*OT* Speaking of 'dueling threaders', here's an article in today's WSJ concerning the topic. SI is mentioned...
August 17, 1998
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.
The controversy surrounding Franklin Telecom, a Westlake Village, Calif.,
producer of Internet telephony products and services, arose over posts
made on a thread devoted to the company by ValueSpec, a board
participant who refuses to reveal his or her identity, but who frequently
posts negative comments about the company. Many posters, including Mr.
Widner, consider ValueSpec's posts "antagonistic."
"I question ValueSpec's motives for posting since he or she claims to have
no position in the stock," says Mr. Widner.
Board participants bombarded Silicon Investor with requests to censor
ValueSpec or allow them to tune him out. Instead, Silicon Investor
co-founder Jeff Dryer decided it was the complainers who should go.
"We feel that ValueSpec posts his opposing viewpoints in a fair way. It is
often the pro-FTEL participants who submit messages that are considered
personal attacks," says Mr. Dryer.
Over at the Raging Bull (www.ragingbull.com) financial site, where the five
former SI members now congregate to discuss the stock, founder Bill
Martin believes it is his site's responsibility to provide board members with
tools to self-censor the boards. Raging Bull offers a feature that allows a
user to block out posts made by board participants whose language or
views that user finds objectionable.
The feature has been a powerful draw. David Neece of Porterville, Calif.,
known by his screen name Orangegrower, was won over by it because it
allows him to weed out posts by the naysayers, hypsters and impostors he
says often populate the boards. "A lot of us were fed up with the idiots on
the Yahoo! [Finance] board. We pushed for an 'ignore' feature, but they
wouldn't do anything," says Mr. Neece.
Mr. Martin of Raging Bull believes that his site's "ignore" feature is not so
much a tool of censorship but a technology that heightens the civility of his
boards. "We've found that very few people use the ignore feature, but it
does act as a deterrent," says Mr. Martin.
Raging Bull also has programmed a unique feature into its message boards
that cuts down on the use of foul language. Common swear words or
vulgar expressions typed into a post appear on screen only as a series of
pound (###) signs.
Perhaps the most monitored of the bulletin-board communities are those of
the Motley Fool (www.fool.com). It plucks posters from its boards to join
its staff as paid moderators of board discussions.
David Forrest, head of Motley Fool's discussion forums, doesn't view the
role of the moderators as one of censorship.
"Nobody likes a Big Brother watching over them," says Mr. Forrest. "The
primary reason for their presence is to engage users and make sure they're
enjoying their on-line experience."
Nevertheless, the moderators are watchdogs. Motley Fool offers a "Fool
Alert" key that allows board participants to praise or complain about fellow
participants, and the moderators do warn offenders and remove people
from their boards.
And, Mr. Forrest says Motley Fool is working on a feature similar to
Raging Bull's "ignore" technology that it calls a "kill file." The site used to
offer this feature, but it slowed down response times, he says. By
reinstating the feature, Mr. Forrest says Motley Fool will be giving users
the same option that television viewers have to surf past objectionable
material with a remote control.
At the other end of the spectrum, Yahoo Finance! (quote.yahoo.com)
takes an extreme hands-off approach. Not surprisingly, the boards have
gained a reputation as an on-line Wild West. But Mike Riley, producer of
Yahoo Finance, believes his laissez-faire approach has the weight of
Internet law behind it.
"The courts have come down on the side of the Internet as a marketplace
of ideas, rather than a medium that needs to be heavily policed," he says.
Last year, when the Supreme Court struck down the Communications
Decency Act, a provision of the 1996 Telecommunications Act that made
it a crime to transmit indecent material to minors, it left one crucial section
intact: on-line publishers of information provided by a third party cannot be
held liable for the content they transmit.
"The real weight of this ruling is that the Internet was granted the highest
level of First Amendment protection," says Nicole Wong, an attorney of
Internet law for Hosie, Wes, Sacks and Brelsford, a San Francisco law
firm. "It affirmed that it is not possible to edit the Internet and that to require
that would break down the Internet."
Ms. Wong believes the court ruling was on target, but thinks legal
protections will not prove to be the best way to regulate financial message
boards.
"Any legal or policy solutions will be outpaced by technology," she says.
"Operators of on-line sites will figure out what the market wants in a way
that law can't answer as efficiently."
Intertwined with the censorship debate, many believe, is the issue of on-line
anonymity. That anonymity creates an environment in which people can
create and spread rumors with no substance and do a lot of damage in the
process, charges Tyler Thatcher, manager of investor relations at Iomega
Corp., the Roy, Utah, maker of data-storage and backup devices for
personal computers.
"Iomega is a poster child for this debate," Mr. Thatcher says. "Our stock
was discovered in 1994 by the retail investor just as the bulletin boards
were beginning to proliferate. We were a small company going through a
period of tremendous growth, and a lot of the stock's volatility was due to
the message boards."
While Mr. Thatcher says Iomega is far less affected by on-line chat today,
he does occasionally ask board operators to delete fake press releases that
find their way onto the boards, or to remove posts of people posing as
company employees claiming to have inside knowledge.
In the end, however, board participants themselves will probably dictate
how the issue of censorship plays out. Silicon Investor acknowledges that
user pressure like that coming from the Franklin Telecom thread could
force it to change its stance on the ignore feature, at the least.
"We don't agree with it -- we think it just lets people create their own
utopias. But if demand for it grows greater, we'll have to consider it," says
Silicon Investor Webmaster Jill McKinney.
John |
