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Censorship on boards.ie
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13-08-2009 4:14pm#1Why I'm quitting boards.ie
(With apologies for typos etc – I may not get a chance to correct them!)
I've posted this mildly humorous, inoffensive advertising video about soccer moms here in the Feedback forum because it is forbidden to discuss it on boards.ie, and because I have been threatened with a ban if I if I attempt to discuss this censorship.
There are, goodness knows, more significant topics to talk about than soccer moms and Cheetos (whatever they are), but then many people, myself included, consider sport, and attitudes to sport, important in life and in society. In any case, the subject here is none of these things: it is the underlying, demeaning censorship culture of boards.ie.
The video, assuming it persists on YouTube, and this post may be removed; and they may not. The post may be edited and distorted – the moderators and administrators appear to have absolute power to do that and even leave my user name on it – or it may not. Or it may be greeted with a bumper sticker one-liner and the thread locked. At this stage this is largely irrelevant, because those in power here have already banned discussion of the video clip as well as discussion of the reason for the original ban. In any case, this post will be published elsewhere, on FootballPress.
In trying to establish the reasons for a quite comical, on one level, instance of censorship, I have learned a little more than I might have wished about how boards.ie functions. This is not as hilarious as an objection to a fast food snack advert might lead one to believe.
It's clear that not only that boards.ie is not a democracy, and also that it has neither respect nor, ultimately, the capacity for free speech. In raising this issue on the Help Desk, I have been roundly rebuked for being 'self-important' and 'wasting people's time on stupid things'. The Guidelines/rules (boards.ie's fudge, not mine) make policy on these 'stupid things' abundantly clear: they place private property rights above the right to free expression, a right enshrined in documents such as the Irish Constitution, the European Convention on Human Rights, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A feature of totalitarian regimes is that anyone who questions policy in this regard is automatically condemned as 'shouting' and 'silly', thus:No freedom of speech.
This is a private website. There is no "right" to freedom of speech here. We, the Admins and moderators DO want to promote discussion but FREE un-moderated discussion online turns into a screaming match between children. We believe that rules of etiquette should be applied (see below). Shouting about how we have infringed your "freedom of speech" on a privately owned website is silly. You can use blogger.com to say what YOU like, what you aren’t entitled to is access to the community we have built here without abiding by the community's rules, as decided and enforced by us.
In short, it appears that boards.ie is a dictatorship, and happy to describe itself as such. It is happy to set out the need for moderation, but utterly rejects the existence in any form of free speech within its confines. If you want to say something that the mods don't like, then say it somewhere else, away from the discussion here.
Now, I'm not a lawyer, but this is more than a legal matter. It goes to the ethical legitimacy of what purports to be a forum for public discussion, albeit on a private system. I am not saying that boards.ie does not have a legal ‘right’ or ability in Irish, European or international law to do what it is doing here. Perhaps, if the question were tested in a court the right to property would win out over the right to free speech; perhaps the right to free speech would prevail. Perhaps resolving that conflict would necessitate a change in law. But this is about more than legal legitimacy: it is about moral and ethical legitimacy too. What is happening here is that boards.ie is ignoring or belittling a central, sacred ethic of communication, and has decided simply that owning something gives you more "right" to express an opinion than not owning something.
This, of course, is how privately-owned old media operate. The commercial owner, ultimately, has the final say. But conventional media don't have unlimited space or airtime, and they generally don't pretend to be a community, although that is changing.
This is the internet, where, we are so told, information is supposed to be free, and things are done transparently and in the open. Boards.ie Ltd uses an open source forum platform, possibly hosted on open source server software, and I'm confident that if I cared to look I could find lots of knobs-on rhetoric here or in associated sites about open source communication and its democratising role. Using open source infrastructure, positioning itself in the public arena, and featuring forums dedicated to public issues, boards.ie has built what it claims is a community. But a real community worthy of the name cannot be owned by anyone other than its members. Boards.ie cannot have it both ways. If you think it can, then, instead of 'This is a private website', try the more specific 'This is a privately-owned community.'
