UNITED STATES
Bilgrimage
William D. Lindsey
Last year, as I tried to drum up discussion about what seems to me a serious shortcoming of the way National Catholic Reporter moderates comments at its discussion threads, I pointed out that the heavy reliance of NCR on a flagging system to weed out undesirable comments positively invites abuse, and lends itself to a lack of transparency. As I noted, individuals working in tandem with each other to make some people personae non gratae in NCR discussion threads clearly do gang up on those they choose to target and use the flagging system to draw negative attention on the part of NCR‘s moderators to these commenters.
And they do this under the guise of anonymity, both because their own usernames are quite frequently anonymous ones, and, more to the point, because the flagging system is set up to allow them to flag comments in a completely non-public way. That fact in itself invites abuse, and then when one adds to it the fact that the moderators make decisions about how to deal with flagged comments in a hidden way — apparently choosing to pay attention to flags in some cases, while completely ignoring them in other cases — one can only conclude that the system by which comments, or even commenters, are weeded out of NCR conversation threads is non-transparent. And ripe for abuse.
It’s ripe for abuse of particular people whom various other commenters may choose to target and drive from the discussion threads, because they dislike those individuals or their opinions, etc. Because that potential for abuse has concerned me for some time now, my comments about the recent censorship of Jerry Slevin by NCR have focused on the question of transparency and accountability in how NCR moderates its threads, and how it chooses to ban certain people from commenting at its site.
These issues should concern anyone promoting healthy, open, wide-ranging discussion of significant issues at Catholic blog sites, it seems to me. NCR has not chosen to engage in any kind of open discussion of how its moderators use the flagging system to moderate comments, and not even the persistent discussion of Jerry Slevin’s banning at NCR has provoked that kind of transparency on the part of the NCR managing staff about how its censorship system works.
Even so, that persistent discussion is now producing some interesting case studies in the problem. Take the thread following the editorial about Archbishop Nienstedt on which I concentrated yesterday. As that thread has continued and as it has tossed around the issue of Jerry Slevin’s banning, some commentators have stated overtly in the thread that they do, in fact, use the flagging system to drive people out of the discussion — off the NCR discussion threads altogether and into “billgrimspage oblivion,” as the anonymous user employing the Hindi name for Brahmin, ब्राह्मण, tells John David yesterday.
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