4 ms·
Newspapers and magazines have a staff of editors (and sometimes lawyers!) review each issue before it's published. That's the standard you want to apply to anyo
by eli 6y ago
Newspapers and magazines have a staff of editors (and sometimes lawyers!) review each issue before it's published. That's the standard you want to apply to anyone running any forum anywhere on the internet? That every comment has to be carefully prescreened for legal compliance? And even then you have to operate under a substantially increased risk of lawsuit.
Maybe you prescreen every comment but you make a bad call and something defamatory gets through. Or maybe someone sues you under bad faith and you have to pay to defend it or settle.
This is a very bad future for the internet. It's an internet where the powerful, who have the full support of publishers, will get to have their voices heard loudly. And the less powerful, who do not have teams of lawyers willing to fight on their behalf, will have a very hard time getting their voices heard.
- zaroth 6y ago> That every comment has to be carefully prescreened for legal compliance? And even then you have to operate under a substantially increased risk of lawsuit. No, that’s only the standard I want to apply if they are editorializing the content that’s being posted.
- ryukafalz 6y agoSo, to use the same CatTalk example from before: if you're running a site dedicated to cats, and you want to disallow user posts about dogs (or cars or pornography or...), you want that site to have to carefully prescreen every comment for legal compliance and operate under a substantially increased risk of lawsuit?
- madeofpalk 6y agoSo HN moderates its content, quite strictly imho. Do you think they should be sued because of a comment you or I make on this site?