Responsibility of bloggers for their commenters...

Simon's earlier post, The Party of Hate and Intolerance, III, stirred up some conversation about the distinction between blog posts and comments, and the responsibility (or lack thereof) blog owners have for comments left on their site.

It is indisputable that no blogger should be held responsible for the specific individual comments made by people who merely comment on his or her blog. The thoughts and opinions of commenters are theirs and theirs alone. The blog owner takes no legal responsibility for them simply by providing the forum to make them. Bloggers should haven't to micro-manage their comment threads.

But at the same time, blogers are, I think, responsible for the general tenor of their comment sections. Bloggers can, and very often do, restrict comments, delete comments, and ban commenters because they don't like what they say. If they consistently choose to not ban certain types of comments and commenters with certain regularly-expressed views, they are not perhaps endorsing them, but certainly tolerating them. By banning some types of comments while allowing others, they are exerting some editorial control and effectively promoting one point of view over the other, at the very least suggesting that they consider the non-banned comments part of the realm of legitimate discourse. Keep in mind that I am not talking about one comment here or there, but the overall tenor of a site measured in hundreds and thousands of comments.

The people running Kos will ban right-wingers at the drop of a hat, just as the people at RedState will ban lefties as soon as they appear. That's an editorial decision made by the blog owners for which they are legitimately responsible. Similarly, there is a lot of cussing at Kos because Markos chose not to prohibit cussing, and he himself uses it from time to time. RedState, by contrast, has chosen to prohibit cussing across the board. Again, these are editorial decisions for which the editors of each are responsible.

Two years ago when I noticed mostly the left complaining about the vicious nature of right wing blogs, a popular target was Charles Johnson's Little Green Footballs. His commenters frequently post some pretty harsh stuff, bigoted, hate-filled, poorly thought-out. Charles' own posts, while from a strong point of view, generally make valid, non-hate-based points. But I thought then, as I think now, that Charles bears some responsibility for allowing his comments thread to become a festering pit, wallowed in by unpleasant people who, for their own reasons perhaps, agree with much of his policy prescriptions. Charles bears responsibility not for any individual comment, but for providing a forum and tolerating those types of comments while not tolerating, say, dissenting voices from the left.

Not only does Charles tolerate these commenters over time, but he also rarely if ever chastises them for going too far or take them to task for extremist, violent language.

Similarly, note that while Huffington Post mostly took down the offensive comments, I saw not one word directed at the commenters saying something simple like, "Commenters, we understand that you have strong feelings, but we at Huffington Post do not believe it is appropriate to wish for the assassination of our Vice President, nor to express regret that such an assassination attempt failed." Not even an update to the original post saying "Some commenters let their emotions run ahead of themselves and said things that they shouldn't have. We've removed those comments because we find the sentiment they expressed inappropriate."

Remember, I'm not saying that bloggers are responsible themselves for any individual comment posted. But bloggers do make editorial decisions which impact the general tone of their comments section, and bloggers may properly be held responsible for the consequences of those decisions.