Porous Media: Community and Moderation

introducing this AOP discussion, in what seemed like a casual aside, chairperson Jemima Kiss said something that wasn’t further discussed but seemed to me to cast a cloud over the afternoon:

“All the best sites often seem to me to be just very clever CMS’s and databases built by very clever people who then sit back and let other people populate them.”

Assembled old media types worried about editorial standards, community management, and brand risk while being only too aware that the new social media winners just don’t seem to care because, for them at least, these things don’t matter.

The unvoiced question was whether there really is a middle way – a nuanced blending of branded media and the Wild West. Instead we proceeded on the assumption that such a route must exist and the discussion was framed in terms of ‘control’ --  when and how to let go.

Paul Brannan, Deputy Editor of BBC Interactive, had a four-point plan: -

1. Be transparent. Beeb publishes statistics on how many comments get through      (50pct) which reinforces the fact that feedback is moderated. They e-mail those rejected with the reason why. And they publish their editorial guidelines in full to help those criticising them understand some of the notions behind decisions.

2. Make it easy to engage. Paul and his team had fought long, bloody battles with      individual programmes to persuade them that having a single place to send      material would maximise the flow.

3. Commit resources. Beeb has six people just monitoring UGC!

4. Check. Having been stung several times, BBCi’s six-person hub was developing a     sense for authenticity in submissions. He stressed getting the submitter on the phone and asking questions (making the point that this is just like the old journalism). How many photos had been taken? What else was going on? Who else was there?

Kim Walker of law firm Pinsent Masons focussed on some practical measures you need to take to minimise risk. 

Breach of IP rights: Site terms and conditions must forbid the uploading of infringing material and it must be possible to ban offenders

Safe harbors: Kim reinforced the point that although it won’t make for a brilliant user experience and poses a brand risk, you are not liable as an author, editor or publisher if you have no effective control over comments and contributions. If you allow defamatory material onto your site but you didn’t know it was there and take it down expeditiously then you won’t be liable.You need a button to report complaints and you need a procedure for taking down very quickly. 

Mumsnet and the issue of what constitutes ‘expeditious’:
The childcare author Gina Ford objected to negative comments appearing on mumsnet – a site for mothers run by seven volunteers. She wanted all comments relating to her removed from the site and a full apology. The site responded that it wasn’t possible to monitor all comments and said they had acted expeditiously in taking down the original source of complaint within 24 hours. However, they settled out of court after losing confidence that within 24 hours would be judged to have been sufficiently expeditious.Kim notes that the Terrorism Act requires site owners to remove material that might incite terrorism within 48 hours! 

Robert Marcus, Director of Beginnings (chatroom moderators) responded to the notion that self-policing was the only way forward by saying: “Do people understand copyright or defamation law? The point is that just relying on a complaints button is expecting a community to police something they don’t fully understand.”

I’ve not heard this discussed before but Robert thought that profiles were crucial in setting the tone for your community and that your policy on nicknames and on pictures were critical. Allowing references to sex or violence in profiles or images would send strong signals about what you would put up with. 

He thought the number 1 mistake for sites was not dealing with ‘trolls’. Cited last year’s launch of the Sportsman newspaper and associated site. The site initially picked up a good volume of posts with 300+ per day. But they rapidly lost 95 pct of these as trolls took over and nothing was done to stop them. Robert believes that many of the trolls were those banned by the competing betfair site which has a more rigorous policy. 

One intriguing idea he had was to have a policy of pre-moderating the first 3-5 comments of a new registrant and then okaying them to post direct. 

Neil McIntosh – head of editorial development at Guardian Unlimited -- had some interesting data on blogs at the Guardian. Said that collectively they generated a quarter of a million comments in March and that the busiest time for comments is between 3-4 in the UK afternoon. 

In response to the criticism of how loose their moderation policy was, The Guardian  had done some research into just how many comments were ‘problematical’. They adopted a five point scale which went from ‘off-topic’ at the low end to, I think but the slides went rather quick here, highly offensive including hate speech at the other. They reckon that only 6 % of all comments raised any concerns and only 1.5% should have been taken down.

Neil's overall observation was that there was a huge amount of effort required to deal with relatively few comments and that the secret had to be finding ways in which the ‘good people’ could be used to sort out the bad ones. He quoted Meg Pickard, a recent appointment as ‘Head of Community User Experience’, "The naughty step and no ice cream is not the only way.”

Neil showed a slide of bored looking commuters on a tube train and then a shot of the clientele of a ‘50s pub. He felt we were all stuck in the tube carriage with only the eccentrics saying anything and that social software and editorial could get us to the pub scenario with journalists as the bartenders. Asked if the pub metaphor really scaled he said he thought social software was the secret. 

He finished with three lessons learnt: - 

1. Editorial and community: comments work best on comment and analysis NOT news.
2. Layering: You need to provide different levels of participation to encourage people to get involved with your site without having to spend a lot of time
3. Scattering: The conversation around your material is happening off your site and you need to find ways in which you can reap that dividend (neither Guardian or the BBC had made any progress here)

 Anonmymity
There was a brief discussion on whether removing anonymity would encourage better behaviour in community. Neil McIntosh doubted whether you could actually do this. Robert Marcus thought this was the wrong way of looking at it. If you could get users to invest in the site in other ways, profiles? collected comments? they would behave better. He also felt that community ought to behave a bit like school in that teachers couldn’t be everywhere so there was a prefect system and you had to choose your community prefects very carefully. He didn’t have a neat answer to the audience member who worried about the legal and brand risks associated with putting community moderation in the hands of people with whom you had no formal relationship.