I was just thinking about messageboard moderation and reputation. I’m off sick so I actually get the chance to think things through. Actually I was thinking about moderation, reputation, the Soham murder case - Ian Huntley’s history is now coming out, privacy, big brother states, anonymising democracies and the possibility of open reputation based, whuffie style societies.
There are two schools of thought as far as reputation and message moderation goes. One goes “You should moderate every message based on the content of the message alone” and there is the other that says that “You should moderate each message within the context of it’s poster’s history.�
Moderation and the judicial system are very similar in many ways. The case against Ian Huntley was only able to use evidence from the event itself, not bring in much about his history, especially as most of his history was “off the record.� This process is exactly like moderating a message in light of it’s content alone. The reason for this is so that an innocent person is not tarred by their previous actions and the court decides on the evidence of the action. It would be very likely that the jury would have convicted Huntley if they knew of all the previous rape charges and his many relationships with underage girls, even if there was evidence that he didn�t commit the murders. Past actions play an important part in human thought and social interactions. This is why there were injunctions out about all this background information so that it would not unduly influence the jury.
So with that in mind one would say that moderation should take each message on it�s own merits or demerits. However from another point of view a history of actions, ie a reputation does count for something. �The race doesn�t always go to the swiftest, nor the fight to the strongest, but that�s the way to bet.� Official records are allowed in court, other convictions (actions proved to have been taken) do count. The courts pay attention to the official reputation of a defendant. This reputation is based on events recorded in the judicial system. Previous convictions count for a lot in this case, and are taken into account. Not that I�m a lawyer, but in cases of this type I assume that it is more about proving that the defendant didn�t do it as opposed to trying to prove that they did. A subtle but important shift even if the western judicial system pretends to be innocent until proven guilty in the court room.
Again moderation and the judicial system are similar. We can record every action in our system, every judgement and use that history to help us make predictive guesses as to intent in future judgements. The problem being that we do end up in the guilty until proven innocent camp if we indicate say a high degree of deletions to the moderators. The moderators are then more likely to remove something.
However being that I�m involved with the BBC boards I think we do generally need to err on the side of safety rather than permissiveness. This has two ramifications, one, that I think we should be more prepared to delete in cases where we might be unsure about the content so we can use reputation to make a good guess at whether something should be removed. And secondly that we end up becoming the Big Brother Corporation, a moderation police state. Watching and recording everything.
The concept of reputation as a currency is very de jour. Whether this is as a real world hard currency like in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom or some kind of more nebulous social currency is beside the point. Any of these types of computationally backed up social networks are information rich networks that have a deep access to what many would see as private actions. The concept of whuffie is intrinsically tied to a persistent identity and in some ways to what the UK government wants to do with ID cards. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing in my mind if it is done properly and openly so it�s not just the government holding the information, it�s a resource for all to use and also a resource that is externally and publicly auditable.
As far as I see it the key to moderating a message properly is to see it in the context of the community. This can be done in one of two ways by examining it in the context of the conversation that it is part of, and examining it in the context of the history of the poster. This has an exact counterpart in the offline world. If you are in a group of people and someone who you know nothing about starts talking you listen, if they say things you don�t like then you can ignore them and/or go away. If someone who you have know to say things you don�t like in the past you would give them less slack before going away.
At the BBC we need to keep the cost of moderation down, we get a quarter of a million messages a week and delete about 5% of those, and we read near 150,000 message in that process. The moderators cannot read those messages efficiently in conversational context, and currently do not evaluate the message in any real context. Nor do we want them to moderate a message in conversational context.
So we can moderate a message in historical context. Check the message content and evaluate it on it�s own merits and then if there is any doubt check the history for a check on which way to go. A good example of where this is really necessary is Trolling. Trolling is one member annoying another, sometimes it�s very obvious, and sometimes it can be very subtle. If a message has been alerted to a moderator by an aggrieved member it is often difficult to tell what the problem is from the content of the message. A check with the users moderation history/reputation can help to see if this user has had this type of activity reported against them in the past, the amount of it and possibly even some advice automatically generated by it.
So after this careful consideration I�m still all for eventually building in a moderation reputation/history system to help moderators effectively and efficiently carry out their tasks.
The real big question now is whether moderation should be completely anonymous or not.
