In the context of Senator Obama’s mastery of the social internet in his Presidential campaign, there’s been a lot of pressure on President Obama to embrace social media in the same way.
As expected there’s been a fair amount of disappointment so far with the President’s use of social media to date. The reason for this being that not only has Obama’s web team been reduced from the campaigning Halcyon of 100+ to around 5, but also the White House faces massive logistical (and policy) issues with discussion moderation – especially as political discussion is famously firey. If the White House were to run an open political discussion area, it would undoubtedly be high-jacked by the inappropriate few (thousand).
Clive Thompson over at Wired US has written a really great piece on the Taming of Comment Trolls relating to this.
One of the most interesting anecdotes he gives of en masse moderation is Boing Boing’s lead moderator’s policy of “disemvowelling” nasty / inappropriate posts – i.e. removing all the vowels in the offending sentence, leaving it thoroughly neutered and incoherent. Something like this “y r c m pl t ssw p ” for example.
I’m offering a free Wispa to first person who can guess the offending comment!
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I know what it is but I’m too shy to type it out. I think it first became popular in the 80′s….
Ha! Well you’re not gonna win the prize then! Only the bold win Delib competitions . . .
You’ re a c om plete asswipe
Looks like I owe you a Wispa, Dick!
In the long run for a successful community it’s wise to make sure the culture and community rules are consistently applied from the outset to help avoid use of clinical inteventions such as ‘disemvowelling’. Prevention is better than cure!