Internet community moderation: What its advocates fail to understand

March 6, 2009 by admin
Filed under: Internet & Media

Written by Ng E-Jay
06 March 2009

The hot topic of internet community moderation was broached again a couple of weeks ago by a Straits Times article claiming that bloggers are warming to the idea of having online speech moderated by referees from among them.

The ST article, published on 21 Feb, was entitled “Moderate so Government can de-regulate“, and appropriately so as well for it was a direct quote from Mr Choo Zheng Xi of The Online Citizen (TOC), who is currently one of the most prominent advocates of internet community moderation.

It is often accepted almost without question within certain circles such as the Bloggers 13 Group (of which I am a part) and TOC that some form of community moderation is necessary to counter what is perceived as the harmful side-effects of unlimited free speech. The concern of such advocates is not whether community moderation should exist, but what form it should take in order to play an effective role in moderating the rabid vitriol that often pervades cyberspace discussions.

Lost in this dialogue however is the fact that the concept of community moderation existed long before the internet did, and I feel there is this perception amongst some members of the online community that all this talk about online moderation is but a veiled way of imposing an old-world structure upon a new media structure that we have not even yet fully understood given that it is still barely out of its infancy.

The Straits Times article did a rehash of the incident involving Yio Chu Kang MP Seng Han Thong being set ablaze by one of his residents. The torrent of vitriol and insensitive remarks directed at the MP led Senior Minister of State (Information, Communications and the Arts) Lui Tuck Yew to express disappointment in Parliament that the online community did not do more to rebut nasty comments made against Mr Seng.

It was a “squandered opportunity for a higher degree of self-regulation”, Mr Lui had said.

Mr Lui’s view was also shared by Mr Tan Tarn How, an Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) researcher on new media. Mr Tan noted that a few bloggers did state their objections to the nasty remarks against Mr Seng, but that did not happen widely enough.

While the Straits Times article uses this incident as an example justifying the need for online community moderation, there is little discussion whether that is the correct response to such an incident, apart from Mr Tan Tarn How’s succinct comment that the online flaming of Mr Seng is complicated somewhat by how it reflects a deep disaffection against the political elite that no amount of community moderation can solve. That, in my opinion, was the heart of the issue, not the apparent insensitivity of fellow netizens towards the physical suffering of another human being. (My view of this incident was laid out in the article Lui Tuck Yew’s admonishment of netizens misses the forest, the trees, and even the overhead bridge.)

To me, this incident serves not as an example justifying the need for community moderation, but rather as an example illustrating the potential pitfalls of community moderation. When one entity is given either the legal or moral authority to set rules or provide guidelines for the broader public, issues concerning fairness, differences in opinion, differences in interpretation of events and their significance, and even personality issues all come into play.

For example, Mr Lui Tuck Yew’s admonishment of the internet community shows that he either failed to understand or deliberate chose to ignore the real underlying reasons for the diatribe directed at MP Seng Han Thong, but chose instead to taint the entire online community with the same brush. Had this position been taken by a supposed independent community moderation panel appointed to draw up guidelines for online discussions and blogs, I would have been very peeved at it despite not having participated in any of the discussions, whether positive or negative, concerning MP Seng.

There is also the question of what kinds of internet communications should be moderated, given the wide diversity of platforms on which netizens can conduct dialogues with each other. Besides posting on blogs or writing comments on forums, netizens can also use platforms like facebook which are partially public and partially private at the same time, in the sense that while the content posted on facebook can be accessed by anyone if the user so chooses, sometimes the context in which message is posted makes it clear that it is intended only for a close clique of friends rather than the general public.

If, for instance, a facebook user were to write nasty remarks about the recent stabbing of the NTU associate professor, but intends the message only for his BFFs (best friends forever), would that be the concern of the online moderation panel?

Advocates of internet community moderation frequently fail to understand that many people find pleasure in expressing themselves online as it is a way of escaping the psychological prison of conformity that so often exists in mainstream offline society. The last thing they want is a panel of supposedly independent personalities whom they may not be able to identify with coming in to make rules or guidelines about what they can or cannot say in online discourse, even if those guidelines have little chance of being enforced given the freewheeling nature of the internet and the right to choose to remain anonymous.

The failure of the Association of Bloggers to gain any measure of support, for instance, is due to the mainstream media painting a picture of its president as wanting to draw up rules for everyone else to follow, and its perception as being an elitist organization that seeks to accord its own members greater credibility in cyberspace simply by virtue of their membership in the Association. These same perception issues will undoubtedly plague any attempt to establish an online community moderation panel. To date, there has been little discussion of how such perception issues can be addressed.

Given the rapidly evolving technologies on the internet, its freewheeling, porous and borderless nature, and the very fact that the online community is not merely an extension of the offline world but indeed a brand new construct, both technologically as well as psychologically, I am in agreement with Mr Alex Au of Yawning Bread who does not believe it is feasible to have community moderation as a single structure sitting on top of a media platform, but rather that community moderation should simply be the “aggregate of all decisions” made by owners of forums and blogs who decide what content to put up.

In this conceptualization of community moderation, the aspiration to maintain one’s credibility would be the primary driving force behind self-regulation and self-moderation. There should also be the confidence that over time, readers will be sophisticated enough to discern for themselves what is appropriate and what is not, and do not need to rely on an external entity to tell them right from wrong.

If there is ever a online moderation panel, I feel that it should only address online speech that clearly breaks the law in terms of being defamatory, or of inciting racial or religious disharmony, or of abetting other criminal activity like financial scams, or that breaks rules of civility and basic human decency that most people can agree upon. All other kinds of speech, especially political speech, should not come under the purview of the moderation panel. The panel should also gain its own credibility not via some Government edict declaring it so, but by repeatedly making good judgment calls that resonate with the broader internet community.

And I need not remind readers that while our political system is dominated by a single party that has shown repeatedly that it is not exactly democratic, there is always the significant risk that any online moderation panel could be co-opted to serve the interests of the ruling regime rather than that of the internet community.

The last thing I would want to see is a well-intentioned panel being converted into yet another tool of propaganda and oppression.

Tags: internet community moderation, online moderation