[Seattle-editorial] Re: f------ spam: hide it?

[Jeremy G Kahn]

I agree with Jason.  However, blatant violations of that policy don't 
require that we gather consensus before hiding -- merely that anyone 
doing hiding notify the list promptly after doing so.

We only need to gather consensus if there's a question.  Articles that 
are raving worthless advertisements of hate speech (a violation on... 
several counts) can be hidden immediately. However, for the sake of 
accountability, we still need to keep a log of what's done -- and that's 
why we notify the list.

We can have the best of both worlds.  Well, not the best -- the best 
would be if this was something we could do entirely from the website 
through some kind of group-admin interface, where we could log in 
separately and register our observations, and let the system 
automatically hide, and those of us who wanted to stay apprised could 
get email notification. But I've digressed to a discussion for the tech 
capacity of the website ("how"), not really an issue of what the 
editorial policy ("what" and "why").

--Jeremy

Jason Reep wrote:

> Judy,
>
> I understand and agree with your comments.  I think that it's vitally 
> important though to use the editorial policy that we have.  The 
> Seattle IMC editorial group created an excellent and sucessful 
> editorial policy which has been the model for many other IMC's 
> editorial policies.  It allows for decisions like the ones you are 
> urging but hide requests need to be justified to the list based upon 
> one aspect of editorial policy or another or several.  We have had 
> just as many or more complaints about being ruthless censors as we 
> have about allowing too much right wing hate mongering.  If we can use 
> the editorial policy to justify hiding posts we stand firm ground.
>
> -jason
>
> typist at speakeasy.net wrote:
>
>> I'm in favor of getting rid of these posts.  They do not serve our 
>> community, and the are wasting web space and people's time.  I 
>> realize it's a chance for people to respond to these posts, but I 
>> think for the most part people are tired of them and want to move on 
>> and are tired of the IMC for allowing them to stand.  For those of 
>> you who don't know, we had a man attend the last editorial meeting 
>> furious about how the site was being overrun with right wing nut 
>> cases and wanting to know what we were going to do about it.  If he 
>> was bothered enough to come down and complain, think of how many 
>> other people are equally bothered and not complaining--they're just 
>> leaving the site and not coming back. It's bad enough we have a 
>> difficult time keeping the feature column fresh but when people can't 
>> even get worthwhile community news on the newswire, well there's 
>> really no reason for them to visit the site at all.
>>
>> We can discuss this more at the next editorial, but I think the 
>> usefulness of the newswire as "open" has turned to abuse of the 
>> newswire and it is hurting our ability to get out useful community news.
>>
>> We need to start getting these obnoxious posts off the wire 
>> immediately and allow real news to flow.
>>
>> Judy
>>
>>
>>
>>> -----Original Message-----
>>> From: nathaniel t [mailto:vsea75 at hotmail.com]
>>> Sent: Friday, September 26, 2003 12:12 PM
>>> To: seattle-editorial at indymedia.org
>>> Subject: [Seattle-editorial] Re: f------ spam: hide it?
>>>
>>>
>>> http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=33635&group=webcast
>>>
>>> same issue
>>>
>>> ----Original Message Follows----
>>> From: "nathaniel t" <vsea75 at hotmail.com>
>>> To: seattle-editorial at indymedia.org
>>> Subject: f------ spam: hide it?
>>> Date: Fri, 26 Sep 2003 05:11:19 -0700
>>>
>>> The author of
>>>
>>> http://seattle.indymedia.org/front.php3?article_id=33643&group=webcast
>>>
>>> probably intended to comment on some other article, or else he is 
>>> blatantly trolling.
>>>
>>> No news content.  Hide it?
>>>
>>> I know Gentry doesn't like it when we call these people fascists, 
>>> but that's what they look like to me.
>>