Content Moderation Case Study: BoingBoing Begins Disemvoweling The Trolls (2007)

from the dealing-with-trolls dept

Summary: One of the challenges for any website that allows for user content — no matter the size of the website — is how to deal with trollish behavior. There are a variety of options available, including just deleting such comments, but one option that got attention in the mid-2000s was the idea of disemvoweling: literally removing the vowels from any comment deemed trollish. This was something of an update on concept of merely “splatting out” letters (i.e., replacing certain letters with ‘*’ to make them less searchable and to create some level of disassociation from the initial word).

The history of disemvoweling is not entirely agreed upon, though it is clear that James Joyce used the word to describe writing without vowels in Finnegan’s Wake, published in 1939. Many people associate the modern use of it with Teresa Nielsen Hayden, who wrote in the comments on her own blog (Making Light) about how she had removed the vowels from someone who was trolling.

Other users then referred to this as disemvoweling. The word and its usage as a moderation mechanism appeared in other places before, including in a 1990 version of the RISKS Digest newsletter discussing a proposed anti-hacking law.

Nielsen Hayden embraced the power of disemvoweling, and supported efforts to make it easier to do. (She initially said she removed vowels by hand).

In August of 2007, the popular blog (and former zine) Boing Boing announced that it had relaunched and brought back comments, with Nielsen Hayden joining the site to help with community management. This immediately resulted in questions about whether or not BoingBoing would now embrace disemvoweling as a technique to manage trolls as well. Nielsen Hayden suggested that it might, but she did not expect it to be that frequent:

"Glad to see comments back. With TNH moderating should we expect frequent dis-envoweling?

Only if it's warranted. I doubt I'll have frequent cause to use it.” --Teresa Nielsen Hayden

The blog did embrace disemvoweling as a technique, though. Others on the Boing Boing team talked about how it seemed to work quite well. Xeni Jardin noted that while it did involve a fair bit of human effort, it appeared to be mostly effective.

We hired a community manager, and equipped our comments system with a secret weapon: the "disemvoweller." If someone's misbehaving, she can remove all the vowels from their screed with one click. The dialogue stays, but the misanthrope looks ridiculous, and the emotional sting is neutralized.

Now, once again, the balance mostly works. I still believe that there is no fully automated system capable of managing the complexities of online human interaction — no software fix I know of. But I'd underestimated the power of dedicated human attention.

Plucking one early weed from a bed of germinating seeds changes everything. Small actions by focused participants change the tone of the whole. It is possible to maintain big healthy gardens online. The solution isn't cheap, or easy, or hands-free. Few things of value are. -- Xeni Jardin

In a separate piece, then BoingBoing writer Cory Doctorow talked about it as a way to “remove the poison” from online conversations.

For example, Teresa invented a technique called disemvowelling -- removing the vowels from some or all of a fiery message-board post. The advantage of this is that it leaves the words intact, but requires that you read them very slowly -- so slowly that it takes the sting out of them. And, as Teresa recently explained to me, disemvowelling part of a post lets the rest of the community know what kind of sentiment is and is not socially acceptable. -- Cory Doctorow

However, he also noted that it often needed tools to make it workable, as doing it by hand was not scalable:

When Teresa started out disemvowelling, she removed the vowels from the offending messages by hand, a tedious and slow process. But shortly thereafter, Bryant Darrell wrote a Movable Type plugin to automate the process. This is a perfect example of human-geek synergy: hacking tools for civilian use based on the civilian's observed needs.

But there aren't enough Teresas to go around: how do we keep all the other message-boards troll-free? Again, the secret is in observing the troll whisperer in the field, looking for techniques that can be encapsulated in tutorials and code. There is a wealth of troll whisperer lore that isn't pure intuition and good sense, techniques that can be turned into tools for the rest of us to use. -- Cory Doctorow

The concept did get a bit more attention after that. The following year, Time Magazine described disemvoweling as one of the “Best Inventions of 2008” (even though disemvoweling was developed before that year). Almost exactly one year after BoingBoing did it, various Gawker blogs announced plans to also begin disemvoweling troll comments with a tool built into their content moderation system.

Company Considerations:

• What are other techniques like disemvoweling that can be alternatives to simply deleting trollish comments?
• Is disemvoweling an effective strategy for dealing with trollish behavior in forums?
• For making use of disemvoweling, is it worth investing in building tools to make the process usable across multiple moderators? If so, what features would those tools need to have? How would those tools be rolled out?
• Should there be different types of moderation (deletion, disemvoweling, etc.) applied to different types of content? If so, what should those differences be?
• In this case study, the websites' traffic was fairly small and moderation was by a handful of moderators. What would a company need to consider, in terms of content policy and moderation tools, if they want to use disemvoweling on websites that have much much larger communities and hundreds of moderators reviewing content?

