Comment policies do not abuse your right to free speech

by Esra'a (Bahrain)

I have not bothered to write about this because I always felt it was painfully obvious to others, unfortunately this is far from the case. Racist, homophobic, and generally abusive commenters continue to complain that our moderators are abusing their right to free speech by deleting their trollish and unwelcome comments.

Let me get a few things straight for those of you who don’t know much about free speech.

A website is a private domain, just like a house is private property. You don’t allow a thief to roam around freely, take a shit on your carpet, smash your television screen just because you believe in “freedom of movement” or that everyone has the freedom to do whatever they please. You have limits on who enters your house and what they do in it. Websites are no different. You do not enter a website, spew hateful, irrelevant remarks, or comments that offer no constructive criticism and are written merely for the sake of attacking and provoking another person, and expect to get away with it. These comments get deleted, just like the thief’s face gets smashed in with a pan and/or tack hammer.

You did not abuse this thief’s human rights by smashing his face, nor did we abuse your right to free speech by deleting your comment and probably enlisting you on our system as a spammer. Both are meant to protect – you’d protect your house and your private property from theft, and we would protect our atmosphere and higher-than-average standards for commenting, where respect is a requirement, not an option.

Why isn’t this the same as abusing your right to free speech?

Mideast Youth, or any other website, is not a country, nor does it represent the entire internet, which we don’t stop you from using. It’s public for your eyes, everyone is welcome to read it, but not everyone can do whatever they want with it. We worked hard on this site and expect it to represent positive values. Our mission, first and foremost, is to bring people together, respectfully debating and disagreeing with each other by justifying their opinions with facts and not insults. Our aim is for this to be an educational platform, not a playground for kids with no life.

At the end of the day, this website reflects the participants’ vision. If an author complains that a comment is ill-mannered and racially motivated, or has no purpose in it other than to offend, our moderators will remove it, provided the complaint is well-founded. Simple as. Our authors help us set the rules and our moderators are meant to carry them out, and they will, to maintain the general atmosphere of this website.

What would be an abuse of free speech?

Abusing free speech would mean we would not only remove your comment, but will also ban you from participating in ANY other website in the world, as well as delete all of your insults elsewhere. That is abusing your rights, NOT by deleting comments that we find to be childish and merely provocative. The latter is like disciplining a child. You don’t ask a child not to say “whore” and then hear someone complain about you abusing this child’s right to free speech. You don’t ask someone not to call you by a racist slur and expect to take them seriously when they reply back with “I’ve the right to free speech.”

Right now, you can easily go to our forums or any other blog to complain freely, which some people do. We don’t stop them, or ask them to delete their posts, or ask blogging platforms to delete their blog, thus proving the fact that you still own your rights to free speech both within this website and beyond.

A comment policy exists on almost every other website, and we have already been far too lenient, allowing hundreds of comments to come through despite them being homophobic and racist or very insulting. This was meant to stir some people up in an effort to maybe cook up a nice argument which people can ultimately learn from. All it resulted in was a bitch fest that no one got anything out of it, except perhaps the realization that it was a total waste of time. We no longer allow these comments to pass through. We decided now that it’s time for us to clean up the trash that many of you leave behind.

If your comment was removed, it was either due to a bug which sometimes recognizes some e-mails as spam, or you were being a jerk and your comments do not reach our standards for commenting. For those complaining about censorship, dictatorship, and any other word you have yet to learn the right definition for … get a clue. And maybe a dog or two to help you pass the days more productively.

In summary:

Stop trolling. It’s bad for this website, it reflects poorly on your character, it’s useless. Our disclaimer is right on the comment form itself, please read it.