On community
moderation of internet content
Jeremy Au Yong cited some of my views in his Straits
Times article about how to moderate content on the internet [1]
However, activist and
blogger Alex Au and National University of Singapore (NUS) new
media lecturer Lim Sun Sun both believe there are already shades of
community moderation online and that the status quo is hard to
change.
'Where this discussion
is going to go wrong is if people approach (moderation) thinking of
a single structure on top of a media platform,' says Mr Au. He does
not believe there will ever be such a structure given the
Internet's unbridled nature.
His take on community
moderation is that it is the 'aggregate of all decisions' made by
owners of forums and blogs who decide what content to put up. 'The
only thing amenable to change is how the website owners go about
their actions,' he argues.
[Then the article
discussed Choo Zheng Xi's ideas for a superstructure, ombudsman or
code of conduct.]
For Mr Au, something
less formal might have value here. He is opposed to approaching
community moderation as the idea of some formal superstructure
sitting on top of the Web.
When he signed off on
the community-moderation idea in the Bloggers 13 proposal, his idea
was that it would take the form of a 'talk shop' - a place where
bloggers and Web administrators come together to discuss the
choices they make in moderating their own sites: 'What to allow,
what not to allow, how much space to give to something, these are
problems everyone faces. The talk shop would allow them to tap each
other. The outcome would be intelligent, consistent
moderation.'
I think I need to
expand and explain what had been quoted. I basically said that even
without a superstructure, moderation can be alive and well. The
reason is that every website, whether a blog or a forum, has
somebody in charge. He is not going to be absent, because
maintaining these things takes work. But he's also human, and human
beings are ultimately social animals. They tend to get into similar
patterns of behaviour as others. This social instinct means their
behaviour is amenable to change in ways they are not even conscious
of. Or when they are, it is entirely voluntary.
The question then is
how can we promote this possibility? One is through socialisation
among owners of websites and producers of content. Which was why I
mentioned a talk shop where people could tap each others'
experience in handling issues or bounce ideas off each
other.
In contrast, erecting a
superstructure means that webmasters will see behaviour
modification as an external force. It will be
resisted.
But
there is community moderation even now
I also said to the
Straits Times that we can see moderation at work all the time -- if
we know how to look. The problem is, the elephant (the government)
comes into the room and tries to define what a moderated internet
should look like: It has to be civil, it has to be "balanced", it
must not contain "immoral" content and so on. Then everyone puts on
his best Sherlock Holmes outfit and goes around with a magnifying
glass looking for such a thing, only to find that it's not there.
Together we then conclude that since the expected result is not
evident, no moderation has taken place.
What a
farce!
To me, moderation is
evident even now, if only we know how to look for it. There are two
kinds of moderation: post-publication and
pre-publication.
Post-publication
would
include instances when either the webmaster or moderator intervenes
or when other commentators criticise the viewpoint of the original
writer or comment-maker.
A classic example would be when someone
tries to cite religious scripture to support an argument. You can
bet that lots of others would jump on him immediately. Singaporeans
seem to recognise a norm that religiously-based arguments cannot be
valid in public discourse.
This is not universally true, you know. In
many societies with a majority belonging to the same religion, it
is quite common for religious citations to be used and not objected
to. For example, I have for some time been observing the discourse
about homosexuality in Jamaica, one of the most violently
homophobic countries on earth, and the typical argument used is a
scriptural one. Even the pro-gay equality argument, on the rare
occasions when it is surfaced, is sometimes
scripture-based.
Pre-publication moderation
is when the writer self-censors. It is much harder to spot.
However, we can detect it at work by looking for pattern. Organic
self-organisation is usually indicated by the presence of
pattern.
One that is quite obvious is the
almost dreary uniformity of
viewpoint in the socio-political cyberspace of Singapore -–
anti-elite, pro-opposition, and rather provincial. As Tan Tarn How,
a media researcher with the Institute of Policy Studies, said
recently, we don't see blogs taking strikingly different
ideological viewpoints; we don't see pro-communist blogs, for
example. Do people with pro-government views or unusual ideological
stances censor themselves, and not even put up their
arguments?
Related to the above is the narrow range of
topics people discuss. We see cost-of-living
issues, government mismanagement issues and the like, but we don't
see much discussion of foreign policy, our attitudes to law and
order, our drugs policy, capital punishment, public health,
corporate behaviour, pollution and the environment, for example.
Might it be that content producers, even if they are personally
interested in these topics, have learnt that they get few readers
(and therefore little gratification) if they write about such
things?
