The wrong way to protect community

I wrote the following post yesterday to run on our site after an unpleasant incident with a prospective vendor.Before I posted, I got a just-satisfactory-enough apology and explanation from the president of the company involved to hold my digital tongue. But, there are some points in here worth sharing with this group. Names have been removed to protect the acquitted.

As our regular readers know, our user comments which are (at least compared to a lot of local sites) active, vibrant, mostly on-topic and reasonably civil are a point of great pride for us here at PNWHQ.

To date, we've had over 26,000 user comments posted and moderated fewer than fifty. That's less than .1 percent, and to be honest the bulk of those moderated were staff who were getting too hot under the collar about a dealing with a vocal user.

We have over 12,000 voluntarily registered users and all have the ability to upload an image avatar. Until today, we haven't had to remove any.

Last night, a new user posted a misspelled (to avoid our language filter) racial epithet on a story about uninsured motorist policy. I removed that comment early today via my iPhone-- I saw it both via the emails we receive on new user comments and because a user had flagged it as inappropriate.

Further, the user in question had an avatar that was a graphic photograph of a topless woman performing a sex act on a naked man. We removed the image and deactivated the account. We also gleaned from the IP address that the post came from outside our area.

This troubled me because it is out of character for our site. The moderation stats speak for themselves and our registration requirements are just tough enough to make us (so far) unattractive to spammers.

I didn't think any more of it until I learned that our CTO had a conference call this morning with a company that specializes in the automated moderation of user-generated content. I briefly wondered aloud if they might be involved but dismissed the idea as ridiculous.

However, in the course of the demo (in which I did not participate, but learned of from Jeremy), the Business Development Manager tried to wow us by showing us the offensive user profile. She then admitted that she had posted the comment and the photo and made light of it by saying that she was the woman depicted in the avatar.

If analog security companies like alarm providers tried tactics like this (especially in Texas), somebody would end up shot. The stakes might seem lower online, but I take equal exception to a purported partner breaking into my office and mucking with our site unannounced.

In response to my email on the tactic, the BizDev manager called me but didn't leave a voicemail and then by email offered the following:

"My apologies for posting the inappropriate content. I was simple trying to test the current moderation tool you had in place. I agree that this is not a best practice and will remove it from our testing process."

Call me a cynic, but I doubt that the tactic will stop. If it was just a test and you cared at all about our business, why not alert us immediately rather than try to leave the harmful material up for more than twelve hours? (Even if it was handled that way, without our permission, I'd still call the tactic ill-advised.)

I'm sure it's really effective to show a prospect their vulnerability by posting harmful material and violating their terms of service -- if said prospect is easily spooked by the craziness of Interwebs 2.0, or whatever the Wikipediaorg calls it today.

And its a slippery slope. If we became a customer and were slow to buy an upgrade or new service, would this partner exploit the vulnerabilities of the old to scare us into buying? If creating fear is the best sales tactic available, is this a product that merits our use?

(I responded to her and emailed the company president and sales VPm to confirm whether this was indeed standard operating procedure, and have yet to receive a response -- the email certainly made it seem as if it was.)

NB: I later got an email from the president that this was a new employee acting way outside company policy.

To be clear, I have no idea about the quality and efficacy of the service, although I do know that they have an A-list of clients and our CTO was fairly impressed with their product. But I know that this confirms my bias -- at least at the local scale -- against solutions that lean more heavily on technology than on people.

That's not to say we don't use technology in our posting system -- that's how we caught and decided to remove the offensive material. But when timid auld media folk ask me how in the world we don't crumble under the weight of moderating user submissions, I always have the same response:

"We don't moderate. We participate."

We help set standards by joining the fray and (at our best) showing how we would like to see discussions conducted. We let people know we're paying attention by answering user questions and by posting thanks and acknowledgment when a user comment yields even a mundane correction. And because of that, our loose but real boundaries quickly become apparent to even the newest members of the community.

I fear that those who rely exclusively or primarily on technology to police a community miss the point -- and a lot of opportunity. Virtually every story we've done that was big enough to be picked up by local TV stations, for instance, came out of tips in user comments. The vibrancy of the social community created by our users, but enabled and catalyzed by us, is one of the key reasons that things like targeted promotions are working so well for our advertisers.

And I would hesitate to hand the keys to the community's bus to someone who thinks that the way to introduce themselves is by flouting its standards or trying to show off its vulnerabilities.