The often-repeated fear is that comment control – the removing comments that you don’t want on your blog – is somehow the same as censorship. This is not only untrue but potentially damaging to your platform.

What is freedom of speech anyway?

If your blog has ever been visited by a troll, you know exactly how much community damage one individual can do. Try to remove their abusive comments and they will almost certainly cry “censorship” and “what about my freedom of speech”. Such a reaction to your comment control shows is that the troll does not understand either of those things.

Freedom of speech

Freedom of speech is the promise that the government will not arrest you for what you say. It is not the freedom to say what you want, where ever you want to say it, and without any repercussions.

Freedom of speech is the right to say whatever you like about whatever you like, whenever you like, right? Wrong. […] Freedom of speech and the right to freedom of expression applies to ideas of all kinds including those that may be deeply offensive. But it comes with responsibilities and we believe it can be legitimately restricted.

What is freedom of speech?, Amnesty International

Removing a comment does not remove a person’s right to say bad things. Nothing can stop someone saying things about your blog, your post, or your community. Comment control simply says, “if you want to say those things, say them somewhere else.”

As we in the west enjoy a great deal of freedom of speech, we enjoy the freedom to express ideas that might be unpopular. What we do not have is the right to force anyone to listen to those ideas. Just as you have the right to say things, the community has the right not to listen. When an unpopular comment is removed this is in support of the right not to listen. Comment control is the freedom not to be subjected to comments that are mean, disruptive, hateful, aggressive, spammy, or simply out of place.

Censorship

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or “inconvenient”.

Censorship, Wikipedia

While, censorship is the deliberate silencing of a person and the removal of all avenues of expression. Comment control, on the other hand, is just good stewardship of your corner of the internet.

Preventing access to something is not the same as refusing to host it. Censorship happens when, for example, a country forces their ISPs to prevent the citizens from seeing any and all reference to whatever they are censoring. Such as happens in China.

Censorship cannot, therefore, happen on a single website or blog. If one site will not carry your message, another might. Especially if you create the site yourself. Baring some law forcing ISPs to filter everything you say, the only ones capable of actual censorship are probably Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

By comparison, a blogger removing rude and abrasive comments that do not fit within their comment policy is simply catering for the desired audience. Keeping the blog a nice place to read about interesting topics means removing comments that prevent that. Comment control is healthy. To try and equate removing a bad comment to actual censorship is inaccurate, to say the least.

Running a blog is much like hosting a party

Imagine you threw a big party. The venue is full of guests all having a pretty good time. What would happen if one guest stood up and started loudly criticising the venue, the party, and the guests? Either you remove the trouble maker or, eventually, the guests are going to leave.

Do you want to keep the guests you have? Or would you want to swap them for angry and aggressive guests? Do you want the reputation as a person who throws parties it is safe to go to? Or do you want to be known as a person who attracts only combative and loud-mouthed guests? Your answer will be in the form of what you do with the loud trouble maker.

Blogs are not so different. If your desired audience is loudly confrontational, you do nothing. If, on the other hand, your audience is made up of more civilised people, you need to get rid of the trouble maker before the trouble maker gets rid of your audience.

Comment control is good blogging

When a comment is allowed to remain on a blog, it says something about the blogger. The comments that are allowed to remain tacitly implies the site owner’s approval. A comment left up might not imply agreement but it always implies approval.

Good blogging necessitates the removal of harmful, excessively commercial, off-topic, rude, or disruptive comments. As a commercial enterprise, book blogging by authors might include the careful limiting of negative reviews on the author’s blog. Authors are under no obligation to give equal weight to the opinions of all readers.

Commercial blogging is not unbiased news reporting. Author blogging, as an example, exists to further the end goal of selling books. Comment control is part of that effort. While you might like a lively debate, at the end of the day, you have the power and the right to remove comments that go too far. The case might even be made that you also have a responsibility to remove some comments.