A possibility exists that the interpretation of 'private' here refers to the website being in the private, collective control of all of its members, like a club, or of its various volunteer mods and admins. But that is a claim that is distinctly absent from the 'No freedom of speech' edict, and in previous exchanges on the Help Desk concerning the denial of this right, involving myself and others, mods and admins leave no doubt that their assumed right to quash open exchange is based on boards.ie's claim to private ownership. Here's a nice, ominously-worded, fifties-flavoured contribution, reds under the bed an' all:I will forgive you for thinking that Boards is a communist site. It never has been, we have always been a benevolent dictatorship. Though that might be changing...
Even if there were some majority support for censorship and quality control, it's validity would be in question where it extended beyond posts that are racist, sexist, pornographic, comprise hate speech, are defamatory, etc., or that clearly are designed purely to wreck a discussion (which is not the same as commenting an opposing view or framing it in a different way). Even in a democracy (which boards.ie plainly isn't), the majority does not have the right to tell a minority to shut it, or else. And who reading this thinks that, in the event of a disagreement in a critical area between a volunteer and a boards.ie Ltd senior staff member, the opinion of the former would hold sway?
In attempting to raise the matter of arbitrary and over-zealous censorship (and not for the first time), I've met with all sorts of diversionary tactics, from simple sneering and name calling to snarling ban threats, and perhaps most of all, just silliness, with responses so juvenile that one wonders whether thoughts about 'stupid things' such as the nature of social interaction and debate ever occur to those in charge. I’ve noted that others who dare to question mods or admins also often get snippy or downright aggressive responses.
So what is censored, and why? I'm not for a minute saying that absolute freedom of expression should be practised on boards.ie: I recognise the pragmatic limits of free speech that most sensible democracies put in place. But community, as practised here, is community on boards.ie's terms, in which it isn't deemed within 'etiquette' to disagree or have an opinion that doesn't fit blandly with the majority, but especially with those of the mods. This is a creepy, Disney community where, at least in some forums, if you don't join in the general cumbya you will, depending, by their own admission, on the whim of mods and admins, be told to shut up. If you don't shut up, security will be called and you will be made to shut up, and subjected to posts and actions on the part of mods and admins that are impulsive, irrational and facetious, and sometimes vindictive in tone.
In my case, my general offence seems to be to have been not on-message with regard to football and to have a view of the sport that differs from the vast majority in this country. Not being part of that particular party, is, I believe, the underlying reason why I have fallen foul of the 'rules', the very existence of which, in a further super-Orwellian twist, is denied and fudged, even though it is forbidden not to know them. (If it is of interest, my particular offence is to want to respond to a post in which I am specifically mentioned: this post was made by a mod unusually acting for someone else, and then, bizarrely, locking the thread. I will admit that I do seem subsequently to have encountered a particularly unreasonable admin. However, his line has been supported by another, as the ranks, predictably, have closed).
I would make two suggestions for the improvement of boards.ie in respect to free speech:
1. Take more care appointing mods and admins. Choose people who value diversity of opinion rather than fear it, and who can engage in rational discussion around it. Reject zealots, as any professional recruiter would, who appear over-keen to be in a position of power.
2. Do some work on open source communication, or simple communication rights, that goes beyond cheer-leading for some distant information revolution based on coding software and developing gadgets. Put together a charter that clearly states rights and responsibilities of boards.ie users, and that cherishes and protects freedom of expression in a balanced way, subject to universally recognised limitations.
3. Commit to some standards that you not only require people to know but are yourselves not seeking to or able to deny when it is expedient.
But at this point I'm not looking for boards.ie to do anything, really. I've given up on the 'Help' Desk, for obvious reasons.
My feedback, as invited by boards.ie in this forum, is that I choose not to be a subject in a grubby and sinister set-up in which I am allowed to exchange views only at the pleasure of a group of people who might easily be in training for gainful employment in Myanmar or on China's Green Dam. I don’t fit in here, but I’m comfortable with that.
So go for it, thought police. Ban away. And think up some new names or petty accusations for me or others who don’t toe the line, or recycle some old ones. I don't know what buttons to press to vaporise me and my account but, whatever about your ability to cope with free speech and its complexities, I'm sure you guys will know how to do that too. Or not, depending on your whim.Post edited by Shield on1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UgoDcCQZzIgComments
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