Note to readers: I first published the following blog post in 2022 after the Fifth Circuit ruling. I thought I’d repost this in light of next week’s Supreme Court oral argument. — Orin
Reading the 5th Circuit’s decision, Netchoice v. Paxton It reminds me of the old days of Volokk’s conspiracy.A little background: When we were volokh.com, introduced open comment threads. For several years, he spent more than an hour each day moderating the Volokh Conspiracy comment thread.I quit after moving washington post In 2014, it was up to them to moderate comments. I’m very happy that I no longer moderate comments.However, my comment moderation experience with volokh.com It left a lasting impression.
I think three of these impressions are relevant to thinking about: net choice.
beginning: It is a strange law of human nature that most people who are moderated in online forums feel confident that their beliefs are being censored. Few people think they went too far or broke the rules. Moderation is usually thought to be the result of prejudice. The liberal commenters were positive, so I deleted their comments or banned them from posting. Because this is a conservative blog, and I feared liberal truths would pierce through the darkness and expose conservative false claims. And conservative commenters were completely convinced that we had deleted their comments or banned them. Because we are liberals trying to prevent conservative truths from exposing liberal lies. That’s what always happened. Despite their moderation, claims of censorship continued on a daily basis.
Second: Content moderation always reflects moderator messages. My goal in moderating Volokh Conspiracy comments was simply to keep the discussion moderate. My thinking was that if I could keep my comments civil, I would not only encourage better comments, but also entice better commenters. And I think experience has proven that to be true. For several years there, his moderated Volokh comment thread was a very insightful place to look for perspectives on our posts. But moderation always carries some kind of message. This implies some value or judgment that the site has (or only the main moderators have) that it wants to advance. For example, when I was managing uncivil comments and commenters; volokh.com, I didn’t care if my opinions were liberal or conservative. But my moderation still expressed my values. That meant a belief in the marketplace of ideas, a desire for ideas to be expressed in a compelling way. Those were our (or my) values. It’s a process value, but it’s still a value. Moderation has always been an effort to further our core values.
Third, perfect comment moderation is impossible, but you can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I wrote above that many moderated commenters believed they were being censored for their beliefs. As a corollary, many commenters had examples of comments from the other side that remained up, clearly unmoderated, and that proved biased to them. .A few months ago, it was common to hear angry cries when a comment was deleted as disrespectful jukebox grad Substantially similar comments are still up somewhere, and it is despicable to moderate based on due process and Magna Carta principles. this comment now. The problem was scale. At that time, there were a lot of short posts, so I might have posted about 20 posts a day. The average post will have (for example) 100 comments, and some may even have many more. I had to go through about 2,000 comments every day. Moderating all comments would require full-time moderators and some type of legal process for making decisions about moderation of individual comments. Moderated commenters often seem to want it, and in some cases demand it. However, considering our daily work it was not possible. Moderation was necessary to make the comment thread worth reading, but the size of the comments was so large that incomplete moderation was the best option.
