Libel, Censorship and Blog Comments

Oct 31, 2009 Alun Politics, The Past 3 Comments Comments, Libel, Martin Schøyen

I hate the idea of a com­ment policy. The reg­u­lar read­ers are all intel­li­gent enough to make any policy redund­ant. The tiny minor­ity who are delu­sional enough to cause a prob­lem wouldn’t ser­i­ously stop to read any com­ment policy any­way. But occa­sion­ally a per­fectly good com­ment will either dis­ap­pear or fail to appear. Here’s why.

This is about as close as I’d like to get to a bar­ris­ter. Photo (cc) Steve Punter.

I’ve been busy recently. Hope­fully you’ll see the fruits of some of that work shortly, but it means I haven’t had time to write much here. One of the side-effects is that I get email point­ing to some­thing that I should blog about from a few people. For example an arte­fact has turned up some­where which is really dodgy. I’d guess there’s some sort of illegal activ­ity in its sale, but I don’t have the time to research where. Now if I had a forum I could leave it and half-a-dozen other people could have been talk­ing about this on site. One prob­lem though is libel.

If you’re run­ning an auc­tion house, Ponsonby’s for the sake of argu­ment. If you routinely sell unproven­anced antiquit­ies then you really rely on your repu­ta­tion. You don’t need people point­ing out that a large num­ber of Puglian vases you sell are likely to have been illeg­ally excav­ated from Italy (up to 95% of such vases accord­ing to one estim­ate). Nor do you need people high­light­ing that there’s a cot­tage industry in pro­du­cing fake Mycenaean fig­ur­ines. Basic­ally, the biggest guar­an­tee that this stuff is a sound invest­ment is your word and your reputation.

If someone blogs on Puglian vases gen­er­ally, that’s a prob­lem but react­ing to it is a bad idea because it drags your name into an argu­ment about sleaze. If it’s doc­u­mented that you’ve handled stolen goods and a blog­ger men­tions this it’s still a bad idea to leg­ally respond — you’d be repor­ted on widely for legal threats over some­thing which is obvi­ously true. You’d even­tu­ally silence the blog­ger, because the blog­ger wouldn’t be able to afford to defend the case, but you’d be slaughter­ing your own repu­ta­tion in the pro­cess. So a forum would be a place where you could dis­cuss this and help reduce the value of illi­cit antiquit­ies without dam­aging the mar­ket for legal arte­facts. But there’s a prob­lem when you start dis­cuss­ing motive.

Sooner or later someone will point out that Ponsonby’s routinely handles illi­cit mater­ial. It’s entirely human to spec­u­late that if a new undoc­u­mented Puglian vase turns up, Ponsonby’s know it’s prob­ably been excav­ated by organ­ised crime. That’s human, reas­on­able and action­able. At that point you’re assign­ing guilt to Ponsonby’s and dam­aging their repu­ta­tion by say­ing they’re know­ingly enga­ging in crim­inal action by fen­cing stolen goods. Now they have a case worth win­ning, because when they win it will be clear­ing them of crim­inal activ­ity and enhan­cing their repu­ta­tion — iron­ic­ally mak­ing them very attract­ive to any­one else who wants to laun­der artefacts.

That’s why I don’t have a forum. Someone act­ing sens­ibly and reas­on­ably would even­tu­ally put me in a pos­i­tion where I’d have to start delet­ing com­ments because I’d be held leg­ally account­able for whatever snookums538 pos­ted on the site. It might seem like para­noid, but it’s jus­ti­fied paranoia.

For example Mar­tin Schøyen has some incant­a­tion bowls from the Middle East. David Gill and Sam Hardy both men­tioned a debate in the House of Lords earlier this week. An invest­ig­a­tion has stated they were prob­ably illeg­ally removed from Iraq des­pite being, in a very real and legal sense, the prop­erty of Mr Mar­tin Schøyen. I’ve blogged in the past about how much these are very much Mar­tin Schøyen’s prop­erty. In fact he has my sym­pathy as the fact that the invest­ig­a­tion into the ori­gins of these bowls was sup­pressed, by per­sons unknown, could lead someone to mis­takenly think some­thing a bit dodgy is going on. It’s def­in­itely not. I know Mr Schøyen is a fine upstand­ing cit­izen because when I emailed ask­ing for a copy of the report he didn’t reply — thus keep­ing to this out of court settlement.

I sent the email after get­ting a com­ment from a pub­li­cist for the Schøyen Col­lec­tion. I wrote a blog post which made it clear the bowls were 100% leg­ally the prop­erty of Mar­tin Schøyen. I linked to a news­pa­per art­icle which made it clear that Mr Schøyen had done noth­ing wrong in any way because the bowls were entirely and unques­tion­ably leg­ally his. The com­ment, first after the post, might not be quite as pos­it­ive as mine, but it shows that even on a minor blog art col­lect­ors take their repu­ta­tions very ser­i­ously. But what would hap­pen if someone pos­ted some­thing libel­lous as a com­ment? This is why I use com­ment mod­er­a­tion, cur­rently via Disqus.

Com­ment mod­er­a­tion is essen­tial for a blog as any­one who’s run one will tell you. For every com­ment by a real per­son, there’s about four by auto­mated sys­tems. These can come in storms. For example a post about the Brit­ish Chiro­practic Asso­ci­ation has recently had at least 250 spam­ming attempts in the past twenty-four hours. Without some form of spam­guard I’d be get­ting swamped by junk com­ments. Not all of these com­ments are going to be GET P0RN HER3!!!!!!!. Some will attempt to look nor­mal. If your com­puter gets whitel­is­ted then it bypasses a lot of checks. Laura’s com­ment “Do you really want to know why this is a ter­rible idea? Ask an immun­o­lo­gist.” has given me some prob­lems. It could be genu­ine and immun­o­lo­gists might be opposed to extra­solar astro­nomy. How­ever the non-sequitur sug­gests someone hasn’t read the art­icle, so it could be an attempt by a spam com­puter to pass as nor­mal. Allow­ing the com­ment to stand marks out a secur­ity hole in this site and maybe that’s why the num­ber of spam attempts has rock­eted. I’ve con­tac­ted the email asso­ci­ated with the com­ment ask­ing if it’s genu­ine and got no reply. That’s why I’m delet­ing it. Another com­mon fea­ture if spam posts is that they have a lot of links. There’s often good reason to include links in com­ments, you’d want to point to some other inform­a­tion maybe. But because of spam­mers Dis­qus counts the links and deletes. Any­thing above two links is prob­ably going to be deleted.

I don’t like doing that because if someone’s taken the effort to type some­thing in then that’s kind of them. It’s clear I don’t agree with Scott Mon­ahan. I’ve never known a depart­ment with a ‘depart­mental grant writer’, but maybe they do things dif­fer­ently in Amer­ica. I accept that there’s always going to be someone who knows where Atlantis is, or who really settled the Amer­icas. If they want to share that enthu­si­asm that’s great, just so long as they don’t think I’m obliged to take them ser­i­ously. Besides the great thing about tak­ing com­ments from people who dis­agree with you is that occa­sion­ally you learn some­thing.

If your com­ment doesn’t appear here, it’s quite pos­sible it’s down to some reason that’s not your fault. If I’ve poin­ted you here that’s all you need to know. This is why, espe­cially if I like your com­ments, I recom­mend set­ting up your own web­log. So why bring this up now? Well I’ve been vis­ited by one of the spe­cial people on the internet.