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Pastimes : Religion on SI -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: flickerful who wrote (46)	8/17/1998 6:35:00 AM
From: Diver	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1542

flick... Good responses. You've got me (re)thinking. BTW thread, the WSJ has an interesting article about just this subject. Here is the link... interactive.wsj.com Here's an excerpt: "Chat Room Monitors Struggle To Deal With Censorship Issues By NANCY BOYD KENNEDY Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL INTERACTIVE EDITION These days, the Franklin Telecom thread on the Silicon Investor financial message boards is a bit thin. On July 24, Silicon Investor (www.techstocks.com) suspended five of the thread's regular participants, charging that the group was plotting a "group rebellion" against the bulletin-board operator. Terry Widner of Louisville, Ky., who goes by the screen name of Jack Sman,is one of the regulars left on the thread these days, but he says the place just isn't the same anymore. "This thread is essentially dead," says Mr. Widner. "It's a shame, because this used to be a great thread. It offered a lot of constructive information." As individual investors flock to Internet stock-discussion forums, censorship has become a troublesome issue for those who operate on-line message boards and chat rooms. Webmasters spend hours reading through e-mail complaints from board participants, reviewing questionable posts and taking action against those who have broken their rules. And software developers are coming up with ever more intricate means of allowing board participants to self-monitor their threads. The way Web site operators respond to the rowdy and raucous masses that populate their forums reveals a lot about how they view their roles as overseers, and shows much about where they stand on the perennial American debate over free speech. For its part, Silicon Investor says it does not actively patrol its boards, but will investigate complaints from board participants and delete posts or ban people it deems to have run afoul of its rules -- most often for the use of foul language, personal attacks, spamming, solicitation or hyping a stock." SK