From: Louis Newstrom (louisnews@comcast.net)
Date: Tue May 28 2002 - 20:10:08 MDT
From: "Lee Corbin" <lcorbin@tsoft.com>
> John Clark writes
> > Lee wrote
>
> >>were a list moderator to end a thread, or to take any forceful
> >>action whatsoever, we must conclude that censorship has occurred.
>
You are once again confusing action and inaction that might result in
similar situations.
Taking action to stop you from talking is censorship. I.e. if I sabatoge
your computer so you can't get to the net, that would be censorship.
Not taking action enabling you to speak is NOT censorship. I.e. channel
four not giving you your own talk show is NOT censorship.
In the case of a mailing list, it is NOT censorship. The owners of the list
are doing you a favor by publishing your comments for others to see. If,
for whatever reason, they don't want to publish your comments on their
forum, that is NOT censorship.
> So it's rather general, and it would be correct usage to say
> that "a list moderator censored a [post, thread, topic]".
No. It would be an imflammatory exaggeration.
> Having far less on-line experience than you, let me ask:
> has it in fact been a common problem on lists with people
> engaging in discussions that by their own admission have
> nothing to do with the obvious theme of a forum?
YES! This is a BIG problem. The sci.* groups are practically unusable
because of off-topic postings by religious zealots preaching, or by
crackpots who claim modern science is wrong. That is one of the main
reasons that mailing lists and other MODERATED groups exist. Many people
WANT a moderator to keep out the spam.
> Oh yes, no doubt about that. My question is always "who decides?".
In our case, the owners of the list. Whoever is PAYING MONEY to have a
computer which accepts our messages and forwards them to others. They are
doing a service for us, and they have total say over everything.
First, because they have total control over the computer, there is no way to
stop them from having total control over the list. Second, because WE
joined THEIR list. They created a mail list for a specific purpose, and
most lists clearly state what that purpose is.
> If I saw a topic that struck me as totally unrelated to this
> forum...
> What would you do? What should anyone do?
Nothing. I don't own the list. If you really feel strongly, you can always
contact the list owners to make your opinions known. But in the end, each
list is owned by someone, and the owner of the list makes the final
decision.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:14:27 MST