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

[Ben Seattle]

Thanks Sheri for forwarding this.

This is also the view that I support.

We waste everyone's time and antagonize our readers (and
potentials supporters) when we allow racist or troll posts to
remain.

It must be a priority to keep the signal-to-noise ratio useful.

This is fundamentally a political question.  Many technical
decisions will follow from this.

Sincerely,
Ben Seattle
----//-// 8.May.2004
http://struggle.net/Ben (my elists / theory / infrastructure)

-----Original Message-----
From: sheri at indymedia.org <sheri at speakeasy.net>
To: seattle-editorial at indymedia.org
<seattle-editorial at indymedia.org>
Date: Sunday, May 02, 2004 4:52 PM
Subject: [Seattle-editorial] Fwd: [IMC-Process] Re: Perth's
Question onstrategies for dealing withracist posts



-----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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