The Effects of Censorship — a Tale of Two Websites

An anonymous reader writes "Two message boards devoted to the same topic have each been on-line for roughly eight years. One is censored, and the other is not. The two forums are virtually the only ones devoted to their topic (polygraph testing, a fairly arcane one), so they're in "competition" only with each other. The result? The uncensored forum has more than six times as many posts as the censored one." To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.

first uncensored post

cmdrtaco smells bad.

But the quality of the posts

? What about s/n ratio on censored and uncensored forums ? if 5 of 6 posts on latter messageboard are offtopic (goatse, flamewars, irrelevant and trollish) , then s/n ratio of censored forum is waay higher.
 

Re:But the quality of the posts

Judging which posts qualify as noise is not a straightforward issue, though; one's results could vary wildly according to exactly where one chooses to draw the line. And when all the moderators drawing that line are on one side of an argument, any deletions which might objectively be judged as overzealous will most likely favour that side. The only way to be sure of seeing the whole argument is if there is no moderation (or, less euphemistically, censorship).

As far as the uncensored site attracting more discussion, that can only be judged conclusively if the number of posts deleted on the moderated site is known - although they would have to outnumber existing posts by a factor of 5.5 for the sites to have had equivalent levels of traffic.

(All of which disregards bannings from both sites, which would also be a factor.)

Re:But the quality of the posts

In regard to this question of quality vs. quantity, where is the line between "censored" and "moderated"? I'm thinking of the official WoW forums compared Elitist Jerks forums. The EJ forums are heavily moderated, whereas the WoW forums are not. The WoW forums get many, many, many times as many posts...yet most of it is total crap. Anybody who wants to seriously discuss WoW and not just have flame wars goes to EJ.

And in response to concerns that "oversight doesn't scale", the advantage of moderation is not just that the moderators weed out the junk, but that people end up posting less junk in the first place.

Re:But the quality of the posts

I'm on the two large Pontiac Fiero forums. and I can tell you that the amount of USEFUL info is far greater on the Censored forum compared to the uncensored one.

The uncensored RFT is chock full of outright lies and bull while the Fiero.nl one is censored not ony in content but in quality of content. If a post is flat out wrong and the poster will not change it it get's deleted. on RFT you get a 3 month long pissing match that degenerates into nothing more than a flamefest.

Yes the number of posts are higher, but the quality of those posts are of lower value.

Melodramatic

Censored? Do we mean, less melodramatically, "moderated"?

Perhaps the author is under the impression that quantity and quality are the same thing.

Re:Melodramatic

Agreed. And moderation doesn't necessarily have to mean deleting posts. As a FidoNet echo moderator many years ago, 90% of what I had to do was to tell users to cool off or they were gonna get banned. Only nodes that were deliberately sending spam (or refused to listen to the moderator) got banned. It wasn't like we could really delete messages anyhow (there was no equivalent of UseNet's 'cancel'), but my moderation for local boards (where I did have the power to delete) was basically the same.

I only ever deleted a very small number of posts, most at the request of the original posters.

Re:Melodramatic

Nevermind that while the topics of the forums are "polygraph testing", they couldn't possibly be more different. One is pro, and the other is anti polygraph.

Which one do you think has more posts?

What a stupid waste of an article.

Re:Melodramatic

Censored? Do we mean, less melodramatically, "moderated"?

Really. I'm surprised the summary didn't say, "One site, run by fascists, gets less traffic from nice people like me."

Of all of the terms that get tortured out of proper use (on this board, esepcially), "censorship" is one of most abused. When you choose to go make use of a service (like an online forum), one of the things you consider is whether or not the rules of that gathering's discourse are useful to you, or not. It's called freedom of association, and it's the exact opposite of censorship. Censorship would involve a central authority, backed up by force, that would impact all public discourse in the same way. That central government authority is not present in this case. Censorship is not happening. There's nothing stopping anyone from just starting up another board that DOES tolerate any nonsense anyone wants to post.

There are all sorts of forums that are only worth a damn because they ARE moderated. That's not censorship, it's quality control. People who call it censorship probably also complain that there are rules in pick-up basketball games among people who gather to play them, or that not every church uses the hymn book they think should be used, or that the politcal party they hate has primary elections according that party's own preferences.

Slashdot has opted not to run with at least a few of my submitted articles over the years. Censorship? Give me a break.

