any good philosophy out there that promotes the idea that a word can truly be obscene regardless of context?
Thanks.
Re AMOS 24th Sept.
“It seems like an unsuccessful attempt by people accustomed to describing the world in fairly exact scientific terms to describe very complex historical and sociological phenomena, the transmission of ideas.”
I agree with what you say here. However why do you say it is unsuccessful? Surely it is an attempt at an analogy with respect to the genetic functions. Certain patterns of human behaviour etc do seem to be infectious and spread from person to person. Where the environment is favourable, the rate and volume of the spread is enhanced. So perhaps we could speak in terms of survival value so far as the pattern of behaviour is concerned, in rather the same way that we speak of genetic survival and procreation. Memetics of course does not have the underlying bed rock of scientific endeavour that Genetics has. It is merely the name given to some processes in historical and sociological phenomena. It does not accordingly purport to be an explanation, but could well suggest a scenario for an attempt at a thoroughgoing explanation of such phenomena.
I don’t know what all this has to do with what extent one should be allowed to be ill mannered on a blog (not at all I would say) perhaps this parenthesis, just brings it back to the point.
Don: Memes are, as you say, an analogy, not an explanation or a description. It seems to me that ideas spread in different historical and social circumstances
for different reasons, and that it is the job of the historian, the anthropologist, the social psychologist and the sociologist to
study those different reasons.
Christian religious ideas spread through the late Roman Empire for very different historical reasons than those of Islam originally spread through the Middle East and
North Africa, and Buddhist ideas are currently spreading in the west for still different reasons. Marxism spread through Western Europe in the 20th century for different reasons than it spread through Latin America.
If you want to call them “memes”, fine, but you explain very little.
Dawkins should stick to biology, and Dennett should stick to the philosophy of mind. They are both excellent men in their fields.
I got the impression that they have little historical and political sense. Hitchens, on the other hand, has more political and historical sense.
I agree that we are straying from the theme of this thread, but I wanted to explain my position in more detail.
Michael, you’re basically asking for an account of meaning itself, which will rouse all kinds of different opinions. But suppose that we claim that the meaning of a context-invariant locution is something like: “A meant something by X’ is roughly equivalent to ‘A uttered X with the intention of inducing in B a belief by means of the recognition of this intention’”, and by “B” we mean “the lowest common denominator” or “cultural dope”. On this view, meanings are the kinds of regularities that we expect relatively stupid people to understand. Since the worst thing in the world is to encourage relatively stupid people to be relatively mean asshole fuckheads, our attitude towards the naughtiness of the word can be understandably negative, while our attitude to its use in context can be quite a bit more sprightly under the appropriate conditions.
Re:- Michael F. 26 Sept.
When I was at school we were often told ‘you must never write as you speak.’ It has always seemed good advice to me. If I wrote as I spoke when I knocked a pile of books on to the floor or caught myself about some thoughtless foolish act I would not last five minutes on any respectable blog. The two words which you have mentioned and in the context that you write, are to me harmless as a loaded gun is when not pointed at anybody. How ever when pointed and fired the situation is different. If you replied to me “Only fuckhead would write crap like that” I would feel that you had offended against what is considered the correct and civilised way to conduct a philosophical enquiry. It is the language of the gutter and has no place where people are endeavouring to reach some understanding as to how things are. The proper response I believe would be to make an attempt to show me how what I said was in your opinion questionable. Normally we endeavour to respect the viewpoints of others although we may disagree with or not understand them. Personal abuse is the last resort of the ignorant.
I have friend who will not tolerate the C word under any circumstances. Again it is not a word to be applied to a person meaningfully as it probably regarded as one of the grossest insults. I cannot personally recollect myself using the word in that context but probably have done in a joking way with close friends. There are some amusing jokes which involve use of that word and I personally see no great harm in that, but my friend mentioned above would object,
I think it all comes down to the intention of the speaker and as you say context when these expletives are used. Outside of that, say for instance, written on a wall the words seem to me impotent, but probably represent the bad taste of the writer who could well be something in the nature of an ignorant mischievous schoolboy. Probably best to erase such words as they make the place look untidy. What if they formed part of a fantastic artistic graffiti of the highest order. I am not sure on that one.
I suppose a word out of any context can be regarded as obscene, but it surely depends on how the beholder is disposed to such things. I do not think a general agreement could be reached here. Offhand and without researching the subject, I can think of no reputable philosophy to call upon in this matter.
I would not claim copyright for any of my ideas as I take copyright to be understood by default. Sometimes, nearly always where I am among academics, I will post a reminder of this default. I will put the reminder again. Any ideas that I present, and others present, are copyright by default.
Academic philosophers should know this:
It is not Plato, nor the thoughts of Kant, nor the modern analytic/continental divide that characterizes the texts of philosophy. It is “who-said-what-
-and-where-and-when-we-heard-it” that grounds the whole structure of academic philosophy. The structure isn’t an epistemological nor a philosophical one, it is a body of power. And because it is a body of power I will remind all those here that have that power to be careful where they pick and choose their ideas for none of mine are free game.
