[Imc] Death Threatz

[Mike Lehman]

Josh,
Actually, the responsibility for editing on the Newswire is shared among
several people, not just the Tech group. It is constrained by the UCIMC
Website Use Policy <http://www.ucimc.org/website_policy.php3> and
actions taken are reviewed by the Steering group (which actually has the
ultimate responsibility) as needed, so there has rarely been the need
for it previously. Generally, with Open Publishing, there is little that
can or should be done, unless something is an explicit violation of the
Use Policy.

With the changes in the global IMC Newswire, some of the stuff that
crawled out when that particular rock was kicked over showed up here and
has made things somewhat busier than they had been at this task. We hope
to implement the new Dada software in the near future, which we hope
will give us more options in how to deal with posts that fall into the
gray area between OK and Obviously A Violation.

A gray area is exactly what the post that I asked for advice on involved
the false claim that "Larry is dead" earlier this week. It wasn't
clearcut enough for me to deal with on my own, so it took a little time
before we came to an "online consensus" i.e. the few who spoke, spoke in
favor of hiding it, with no objections, so it was hidden by Paul R. at
that point, with him the citing appropriately the exact nature of the
use polciy violation we had concluded that it was. When these things
come up, remember that everyone on the list is being asked for their
opinion, not just those of us with the edit passwords, so speak up if
you want to be heard. People can also be involved in the finalization of
any such decisions at the next Steering group meeting.

Today's hidden story involved a death threat, making it a clear-cut
case, so I hid it as soon as I came across it.

In both cases, these decisions will be reviewed by the Steering group.
Complaints from readers have some impact in both the initial decision to
hide a post and the Steering group's eventual, more formal consensus
decision to uphold or unhide a post, but they are not the only factor.
Any decision to hide a post must be because it is, in fact, a violation
of the policy. Just because it upsets people is not enough, which is why
Paul R. made the important distinction clear between a post being just
personally offensive (which is was to both of us) and being plainly
meant just to be offensive to everyone reading it. We take our free
speech pretty seriously here.

With the coming implememntation of the new software, there will be some
changes and updates in policies to accomodate its greater flexibility.
The discussion on this will probably begin at this Sunday's Steering
group meeting and we certainly invite input from everyone on these
changes.
Mike Lehman

Josh Michaels wrote:
> 
> It seems that lately we've seen a lot of rather hateful and
> obscene postings to the newswire. I find it interesting that
> the tech group acts as the editor of the newswire, rather
> than a group of editors focused on keeping the newswire clean
> and credible. Has anyone ever considered creating a group
> specifically to act as editors of the newswire? We shouldn't
> have to wait until someone complains to take hate speech off
> of the wire...
>