Blog comments, hate speech, profanity, and turning them off.

The Washington Post turned off comments on their blogs. I think this is a huge error on their part for the simple reason that an interactive community is a primary purpose of having a blog in the first place. A blog without comments is like, well a newspaper.

Having said that, the issue of comment spam, profanity (non-ornamental in nature), hate speech, attack speech, and general unruliness among commenters is a legitimate issue that requires a technology solution and a level of community policing. Regardless, of what your attitude is toward the Post, we should all be in agreement that there is nothing to be contributed by a blog comment that attacks their employees personally, or becomes a forum for hate speech of any kind.

Here's what I don't understand, why have the same providers of spam filters not offered filters for blogs that mask out profanity or apply more sophisticated linguistics filtering to disallow comments that feature hate speech? This straightforward solution add-on would make the jobs of many blog editors much much easier.


Technorati Tags: Washington+Post, blog+comments

Comments

[scott]

I read that they only turned-off the commenting feature for the blog that was experiencing the issue. My understanding is that comments were not disabled for the rest of the Post blogs.

[jeff]

good point.

[Dave]

I have an idea. Only people that have commented can view other comments.

If you want a discussion, there's always forums.

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