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Crowdsourcing censorship

email   discuss Posted by Jessica Clark on May 3, 2008 at 10:31 AM

Annalee Newitz—tech reporter and editor of a hot new sci-fi blog io9—has an interesting column up on AlterNet titled User-Generated Censorship. She writes:

Here’s how it works: let’s say you’re a community activist who has some pretty vehement opinions about your city government. You go to Blogger.com, which is owned by Google, and create a free blog called Why the Municipal Government in Crappy City Sucks. Of course, a bunch of people in Crappy City disagree with you — and maybe even hate you personally. So instead of making mean comments on your blog, they decide to shut it down.
At the top of your Blogger blog, there is a little button that says “flag this blog.” When somebody hits that button, it sends a message to Google that somebody thinks the content on your blog is “inappropriate” in some way. If you get enough flags, Google will shut down your blog. In theory, this button would only be used to flag illegal stuff or spam. But there’s nothing stopping your enemies in town from getting together an online posse to click the button a bunch of times. …Censorship isn’t working the old-fashioned way. Your videos and blogs aren’t being removed. They’re simply being hidden in the deluge of user-generated information. To be unsearchable on the Web is, in a very real sense, to be censored.

Who is the villain in this scenario? Of course, it’s always easy to blame Google, but as Newitz points out, many other user-driven sites have rating tools that are designed to allow users to flag inappropriate content. Like so many other issues arising in the Web 2.0 environment—like fair use practices in user-generated video—crowdsourced censorship will need to be worked out on a case-by-case basis, with the cases serving to inform wider codes of practice and ethics.


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At the top of your Blogger blog, there is a little button that says "flag this blog." When somebody hits that button, it sends a message to Google that somebody thinks the content on your blog is "inappropriate" in some way. If you get enough flags, Google will shut down your blog. In theory, this button would only be used to flag illegal stuff or spam. But there's nothing stopping your enemies in town from getting together an online posse to click the button a bunch of times. ...Censorship isn't working the old-fashioned way. Your videos and blogs aren't being removed. They're simply being hidden in the deluge of user-generated information. To be unsearchable on the Web is, in a very real sense, to be censored. Who is the villain in this scenario? Of course, it's always easy to blame Google, but as Newitz points out, many other user-driven sites have rating tools that are designed to allow users to flag inappropriate content. Like so many other issues arising in the Web 2.0 environment--like fair use practices in user-generated video--crowdsourced censorship will need to be worked out on a case-by-case basis, with the cases serving to inform wider codes of practice and ethics.
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