Legal Internet Use by Terrorists

Marc, thanks for the comment and yeah I don’t know why but half of my comments never show up either. I've just decided to edit the pages directly from now on. Really irritating...

Anyways as for your question about who is deciding what to censor, I think that should be the Department of Defense. They are the ones that have the intelligence needed to determine what is and is not actually potentially violent. Under "my regime," at least, most if not all of the cases of violent content will require some other intelligence to prove that there is an imminent threat. There is rarely anything that could meet this standard by its content alone--even direct instruction online would need some kind of intelligence to say whether it's credible.

I think that allowing for comments on certain content that is not violent enough to necessitate taking down but still quite controversial is a very creative and perhaps effective approach to the problem. I think if a place like YouTube? decides to remove users' abilities to block all comments/video responses, it would definitely increase the amount of discourse around controversial postings and topics. Allowing this might even turn people's reactive anger (i.e. in the cartoons described in David's post) toward a more positive method of discourse.

That being said, there may also be some other concerns involved as well. For instance, if a terrorist organization were to be perhaps extremely offended by the video responses to their content, it might simply fuel their fire. Also, if I were to post a personal video from my wedding for my friends and family to see, and someone out there links a crazy nsfw video to it… maybe I might want the ability to unlink those kinds of videos and comments.

All in all, I'd say it'd be nice for the ideal of community and discourse if sites like YouTube? and other content-hosting services had at least some form of commenting available for all of its postings. Personally, I would propose the following: you cannot disable comments and video responses. However, if a response does arise that offends you or that you just don't want up, you can hide it. The poster of that comment can then appeal it, and someone from YouTube? can just make the decision (with a very strong bias toward respecting the author's wishes ).

-- StevenHwang - 12 Dec 2008