Fear the trolls!

Posted by Martin Stabe on 13 March 2006 at 12:05
Tags: Blogs, Contempt of Court, Guardian, Journalism, Libel

The Guardian’s new blog, Comment Is Free, launches tomorrow.

Ben Hammersley, who has been working on the project, says they are still burning the midnight oil up Farringdon Road putting the finishing touches on the software behind the blog. Still in progresses is a solution to the much-discussed problem of handling blog comments:

Perhaps the most prominent liberal newspaper in the anglophone world, opening a weblog for comment and opinion, with free and open user commenting is, to put it mildly, asking for trouble. Even more so as we come under UK libel law, rather than US. This means that libellous comments left on the site might potentially cost the newspaper a considerable amount of money. No one has ever offered this sort of content to the wider world in this sort of legal, political, or cultural context. This means that we have to employ a whole combination of technological and social countermeasures to make sure that the handful of trolls do not, as they say, ruin it for the rest of us. Frankly, it gives me the fear.

It’s not the first time this has come up. Simon Waldman explained last month that an experiment like this is all about weighing the legal risks against the potential editorial and commercial rewards. Waldman’s major concern, moreover, is contempt of court, not libel.

Tags: Blogs, Contempt of Court, Guardian, Journalism, Libel