Issue Considerations:

• Would removing vowels simply make trolls angrier and more determined to troll a website?
• Is disemvoweling more effective than simply deleting content since it also acts as a signal of what is not acceptable behavior on a particular site?
• Do trolls adapt to techniques like disemvoweling and find other ways to troll, making it only a short term solution?
• Does disemvoweling actually highlight the comments, making curious readers try to figure out what it’s saying?

Resolution: The focus on disemvoweling eventually went out of favor. Boing Boing dropped the practice, as did other sites that had embraced it. In 2009, a writer for Albany’s Times Union newspaper noted that a corporate lawyer had ordered him to stop disemvoweling comments on his blog posts for the newspaper, though it was not clearly explained why the lawyers were concerned about it.

Most of the discussion about disemvoweling disappeared as well, other than a brief flare up when Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos apparently suggested in a brainstorming session that they should allow some users to pay to disemvowel entire stories (and other users can pay to re-vowel them later). It appears this idea did not gain any support.

Originally posted to the Trust & Safety Foundation website.

Filed Under: content moderation, disemvowelling, james joyce, teresa nielsen hayden, trolls
Companies: boingboing

DailyDirt: Funny Money

from the urls-we-dig-up dept

Just about every denomination of US currency has been counterfeited at some point. But there are some really good copies out there (aka supernotes) that are extremely difficult to detect. In response, every few years, the government has to issue new bill designs that are harder and harder to duplicate. Here are just a few interesting links on detecting fake money and issuing new currency.

• The US Federal Reserve will introduce a new $100 bill with added security features on October 8, 2013. The new bill will be confusing and complicated, so counterfeiters will have a small window where they'll likely be able to pass off a slightly different (but equally confusing) new-looking C-note. [url]
• Ireland's Central Bank says it's offering refunds for a commemorative coin that misquotes a phrase from Ulysses. It was an unintentional error on a coin meant to honor James Joyce, but the bank is still planning to sell the coins -- explaining that the text was "an artistic representation of the author and text and not intended as a literal representation". [url]
• The US secret service has trained counterfeit detection canines to help sniff out fake money. The dogs and their handlers went through a 12-week training program and were deployed in Colombia to find counterfeit currency. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.

Filed Under: bills, coins, counterfeit, currency, james joyce, money

Irish Bloomsday Celebrations Finally Possible Without Threat Of Copyright Claims From James Joyce Estate

from the yay-public-domain dept

We've written a few times about the works of James Joyce, and how his estate -- mainly at the behest of his grandson, Steven -- was particularly aggressive (even to egregious levels) in stopping anyone from quoting Joyce's works. As we stated a year ago, for Europe and much of other parts of the world, starting this year, Joyce's published works have moved into the public domain (70 years after Joyce's death), leading to great excitement about how people can build on them.

In the US, the story is a bit more complex, however, as the Joyce Estate claims that Ulysses is still under copyright, having not been officially published as a book until 1934. Others, however, argue that the book is in the public domain, for a variety of reasons. I was a bit surprised, then, to read this PBS article, which seems to imply the work is officially public domain in the US. At best, that's a point of contention.

Either way, in Ireland, it's clear that Ulysses is in the public domain, and since this past weekend was Bloomsday, the popular celebration of all things Joyce (based on the date on which the book Ulysses takes place) there was, indeed, renewed excitement around the event (thanks to Joe for sending this and other links).

Unfortunately, it's not all good news. That link above talks a bit about how there are still efforts to control Joyce's "unpublished" works -- such as letters and correspondence -- by twisting the law. The law does cover published and unpublished works differently, but on the assumption that "unpublished works" were works that were intended to be published. When we're talking about letters and other issues of historical note, which scholars would love to make use of, it's ridiculous to stifle such things in the name of copyright.

Even worse, as Becky Hogge warns in The Atlantic, regulators who love to extend copyright law brought Joyce's works back in from the public domain in the past and could do so again:

2012 is not the first year Joyce entered the public domain in Ireland; that happened twenty years ago, only for the European Union to retroactively extend so-called authorial copyright from 50 years after the author’s death to 70. The extension handed control of Ulysses back to the estate, causing untold legal trouble for scholars already beginning to take advantage of its public domain status to release new editions.

I’ve witnessed at close quarters a similar extension granted to copyrights held by performers and record labels in the EU. What I learned then was that politicians extend copyright like most of us write thank-you notes: it’s the least they can do to show their gratitude for the attentions of an industry they’d have preferred to join had their looks and talent permitted. In the context of the subsidies granted to farmers or fishermen, extending copyright for the benefit of ageing rock stars is something EU lawmakers do in their lunch break

Hopefully, with a world more aware, thanks to SOPA and ACTA and the like, pushing through such things won't be quite so simple. But it is something that people need to be vigilant about.

