Friday, December 7, 2007
Who is responsible for comments on blogs?
I just read in the Frankfurter allgemeine, that a journalist was sentenced because of a comment a visitor posted on his blog. The court in Hamburg seemingly makes no distinctions between blogs and old-school printed newspapers, which is certainly a bizarre notion: expecting that everybody that has a blog takes responsibility for everything that is said on it, limits the possibilities of the net severely. This precedent makes writing blogs by "citizen journalists" either infeasible (moderating all comments is certainly a full-time job if the blog reaches readers beyond the authors friends and family) or severely limits the functionality of blogs (the easiest solution is not to allow comments at all).
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8 comments:
Resposiblity for comments under a blog's post is blogger's. However the question what is "right" and "wrong" is quite arbitrary, web media ethics have not been consolidated yet ...
What is the point of having a blog if you do not check comments under your posts and respond to them?
I think responding to comments and being responsible for their content are two very different things. One implies dialogue, the other censorship. So I would not agree that the question of right and wrong is arbitrary at all.
Does being responsible really implies censorship? Isn't responsiblity in the matter of hate-speech an expression of the right to communicate (in d'Arcy's terms for instance)? Is a dialogue possible (by definition) in the case of hate-speech? Waiting for your reply ...
This is a tricky question: should hate speech be censored or not? I am inclined to say no. Dialogue is possible in the presence of hate speech if a discursive culture is established that knows how to deal with it. We can see on the other hand how extremist are using the fact that their hate speech is censored as an argument for their cause: they say that they are being wronged and that if their arguments were heard, they would prove them right. And since they are being censored there is no way of proving them wrong. Censorship pits power against power - but power is quite indifferent to moral right and wrong. Therefore censorship works as long as power happens to be on the right side, of which there can be no guarantee.
But the question I was addressing was another one: should the person, who is providing the platform, where hate speech happens, in the case that the platform does not inspire it or is hateful itself, be sanctioned for it. In the case of blogs I think not, because this would impose the model of newspapers on them. It would make sense to sanction a newspaper for printing hateful letter to the editor, since it willingly selected it. But authors of blogs do not select the comments that get posted and therefore I believe it is wrong to hold them responsible for them.
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