@Benjamin – Thanks for the help, although it doesn’t grant me much relief to know that my use of words (especially when I’m not trying to be an asshole) gets interpreted negatively because whoever is listening to me might not trust a relatively stupid person with such words.
@Don – Thanks for the 2 cents. I have to object to your example, though, because “Only a fuckhead would write crap like that” seems to me to intend to offend. I grant that I could be interpreting it incorrectly.
I was raised in 2 different households, one which was very prudish, and one which was quite a bit more socially liberal. As a kid, going from one to the other, I noticed rather small differences in what type of ideas were communicated, but a rather large difference in what words were used to communicate it. In the liberal household, I was around folks who cussed like sailors, and if I were inclined to take offense at cuss words in general, I would have spent all that time being offended when no offense was intended. I don’t understand the motivation to take offense where no offense is intended.
Again, and maybe this is the key point I’m wrong about, but for cuss words to carry any weight with a person, they must first be told that those words are supposed to carry weight, and then just accept that proposition at face value. Good philosophers, it seems to me, should try really hard to never accept propositions like this at face value.
Sorry John, but on that basis, you can’t post here. But for the benefit of other people, the issue isn’t whether or not people retain copyright, so much as whether we are de facto granted the on-going right to make use of the material that people post here as comments. If we’re not, then somebody can announce they want me to remove all their comments, and I’d have to comply. That is not on.
And if people are interested, this is how this is stipulated at the Guardian’s Comment is Free site.
This applies here as well!
Jeremy:
I would be flattered if anyone, including TPM, were interested in republishing any of my comments.
John Jones: ‘Any ideas that I present, and others present, are copyright by default.’
I’m not entirely sure you understand what copyright is, and is not. No-one can copyright IDEAS.
Via Wikipedia: ‘Copyright is a set of exclusive rights granted to the author or creator of an original work, including the right to copy, distribute and adapt the work. Copyright does not protect ideas, only their expression or fixation.’
As this quote indicates, your ideas are not protected by copyright; only your particular expression of them. This is why Jeremy has a legitimate, non-trivial concern.
It is, in fact, because ideas cannot be copyright that priority is a concern in academic (and other) areas. But you don’t need copyright for priority, you only need to demonstrate that you had the idea first.
Amos – We have republished stuff from the blog before. I can’t remember whether we included some of the commentary, or, if we did, whether any of your comments were included!
Right.
My concern here really boils down to 2 things:
1. We want it to be possible for the print version of TPM to be able to use stuff from our blog without having to seek the permission of everybody who has contributed to a particular thread (so, for example, if there were an in memoriam thread, we might want to reproduce stuff from it in the print magazine).
2. I don’t want to be in a situation where somebody can retrospectively withdraw their permission for us to continue to use the comments they’ve posted on this blog. This has happened here before, and it’s a hell of a pain in the neck (as well as being unfair on other people who contribute here, in the sense that if I do delete a whole lot of comments then it can render their contributions meaningless).
I’ll admit that I have not given a lot of thought to the nature of the obscene. Usually I am lazy about it, and fall back on the intuitive view. This is, of course, rather un-philosophical.
In part, what is obscene seems to be a relative thing. For example, using certain words while playing Halo Reach online might not be considered obscene given the nature of the crowd. But using the same words in my classroom might be taken as such.
Usually I delete comments with obscene words because the comment has no value. So, if someone just types in “F@ck you you sh@thead goatf@cker” as a comment, I would be inclined to delete it because it adds nothing and seems rather hostile. Now, if someone made a relevant comment and insisted on using such language, I would leave it in place (and have).
“After all, as in law and ethics, the rules should be consistent and non-arbitrary. That way people know, in advance, what sort of behavior is acceptable and what is not.”
Commenting here is not made easy by the tiny (arbitrarily tiny?) size of the comment box – a small fraction of screen surrounded by lots of white space on my machine. By the time I’m half way through my comment I can’t see what I’ve already typed.
However, what I really want to comment on is your mention of arbitrary rules, as it directly connects with Andy Walsh’s post on Dinner Parties (and Divine Command Theory).
Arbitrariness and consistency are not incompatible:-
I start a blog to discuss what I, quite arbitrarily, wish to discuss. It’s my blog and I arbitrarily choose what’s OK and what’s not OK.
To facilitate this, I consistently apply certain rules.
Seems OK to me.
I would say an interesting discussion, which rarely happens but I would like to add that a blog is like presenting yourself to public. Its like writing a book and you will definitely get varied responses. Positive and negative. Some people would like to gain publicity with your name as well but all of this means that your work is getting noticed and that should be a source of encouragement but what’s the use if you are deleting every criticism and accepting all the appreciation with gratitude. It won’t help ever.