[Seattle-editorial] Fwd: [IMC-Process] Re: Perth's Question on strategies for dealing withracist posts

[sheri at indymedia.org]

-----Original Message-----
From: Guamanian [mailto:guamanian at telus.net]
Sent: Sunday, May 2, 2004 09:33 PM
To: imc-process at lists.indymedia.org
Cc: vicimc-discuss at lists.riseup.net
Subject: [IMC-Process] Re: Perth's Question on strategies for dealing with	racist posts

Hi Shayne;

We've been dealing with this issue a lot at Victoria IMC. We've decided 
on a hardline ban on all racist/sexist/fascist posts and organizations. 
Here is our reasoning for cracking down hard:

Most IMCs seem to start out with full throttle 'Open Publishing' and 
then add restrictions as needed to keep the site usable. In our 
experience there were two problems with this gradual approach:

1. We lost most of our local activist user base, who gave up in disgust 
at wading through countless abusive  posts.

2. Long, drawn-out debates and discussion within the Victoria IMC 
Collective itself over individual  racist/sexist/fascist posts caused 
activist burn-out. Sometimes a 'free-speech' faction and a 
'anti-fascist' faction polarized over disputed posts, but more often the 
sheer volume of decision-making required to deal with abusive posts on 
an individual basis wasted the Collective's energy.

We have come to believe that it is much better to make a clear choice 
and apply it to all racist/sexist/fascist material. We chose to take a 
strong anti-fascist line, which we have formalized in our 'Activist 
Publishing Policy', which is posted at 
http://victoria.indymedia.org/features/indymedia/.

Some key features of the Activist Publishing policy:

- Zero tolerance for racist/sexist/fascist posts. They are deleted, not 
hidden.
- Any poster who violates policy 3 times is permanently banned.
- Use of IP blocking and troll-trapping techniques to prevent abusers 
from posting.
- 'Outing' the worst fascist trolls by publishing their IP numbers and 
trace information. See:  
http://victoria.indymedia.org/news/2004/03/23919.php for an example.
- Placing 'grey-zone' material into the 'Soapbox', which has replaced 
the Hidden Posts section of our site.

As far as I know, by adopting 'Activist Publishing' instead of 'Open 
Publishing' we are at the extreme anti-fascist and anti-troll end of the 
IMC spectrum: Any more restrictive, and we'd have to question whether we 
can legitimately consider ourselves an IMC within the original 
intentions of the network's principles.

I'd recommend you take a look at other active, functioning, IMC 
Newswires to see the different flavours  of  'Open Publishing' that have 
been adopted -- you can generally tell more from how an IMC Newswire is 
actually edited than you can from the formal editorial policy -- often 
the posted editorial policy is out of date or not really followed in 
practice.

Interestingly, Vancouver IMC, located only 50 miles or so away from us, 
is probably at the opposite 'Wide Open Publishing' end of the IMC 
spectrum. It's interesting to compare the results that come from the two 
extremes:

- http://victoria.indymedia.org
- http://vancouver.indymedia.org

I expect most IMCs will want to end up somplace in the middle -- less 
tediously rational and controlled than Victoria, but also less of a 
wide-open free-fire zone than Vancouver!

Anti-fascist action is only part of our Activist Publishing policy, 
which is a serious attempt to create a 'New Model IMC' with an extremely 
low noise-to-signal ratio and extremely high relevancy to local 
activists. For example, a related initiative involves setting up formal 
media liaison with all local activist and political groupings ranging 
from anarchist to social democratic in their orientation, and giving 
them a preferential channel to submit their information for publication 
in the centre column of the site.

My personal belief is that many of the English-speaking nodes of the IMC 
network are in crisis over publishing policy issues, and that there is a 
very high probability of the IMC network splitting into two distinct 
clusters based on 'Open Publishing' vs. 'Activist Publishing' approaches 
and values.

To put it bluntly: An individual IMC can do 'Open Publishing', or it can 
do 'Activist Publishing'. It literally can't do both at once: one or the 
other approach will dominate the site's editorial policy, procedures and 
decision-making, and will literally end up hard-coded into the site's 
information architecture. Choose!

As you can tell, I'm a strong advocate for 'Activist Publishing' :)

Note: I am not speaking officially for the Victoria IMC Collective here 
-- our group has a range of views on editorial policy, which we balance 
out through the consensus process. (I'll 'cc' our local list so my 
comradishes can add their opinions and suggestionsas well.) If you are 
interested in more of this stuff, I've just completed a paper entitled 
'Censorship in Times of Netwar' that explores these issues in the 
context of current information warfare theory, using Victoria IMC as an 
example. Contact me off-list if you'd like a copy...

Yers for the Revo!

Guamanian



Shayne ONeill wrote:
 > Theres a debate in perth indy on dealing with racist posts from
 > organised hate groups, something becoming depressingly common on
 > perth indy.
 >
 > I'm interested in hearing what folks internationally have done about
 > this on there own wires.
 >


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