Legal Commentary

An Excellent Comment on Comment Moderation

By Ilya Somin

As a general rule, I avoid aggressive monitoring of comments. Megan McArdle explains my reasoning well in describing her own similar policy:

As y?all know, I exercise a pretty light hand on the comments section. That?s a tough choice. I could probably have a more civil comments section if I were more willing to delete nasty comments and ban trolls.

On the other hand, I don?t trust myself in the position of censor.... One will always find most outrageous those people who disagree with one?s own pet notions. If I started deleting comments, the net effect would be to pull the comments section towards agreeing with my particular brand of libertarianish, market-loving philosophy. This is not, to my mind, the point of the comments section. So I delete comments only when they are obscene or intolerably nasty; I ban people only when they have a history of repeatedly derailing threads, defaming my family, or similarly doing things that would get them kicked out of any decent private home.

So I have to ask you guys to do it for me. Play nice. Don?t call people names?any names, not just profane ones. Don?t characterize people as having bad motives. Don?t make absurd statements about how liberals, Republicans, or some other group are less virtuous, clever, empathetic, rational, pragmatic, civic-spirited, patriotic and so forth, than the fine, upstanding Americans on your side.

In the first place, it?s incredibly rude. In the second place, it?s basically never true..... And in the third place, while you lightheartedly believe that you are opening your opponents to justified ridicule, in reality all you achieve is to start everyone else snickering at you, because you sound like such a bigoted, arrogant fool.

I disagree slightly with Megan?s analogy between comment moderation and government censorship. The latter is far more dangerous than the former. Nonetheless, aggressive moderation is problematic for the reasons she describes. I also agree with Megan?s point about comments that attack motives, and would add that even if your opponents really do have bad intentions, that doesn?t prove their arguments are wrong, so it doesn?t really help make your case.

I could perhaps overcome the tendency to favor commenters who support my own views by adopting consistent bright line rules (e.g. ? ban anyone who call anyone else an ?idiot? or ?unpatriotic?). But such rules have serious shortcomings of their own: they are insensitive to nuance and context, and can be cleverly circumvented once they become known (e.g. ? using various euphemisms to substitute for ?idiot?). A related problem is that I don?t want to devote my limited blogging time to careful analysis of comments to determine which ones deserve to be deleted, issued warnings, and so on. I think both my goals and those of the readers will be better served if I devote as much of my blogging time as possible to actually writing posts.

For these reasons, I rely mostly on the good sense of commenters and social norms (weak as they often are on the internet) to police the comments. I only ban people in very extreme cases, and have resorted to it only about three or four times since I?ve been on the VC. I?ve probably deleted individual comments only a handful more times than that.

That said, if the proportion of obnoxious and stupid comments gets high enough, I could rethink my tolerant policies. If at all possible, I prefer to use the velvet glove to deal with commenters. But if really necessary, I reserve the right to bring out the iron fist.

Full post as published by The Volokh Conspiracy on February 06, 2010 (boomark / email).