Lauren's Blog: Announcing "Troll Patrol"
-- and Why Social Media Comments Are Crucial
http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/001092.html
We see them all the time now, proclamations related to articles or
social media postings that say: "Don't read the comments!"
The fact that this has become a meme unto itself is both depressing
and rather frightening, because comments on social media postings and
Internet articles are not only crucial to the value of these
materials, but also to free speech itself in a much broader context.
And the very crux of "don't read the comments" really suggests that
the trolls -- the idiots, the haters -- are winning, big time. I
personally refuse to accept this without a fight. Communication and
free speech is too important to be surrendered on any basis,
particularly at the slimy hands of the trolls.
Posting and thread moderation is key to keeping social media and other
commenting ecosystems viable. My view is that social media moderation
at scale must depend first on automated filters and systems as the
first pass -- ideally with sufficient controls and tools so that users
can appropriately signal and train in the face of inevitable false
positives and false negatives. This also suggests the need for ways to
surface quarantined comments for moderator inspection and decision
without exposing them to the entire readership in the process.
Beyond this, the tools available for moderators for their manual
moderation tasks are crucial, with pre-moderation queues important as
one available option, and ideally ways to "anoint" some commenters as
pre-approved, ways to delegate moderation tasks in flexible ways, and
so on.
I very recently created the Google+ community "Troll Patrol"
( https://plus.google.com/communities/116357503737749240121 )
for serious discussions of these and related issues, specifically to
discuss topics surrounding social media abuse; comments; comment
moderation techniques and tools; associated operational, policy and
technical topics; free speech aspects, etc.
Everyone is welcome, unless you're a troll, of course.
My goal for Troll Patrol is to stay focused on practical processes and
solutions that are workable at very large scales. I'd like to avoid
diversions into the political motivations of particular comment
abusers or discussion of politics in general, except to the extent
that political realities might affect the practicality of any given
approaches to solving the problems in focus.
It's a very big topic area and I'm under no illusions of easy fixes,
but I hope we can together move the ball at least a bit forward in a
positive way!
Hope to be seeing you there! Thanks all.
--Lauren--
Lauren Weinstein ([email protected]): http://www.vortex.com/lauren
Founder:
- Network Neutrality Squad: http://www.nnsquad.org
- PRIVACY Forum: http://www.vortex.com/privacy-info
Co-Founder: People For Internet Responsibility: http://www.pfir.org/pfir-info
Member: ACM Committee on Computers and Public Policy
Lauren's Blog: http://lauren.vortex.com
Google+: http://google.com/+LaurenWeinstein
Twitter: http://twitter.com/laurenweinstein
Tel: +1 (818) 225-2800 / Skype: vortex.com
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