(I am a bit of a
masochist to write the recent long article about Asean [2],
when I know full well it will get few eyeballs.)
In the same vein, might it not be true that
people do hold themselves back before they say offensive things
which they fear would not be well-received by others? That what
offensive speech we currently see now is already a reduced amount,
culled by self-censorship? Could it be that what is noteworthy is
NOT how much offensive speech we see, but how
little?
Coming back to the uniformity of viewpoints
and topics, I find the above evidence of self-moderation, or
self-censorship -- and you really can't separate one from the other
-- somewhat disturbing. It begs the question: Is
moderation/self-censorship necessarily a good thing? Does it not
also drain vitality from public discourse? Is Singapore cyberspace
too uniform, too boring, in terms of interests, viewpoints and
writing styles?
But what sticks in the craw of the
government is not that it is boring. What sticks is that it is not
boring IN THE WAY THEY WOULD WANT IT. The interests are not
focussed on the GDP and how to promote economic growth. The
viewpoints are too oppositionist, and the style nowhere near
deferential enough for their egos. And so the elephant says there
is no moderation, and now we're all running around like clowns
trying to create a superstructure.
Where moderation is needed
While I have raised the question above as
to whether the kind of moderation we currently see is always such a
good thing, we should also ask: Is there such a thing as worthwhile
moderation?
I guess a case can easily be made for
moderation of speech that is malicious. Speech that is intended to
inflict social and psychological injury upon a target person or
group. If anyone goes about vilifying an ethnic group or bullying a
fellow student, then reasonable people would consider this out of
bounds.
The problem may be that Singaporeans don't
know how to speak up against anti-social behaviour. It is not only
in cyberspace, where we are tongue-tied or over-reticent.
Singaporeans do not tick off the able-bodied person occupying a
seat meant for the elderly or pregnant, they do not speak up when
they see people not queuing up, or an abusive parent taking it out
on a child.
It is a much more general problem than
merely a cyberspace one. I describe us as a society that
understands and is submissive to vertical authority, but has no
clue about our responsibility to our peers. That, however, is for a
separate article.
The point that I think we need to take away
is that the more we rely on vertical authority to put things in
order, the more negligent we are about horizontal responsibility.
So, pace the headline used by Jeremy Au Yong in his article, and
which, curiously, is taken from the words of the free-speech
advocate Choo Zheng Xi of the Online Citizen -- "Moderate, so
government can deregulate" -- the order should be the other way
around: Deregulate, so people will see the need to
moderate.
"New media" is really new
Where the whole
discussion also falls off the tracks is the use of the word
"media". We say "new media", "digital media" and so on, and
unthinkingly class the internet alongside other "media" that come
to mind, such as television, newspapers and cinema. We then start
asking ourselves what models of moderation in these more familiar
media can be replicated to serve new media.
Words are like
blindfolds and we won't see where we're going if we do not critique
the way we use and understand words.
The internet is
different from the other "media" in a crucial way. While the rest
are few to many -– that is, there are a relatively small number of
TV stations, newspaper titles or film studios providing content for
large numbers of information consumers -- the internet is many to
many. There can be as many producers of content as there are
consumers of it.
Even book publishing,
which is characterised by millions of titles, is not as "many to
many" as the internet.
"Few to many" media
have choke points at which governments or public opinion can
exercise influence. The few can be leaned on to abide by a code of
conduct.
Imagine how difficult
it will be to get the zillions of book authors and publishers to do
the same. Now multiply that difficulty for a medium that is
virtual, borderless, and which does not need editors, publishers or
bookstores as intermediaries, and therefore do not have these
chokepoints either.
You'd be dreaming if
you thought that any model of regulation or moderation from the
"few to many" media can be applied effectively to the internet. The
starting conditions are just so vastly different.
Moreover, as Au Yong
wrote in his report,
In a medium where
freedom is everything, the thought of someone telling you what not
to do is difficult to overcome. Netizens indeed seem particularly
sensitive, and the slightest hint of control triggers a need to
bite back.
Don't look at other media, look at the psychology of human
behaviour
So we come back to the
one sure thing we know: Content is created by humans. And humans
are social animals. Popularity, peer acceptance and social esteem
are perennial motivators. Thus, if we want to dwell on the topic of
moderation -- and I am not sure I do -- then think along those
lines.
Think
also about the more general question: Why do Singaporeans neglect
their horizontal responsibility to their peers? Is it, at source, a
case of an over-controlling government creating a culture reliant
only on vertical authority, such that individuals' sense of social
responsibility has atrophied?
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