Re:Melodramatic

Of all of the terms that get tortured out of proper use (on this board, esepcially), "censorship" is one of most abused. When you

We do not torture terms here at Slashdot. (We may, however, subject them to severely harsh treatment, inflicting traumatic pain and degradation. But not *torture*, oh no, never *torture*)

Re:Melodramatic

You are wrong

Not really.

From the dictionary: censorial control exercised repressively

What you're missing here is the complete absence of any repression. You are not being "censored" (in the way that the word is both usefully used and somewhat in the way that it's commonly used) when you can find or create any number of other outlets to say what you will, when you will, both anonymously and not.

There's a reason that the terms "edited" and "moderated" are correctly used in cases like this. It's because to use the terms "censored" completely cheapens that word as it's used to describe its actual, repressive, authoritarian use as in (for the obvious examples these days) China, Iran, North Korea, etc. You don't experience repression when you use a moderated message board. You go there BECAUSE it's moderated. It's a choice. Censored public discourse restricts choice, while moderated discourse in which you choose to participate is itself the expression of choice.

If you choose to assign it a negative connotation to the word, that is your prerogative.

You didn't find the connotation of the word, as trotted out in the summary, to already be dripping with negativity? The summary correctly assigns a repressive tone to the word "censorship," but is completely tone-deaf in applying it to the topic being discussed, where it's not meaningful.

6 times as many posts is not necessarily ...

* post censored *

Re:6 times as many posts is not necessarily ...

Parent is making things up. I'm certainly not gett~$^NO CARRIER

quantity != quality

I shouldn't have to say this. The article doesn't talk at all about the quality of the posting in the forums, only that in one, dissenting opinions are banned (and, being said by the competition, I take it with a boatload of salt).

Two data points don't make a trend

Show me a topic with 10 or 12 forums, with a balance between censored and uncensored formats, and *then* I'll grant the possibility of a trend.

Otherwise, one bad moderator, or one good poster can make a big difference, hiding the effects of censorship.

Anecdotal Evidence Does not Warrant a Headline

Wow. One website has a green background, and another has a blue background. The one with the green background has 12x as many posts as the other one. Coincidence? I think not.

One difference: Off-topic posting

The "uncensored" board has two sections which do not exist on the other board: "off topic", which has the usual "forum games" and other post-count spammers, and a section called "Employment Forums", which also deals with off-topic posting.

It's easy to claim you have more posts than your competitor if your scope is much wider.

my forum's bigger than yours

This sounds a bit adolescent to me.

Measuring your success by the number of posts, either as an individual or as a forum owner is irrelevant - unless you're counting on advertisement revenue.

If I was interested in this topic, I'd be inclined to post to whichever one had the more professional (i.e. lowest spam ratio) content

Awul thing to post.

The problems are obvious and numerous.

First of all, there is the assumption that the only difference between the two boards is that one is moderated (censored? give me a break) and the other is not. There is no accounting for differences in advertising, domain names, partnerships, ease of use and navigation, bad moderators, abusive members, on-page advertising, site speed, yadda yadda.

Second of all, there is a difference between quantity and quality. Many Usenet groups still get many more posts than online forums covering the same topics, but 90%+ of Usenet posts are just garbage.

Pro Vs Anti

To be fair, there are a few other differences between the two forums, but the point may still be valid.

I'll say.

My first suspicion was that one just reeked of horrid angry fruit salad 1999 intarwebs design (dancing Jesu & flying toasters with a midi track in octaves meant for torture timed with a blinking marquee tag). Honestly, they look about on par although I prefer the simplicity of YaBB though in my opinion it doesn't seem to be an issue here. Normally this is the biggest discriminator for a website's success, not the content.

I did find it interesting to note the slant to these message boards though. The 'uncensored' website has this text as it's homepage:

Did you know:

