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HomophobosphereThe February 26, 2008 issue of The Advocate (the one with Kathy Grifin pulling a "Britney" on the cover) has a short article that I found to be quite thought-provoking on whether hate speech in the blogosphere should be censored. I thought that it might be of interest to AE members.
http://www.advocate.com/issue_story_ektid51690.asp I think that the article does a good job in highlighting both sides of the coin. I am not sure what the policy is at AE, but I would hope that if it ever becomes an issue, that it that it gets "managed" to allow for candid discussion of different perspectives without having to step over distracting/hateful muck that brings little value-added. If you have an opinion on it, you can vote via the link below. I could not believe that my response was a "yes" to censoring as I don't believe in censorship as a general principle, but when it comes to the sites that I care about, which are not many, I do believe that some moderating might be necessary, and I guess some would call that censoring. This piece really made me think and I find that rare these days as most are easy to digest, forget, or not even worthy of reading once. http://www.advocate.com/poll.asp
Submitted by Guillermo Serri... (1613 points) (443 posts) on Thu, 2008-02-14 16:12. |
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Sometimes, yes
Blog-owners should have the right to keep offensive comments off their sites. Imagine if Westboro Baptist were allowed to log-on to AfterElton and tell us how everyone we'd lost in our lives was burning in hell.
As for comment generated sites such as YouTube and IMDB it's different. YouTube allows people to say anything. Some of it's absolutely vile. IMDB will allow reporting of Hate Speech and other disruptive behavior. But either way it doesn't affect the viewing of videos on YouTube or research on IMDB. So I don't believe censoring comments on sites such as those is necessary.
I guess the problem is that what's considered acceptable commenting is subjective. If someone said "I believe that homosexuality is a sin", does that make it hate speech? To some, yes. I can't count the number of times that "customer reviewers" on Amazon.com have labled gay authors as perverted in their reviews. But it doesn't stop me or anyone else from buying those books. So removing those comments wouldn't really make a difference.
But I stand by my view that Blog owners have every right (no matter what type of blog they have) to remove what they see as objectible comments.
Don't trouble yourself Doctor -- I'm a celebrity, I'll write my own prescription.