Finding Balance in the Force

Recently the subject of comment moderation or censorship has come up in our internal discussions and via some support questions.

The question being posed is how do we ballance the blogger’s right to control their own site real-estate as well as the commenters right to have their voice heard and their self-expression preserved in some way. Balance this with the need for spam and troll protection and you end up with quite a complicated scenario.

It’s also an important data portability question that we at JS-Kit have an opportunity to solve at scale (550,000 registered sites!).

Right now our thinking is as follows. I would love your feedback.

• The site owner owns their page and must have control over the content displayed on it.
• The site owner does not own the user or their data (including their comment).
• The site owner may edit or remove a comment from their site at any time.
• Edited comments will be clearly marked as ‘Edited by moderator’ so that other users are aware a change has been made. The user will be emailed to notify them of the edit
• The user has the right to revoke their comment if they feel it no longer reflects their original intent
• The edited or deleted comment and the original version is preserved in the user’s visitor profile
• The site owner may have access to the user’s IP address
• The site owner may not have access to the user’s email address unless the user makes their email address public
• Even if the user’s email address is not made available to the site owner, the site owner can contact the user indirectly via the commenting platform
• The user has the right to delete their account and leave the site. They may choose to delete their comments in this proccess as a seperate and distinct choice.