PressEthic

Mark Maness, in his blog 4 rows back in the bleacher seats, talks about whether or not Jesus would blog.

Now I believe He would not only have plenty of objections, but there would no doubt be a liberal use of the flag button by those who would seek to silence Him in their anger over His precepts. And I mean "liberal" with a small "l".

The flag button is a relatively new feature at Blogger with which readers can “flag,” or mark as objectionable, individual posts. According to Blogger:

When a person visiting a blog clicks the "Flag?" button in the Blogger Navbar, it means they believe the content of the blog may be potentially offensive or illegal. We track the number of times a blog has been flagged as objectionable and use this information to determine what action is needed. This feature allows the blogging community as a whole to identify content they deem objectionable. Have you read The Wisdom of Crowds? It's sort of like that.

So, no one is changing or limiting what the bloggers can write. If the people who run Blogger decide there’s merit to the flags, they can set the blog in question to “unlisted,” which means it’s available on the internet, but is not promoted at Blogger.com.

This seems fair enough. You can’t please everyone, so you make the best compromises you can.

Not all bloggers are happy with this, though. Steakboy at Songs of Meat complains on two levels. The first is personal – he wants his critics to address him directly rather than anonymously flagging his blog. The second:

I do have a big problem with:

the complete lack of transparency regarding how these standards are defined, and with making users have to dig and scrounge for what can only be described as a vague sense for the contours of the issues relative to standards.

I also have a problem with the lack of any notification to bloggers of real or perceived transgressions of these (badly-defined) standards, and of determinations that a blog has been blacklisted (if in case that is what has happened here). I only and by accident and through my own efforts stumbled across an awareness of something having going awry with my blog. No one has extended the courtesy of even a perfunctory, sterile, canned, automated notification of how, where, or when I may have stepped out of line.

Emphasis his.

So, technically, I suppose it’s not censorship. At the same time, I can understand Steakboy’s frustration. Blogger has the right to do what it wants with its free service, anyway, and they’re not shutting people down for what they write. Still, it might be a good idea for Blogger to inform those it takes action against as to why the action is going on – if they’re not doing so already.

Mark’s post, and this whole situation, make me wonder something, though:

WWJF? Who would Jesus flag?