To me, blogging is very different than other sources of news and information. Blogging is not like a newspaper or TV news – it’s a conversation between the bloggers and the community. We as contributors don’t feel like we “own” the stories, we are conversation starters. We don’t want people to feel intimidated to join in the conversation and we want as many people as possible to join in.
We have been getting a lot of feedback lately about the proliferation of rightwing talking points in our comments section. Our blog is called Delaware Liberal. We hope to bring news and comments of interest to our community, mainly focused on the interests of liberals and progressives. What we don’t want to become is the depository for rightwing talking points.
We are discussing a new policy at Delaware Liberal, and that will be more aggressive moderation of comments. We will start reserving the right to put comments in moderation. We want to have great conversations and not be tied up refuting and researching false and misleading talking points. It’s not only frustrating for our readers – it’s frustrating for the contributors as well. Our policy in the past has been in favor of free speech, with certain exceptions (threats and hateful/bigoted language). We’re not sure that this laissez-faire policy is working for the wider community.
Here are the proposed changes:
1. We ask that comments stay on-topic. We realize that comments sections are organic and can sometimes move in unexpected directions and we are sensitive to this. Off-topic comments can be removed by moderators without warning.
2. We want your opinions. What we don’t want is your or other people’s opinions stated as facts. If you make an assertion, please state if it is your opinion or back up what you say with a link.
3. The Fair Use Doctrine means that you do not cut and paste entire articles written by other people in your comment. Use an excerpt of the article and post a link to the whole thing. Comments that cut and paste too big of a chunk of other people’s material will be edited for Fair Use.
4. We realize that we can’t cover every topic of interest to our community. We will provide daily open threads for people to discuss topics that interest them beyond the ones we have highlighted.
5. Comment moderation will be in accordance with these rules and in accordance with the moderator’s judgment.
We want your feedback. Do you feel that the comments section has become difficult to navigate? Do you feel that it has been too difficult to participate in conversations here recently? We would like to get feedback from as many of our readers as possible. Even if you’ve never commented before, tell us how we can improve the climate for conversation. This is your change to influence how Delaware Liberal works, so let us know what you think.