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It seems that folks only question whether I'm paying attention over here when I don't act on their complaints.  That, or they get upset at me for paying attention if that attention centers on their online behavior in a way they don't agree with.  At any rate, I make lots of you unhappy by either, in your perspective, ignoring you or picking on you.  Of course, I don't think I'm doing either, but then, that's the crux of the matter here, isn't it.  It's a matter of opinion, and of context.

If you have no idea why I'm writing about this, or what the title of this post refers to, then you're either a newbie, an occasional reader of these blogs, or else have had the good fortune to either miss or ignore the maelstrom.  Rest assured folks, I have not had that good fortune--I have neither missed nor ignored it.

But some folks seem to think that if I don't agree with their assessment of whether something is a violation of our Terms of Use worthy of removal or other disciplinary action (or, conversely, when I act on something they don't think needed to be acted on), that constitutes either a lack of oversight, a damning bias on my part, or a desire to silence different opinions.

I want to thank witbee for posting that excerpt of our Terms of Use on the thread in question, and for others who chimed in about the responsibility of community members to familiarize themselves with the rules and to police themselves first and foremost.

I am not a lawyer.  Yes, our Terms of Use contain legal terms, but I am not holding up flagged images to a legal obscenity test.  The clause that witbee pasted refers to "false, defamatory, abusive, obscene, threatening, racially offensive, sexually explicit or illegal material," and elsewhere the word "pornographic" is used.  We don't allow profanity or slurs--some folks think that if I remove a slur from a comment, that means that I'm censoring their opinions.  Nope--I'm removing a slur.  Notice that, in the thread in question, I did not remove the many proclamations of personal disgust, some of which were more colorful than others and could have very well been flagged as violations or personal attacks of someone had wanted to.  (Not that that means I would've acted on them, I'm just illustrating my point.)  I only removed the slurs.  We've had this conversation before--it's not about the content or the opinion, it's about not using language that we've prohibited to describe the content or opinion.  If you can't express yourself without breaking out the f-bombs or slurs, then, well, there are plenty of unregulated spots on these interwebs.

Now, to the issue of obscenity and profile photos.  Again, I'm not a lawyer, but to paraphrase a supreme court justice who wrote on the matter, I know it when I see it.  The problem here is, so do you, each of you, but we don't all agree.  And though it may be unfair, I have the job here to sort through things and make decisions about these sorts of things.  The profile photo in question, to me, was not sexually explicit.  Was it more than a peck on the cheek?  Sure.  Could you see tongues playing tonsil hockey and naked torsos?  No.  Am I a legal expert here?  No.  But I am the one charged with evaluating your complaints.  You may not agree with what I decided, and you are more than welcome to take it over my head.  When touchy issues like this come up, believe you me, I ask for coworkers' opinions, and they weren't all the same on this issue either.  But then I have to make a decision, good or bad.  One community member has repeated complained about another profile photo and called it obscene (which, according to what I've read, usually deals specifically with sexually explicit material when discussed in legal terms), and I have not acted on these complaints because, while tasteless to me, it doesn't quite violate our terms of use.  Did I make a bad decision?  You want my bosses to overrule me?  Go ahead and take it over my head.  That's fine.  (I do want to point out though, that whatever the user's intention was in putting up that profile photo, that particular blog inviting people to weigh in on the image was prompted by several comments on another blog which went off-topic in order to comment on the photo which had appeared by the user's earlier comment on the thread; the post about the photo wasn't apropos of nothing, and, perhaps, might not have happened at all if the offended users had used "send-a-message" or some other way to make their opinion known.)

Have I never acted on inappropriate images, then?  Some of you will be quick to volunteer personal experiences that vouch for the fact that I have removed images that violate terms of use.  The ones that come to mind right now, which many of you would probably treat as harmless jokes, involve the physical representation of cursewords that wouldn't be allowed on the site if they'd been written out, and thus, their removal.

This is not a perfect system, by any means.  This is about people, and opinions, and context, and experience, and whenever those things come together, we're talking about subjectivity and interpretation and misinterpretation and disagreement.  But you know what?  If you cut through all the hyperbole and some of the more volatile and extreme reactions on that comment thread, what you have is, indeed, members of this community talking to each other about standards of behavior and what to do when we disagree.  And that kind of conversation isn't bad to have.

We've talked before about implementing other kinds of technological tools that would help the "policing" of this site; maybe it's time to revisit that conversation.

Keep having opinions, keep revisiting the Terms of Use, keep flagging things you think are violations, keep disagreeing with me, keep policing yourselves and your virtual neighbors--keep having the conversation.