• The consensus view among scientists is that polygraph testing has no scientific basis [slashdot.org]?
• The FBI considered the creator of the lie detector test to be a phony and a crackpot [antipolygraph.org]?
• The man who started the CIA's polygraph program thinks that plants can read human thoughts [antipolygraph.org]?
• The foremost polygraph advocate in academia was discredited by a federal judge? [antipolygraph.org]
• A prominent past-president of the American Polygraph Association is a phony Ph.D. [slashdot.org], and this premier polygraph organization doesn't consider it an ethics problem [antipolygraph.org]?
• The longest polygraph school [daca.mil] produces newly minted polygraphers in just 14 weeks -- less than half the time it takes to graduate from a typical barber college?
• The Defense Academy for Credibility Assessment (the erstwhile DoD Polygraph Institute) suppressed a study suggesting that innocent blacks are more likely to fail the polygraph [slashdot.org] than innocent whites?
• The researcher who developed the U.S. Government's polygraph Test for Espionage and Sabotage [slashdot.org] "thought the whole security screening program should be shut down?"
• The National Academy of Sciences [nap.edu] concluded that "[polygraph testing's] accuracy in distinguishing actual or potential security violators from innocent test takers is insufficient to justify reliance on its use in employee security screening in federal agencies?"
• Spies Ignatz Theodor Griebl [antipolygraph.org], Karel Frantisek Koecher [antipolygraph.org], Jiri Pasovsky [antipolygraph.org], Larry Wu-tai Chin [antipolygraph.org], Aldrich Hazen Ames [fas.org], Ana Belen Montes [antipolygraph.org], and Leandro Aragoncillo [antipolygraph.org] all passed the polygraph?
• One of the most prolific serial killers in U.S. history passed the polygraph [antipolygraph.org] and killed again?
• Al-Qaeda [slashdot.org] and Iraqi insurgents [slashdot.org] know full well that the lie detector is bogus?
• You don't have to be a psychopath, go to spy school, or somehow believe your own lies to fool the polygraph? (We'll reveal how it's done.)

While the 'censored' board has this as its opening text:

The Polygraph Place

Wow, such insightful research

Talk about useless research.
I wonder what their research proposal looked like.

I bet it goes something like this:

research hypothesis: censorship leads to conversations (c) being censored
H1: c1 > c2

Null-hypothesis: censorhsip has no consequences whatsoever
H0: c1 = c2

Money needed for research: $12 million + travel expenses

6.5x posts in unmoderated forums....

Why polygraph is bad.
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Polygraph for therapy.
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  Grow HUGE Package.
  Taste of china.

Moderation does not improve the quality of a forum

Sure, the "article" may be a crappy posting by some guy in antipolygraph.org, but he's right. Moderators don't filter very well.

To see a good example, moderate me +1 Insightful.

Re:Moderation does not improve the quality of a fo

Now that I have your attention: even strict editor-based filtering doesn't often work very well. Too often it reflects the knowledge gaps or biases of the editors. This is not to say that people are dumb. Rather, we tend to trust others and think less critically about topics with which we're only casually acquainted, compared with topics where we're experts.

To see a prime example, take a look at Saturday's Slashdot post Wikimedia Censors Wikinews [slashdot.org]. The latter half of the article text, written by an anonymous author, was just wrong, a fact that one commenter noticed [slashdot.org] after discussion was well underway.

The text, in case you're curious:

The US Communications Deceny Act section 230 grants providers of internet services (such as the Wikipedia and Wikinews) immunity from legal action related to their user-generated content provided they do not exercise pre-publication control. In deleting articles critical of the WMF prior to publication, Wikileaks says the Wikimedia Foundation may have set a dangerous precedent that could remove all of its CDA section 230 immunity (at least for Wikinews, where the control was exercised)."

(Actually, section 230 exempts you whether or not you exercise editorial control. In fact, that law was passed in large part to clarify unclear prior laws and to make it clear that even if you exercised editorial control, you were still protected. See Stratton Oakmont Inc. v. Prodigy Services Co., 1995 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 229 (N.Y. Sup. Ct. 1995).)

polygraph testing?

we're dealing with polygraph aficionados? people who's obsessive hobby or profession is in the detection of lies... ok

you would think that such a crowd wouldn't need censors, in fact, wouldn't WANT censors. if lie detection was my thing, i'd want a comment board littered with lies. you know, to work at my skillset. i could bond with other posters on the commment board as we sniffed out who was lying and who wasn't

"did you see the obvious freudian slip in that post, and the so-called 'accidental' dropping the pronoun at the end of the second sentence? his subconcious is practically screaming guilt"

"as good as beads of sweat on that post. and you can almost hear the hesitant stammering in the final sentence, the way he loops around his final point"

"yeah, that post is a lie"

it seems to me that aficionados of polygraph testing who need censorship is kind of like psychics who can't guess the lottery numbers