Filed Under: bloomsday, europe, ireland, james joyce, public domain, ulysses

How Putting James Joyce's Ulysses Into The Public Domain Will Breathe New Life Into Joyce's Work

from the the-public-domain-is-important dept

We've been hearing copyright maximalists lately talking nonsense about how bad the public domain is, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. So it may be interesting to see that, over in Ireland, people are expecting a newfound excitement for the works of James Joyce after Ulysses goes into the public domain there next year (though, not in the US). The Joyce estate has been infamously stingy in terms of letting anyone make use of Ulysses. Perhaps the most notable effort by grandson Stephen Joyce was to block all public readings of Ulysses, especially at the various "Bloomsday" celebrations, based on the book, which are supposed to be a celebration of Joyce's life, but which have been notoriously limited by the estate, other than a single reading on Bloomsday which happens (of course) at the "James Joyce Centre." So many Joyce fans are really quite excited about no longer having any such restrictions next year, and are looking forward to being able to properly celebrate Bloomsday. The end result, of course, will be renewed life breathed into Joyce's work. What a shame that his own estate has restricted the use of the work for so long.

Filed Under: bloomsday, copyright, ireland, james joyce, public domain, ulysses

Copyright As Censorship: After 22 Years, Joyce Estate Finally Lets Kate Bush Use Lyrics She Wanted

from the creativity? dept

It's no secret that the James Joyce estate has been ridiculously overprotective when it comes to Joyce's copyright. Of course, a lot of Joyce's works are quickly approaching the public domain in various places (and some are already there), and so the estate may be losing its control. Still, it's nice to see that the estate finally "agreed" to one usage. Glyn Moody points us to the news that after an astounding 22 years of asking, singer Kate Bush has finally been allowed to use Molly Bloom’s famous soliloquy from Ulysses as lyrics for a song. She had first asked in 1989... and was denied. She wrote different lyrics instead, but kept asking the estate. Perhaps realizing that (in the UK) the work was going into the public domain next year, the estate finally relented.

Of course, the copyright defenders always claim that cases like this are someone being "uncreative" and "just copying" works. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised to see them argue that the world is better off because Bush was forced to come up with her own alternative lyrics. But if the song is really better off using Joyce's prose as lyrics here, doesn't that mean that the world was cut off from this cultural work for 22 years? Doesn't that seem like a problem from a cultural perspective? Especially for a law that's supposed to encourage more and better creative output? When, instead, it's used to censor that kind of creative output, shouldn't we all be concerned about what copyright is doing to culture?

Filed Under: censorship, copyright, culture, james joyce, kate bush, lyrics

James Joyce Estate Sends Takedown For Joyce Quote In DNA

from the a-portrait-of-an-intellectual-monopolist dept

Craig Venter, who is no stranger to advocating stronger and stronger IP laws -- especially in the area of "synthetic life" -- apparently learned recently how those laws can reach ridiculous levels. In a recent presentation, he noted that his team had encoded a James Joyce quote in the DNA of the "synthetic life" he's been trying to create. However, the James Joyce estate was not amused and sent him a cease-and-desist. Venter notes that he felt that it was fair use to include a quote. The quote was really short:

“To live, to err, to fall, to triumph, to recreate life out of life.”

To claim that this is infringement seems pretty ridiculous. What's unclear from the article, though, is whether or not Venter fought this or just accepted it and agreed to take the quote out. This isn't the first time that the Joyce estate has done stuff like this, including an attempt to stifle a biography by use of a copyright claim. In that case, the estate finally learned that they had no claim when they actually had to pay up to settle the case.

Filed Under: copyright, craig venter, dna, james joyce, synthetic life

James Joyce Estate Agrees To Pay Legal Fees To Professor It Sought To Stifle

from the good-news dept

We wrote in the past about how the estate of author James Joyce tried to use copyright law to prevent a professor from quoting any works from James Joyce or his daughter Lucia Joyce in a biography of Lucia Joyce she was working on. This was, of course, ridiculous, and after many years in court, the estate didn't just lose, but was ordered to pay attorneys' fees as well, totaling more than $326,000. The estate then appealed that as well, but has now agreed to settle, and pay $240,000 in attorneys' fees to the professor, Carol Shloss. While the end result was good, the fact that she had to go through this whole process just to write a biography in the first place is still quite problematic. Abusing copyright law to stifle free speech is always a problem.

Filed Under: carol shloss, copyright, fair use, james joyce, lucia joyce