Log In | Register
CoH Shield.
Newsvine has tools that the users can use to report Articles/Seeds or Comments that are in violation of The Code of Honor or User Agreement. These tools have never been updated, though Newsvine has changed over the years, with the exception of the addition of the "Ignore This Author" tool, which was added when that feature became available. The purpose of this article is to look at the available tools, explore their intended uses, and suggest ways they can be made more effective.
Article/Seed Reporting Options.
Report all violations!
The options for reporting an article or seed are as follows:
- Duplicate Story
- Miscategorized/Off-topic
- Broken or Pay Link
- Inaccurate
- Advertising
- Misconduct/Unlawful
- Ignore This Author
Duplicate Story
The first, Duplicate Story, was intended to keep Newsvine from becoming too cluttered by eliminating the same article from being seeded more than once. In the early years of Newsvine it was standard practice for a Viner who had seeded a duplicate to delete that duplicate, and defer to whomever had seeded the story first. It was not a written rule, more of an act of courtesy and respect for other Viners. As time passed, it became less of a standard practice, and something only the most courteous of Viners did, and today, it is common for multiple seeds of the same article to exist simultaneously. This leads to the question of whether that tool is even necessary, since it's rarely used and almost never enforced.
My personal feeling is that the option could be eliminated, since it is largely unused, and duplicate seeds can lead to very different conversations, depending on who the seeder might be, and who visits the article(s).
Miscategorized/Off-Topic
The second reporting option is Miscategorized/Off-Topic. This tool is essential, because articles and seeds need to properly categorized to keep Newsvine organized and usable. No one wants to see Home and Garden articles published to Politics, for example.
Broken or Pay Link
The third option, Broken or Pay Link is also essential. There's no point in seeding something no one can read.
Inaccurate
The fourth option, Inaccurate, is a source of much confusion. Just what makes an article or seed inaccurate? The answer, of course, is that it is not truthful. While obviously this doesn't apply as much to blogs, which are usually opinion, as it does to actual news stories, it can also apply to blogs. Opinions of actual events, when they misrepresent those events, can be inaccurate.
A recent example would be when, in July of last year, Anders Breivik set off bombs at government buildings in Oslo, Norway, then proceeded to go on a shooting spree at a camp for teenagers on the island of Utoya, leaving 77 people dead. Several prominent bloggers immediately jumped to the conclusion that the perpetrator had to have been Muslim, and published tirades against Islamist terrorists, in particular, and Muslims, in general. Though mostly opinion pieces, they were nevertheless inaccurate because they were based on a false premise, that of the shooter being Muslim, when he was in fact a far-right militant. Many of those blogs were seeded to Newsvine, and were, or should have been, reported as inaccurate.
Advertising
Advertising, in the context of Newsvine, refers not only to traditional forms of advertising (ie, spam) but also to seeding from a blog or website with which you are in any way affiliated, ie, self-promotion.
Misconduct/Unlawful
What constitutes unlawful behavior when seeding or publishing an article? Plagiarism and/or Copyright Infringement. If they are not your words, do not publish them as an article. If you find something of interest on the internet that you want to share on Newsvine, seed it - but when you do...do not use more of the article than is allowed under fair use in your excerpt, and make sure to blockquote what you use. Failure to do either constitutes Copyright Infringement.
Ignore This Author
This one is self-explanatory.
Tools I would like to see
Under the Prohibited Conduct section of the User Agreement, it states that we, as users, agree not upload, post or otherwise transmit any User Content that:
- is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortuous, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, known to be false and presented as truth, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;
We already have reporting tools that cover several, but not all, of these categories of prohibited content, but with what I consider one glaring deficiency: Seeding from Hate-filled sites and blogs.
To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever seeded from Stormfront (which I refuse to link to) and that's good. There is no place for antisemitism, or any other type of racially/ethnically/religiously motivated hatred on Newsvine. Likewise, no one has seeded from a Neo-Nazi or KKK website (if the KKK has a website, I wouldn't know), and a user was once banned form Newsvine for seeding from the BNP website, by then-moderator Emily, who had banned all seeds from that website.
There are others sites, from acknowledged hate groups, that do get seeded here, and I feel there should be a tool for reporting them. This, of course, would require a consensus among Viners, or at least the staff, as to what constitutes a hate group/hate site, but once that standard is established, a tool should be made available to report such seeds. Perhaps the websites of groups listed as Hate Groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center would be a good starting point.
Another tool I would find useful would be one to report absent moderators or poor moderation. Many flame wars occur because either no one is moderating an article/seed, or they are doing so poorly, ie, deleting due to disagreement, letting personal attacks stand or otherwise allowing people to flagrantly violate the CoH. CoH 4 mandates that we moderate or columns, and lays out the proper methods for doing so. There should be a way to notify the Community Moderators when a Viner fails to follow CoH 4.
Therefore, I would like to see the addition of these two reporting tools:
- Hate Site
- Poor/Absent Moderation
_____________________________________________________________________
Comment Reporting Options.
The current options are as follows:
- No Value
- Inflammatory
- Advertising
- Ignore This Author
No Value
Originally intended as "of no value to the discussion" this particular reporting tool has become a source of great confusion. What constitutes value, or the lack of, is highly subjective. Some see a no value comment as anything not directly on topic - but we're not robots, and that interpretation leaves no room for friendly banter, humorous comments, etc. Does a comment have to directly add to the discussion to have value? Personally, I would say no. I believe that people having a little fun is a valuable thing. Comments that make me laugh hold value to me.
Because of this, I think the no value option should be dropped in favor an option to report attempted derails - comments that are intended to stop the discussion by changing the subject. If I'm on an article that's about tourist sites in Germany, I don't need to hear about Nazis. If the discussion is about US politics, I don't want to talk about Baseball.
Inflammatory
Another vague option. Intended as a way to report CoH 1 violations, perhaps it should simply just say that.
Advertising
Self-explanatory.
Ignore This Author
Self-explanatory.
There should also be an option for plagiarism/copyright infringement, as there is for articles and seeds. These days it's not uncommon to see long passages, taken from other sources, pasted into comments without blockquotes or attribution. The established procedure is to post an excerpt, in blockquotes, with a link, much as one would post a seed. Many people fail to do so, perhaps not realizing that they are violation the copyright of the original author.
Finally, because it is now enforced, grenade trolling should be added to the reporting tools. Grenade trolling would be defined as denigrating a group so as to attack any members of that group participating in the thread.
This would leave the options as follows:
- Attempted Derail
- Personal Attack
- Grenade Trolling
- Misconduct/Unlawful
- Advertising
- Ignore This Author
_____________________________________________________________________
Notice:
These are the five articles where we discussed the Code of Honor point by point.
CoH 1 | CoH 2 | CoH 3 | CoH 4 | CoH 5 | CoH 6
The full series can be found at this tag.
_____________________________________________________________________
You are now reading and posting on a user column on Newsvine.com. Please be aware that there are certain standards and expectations on this site, most of which are outlined in our Code of Honor.
Posts that violate the Newsvine Code of Honor, including posts that are racist, insulting, threaten violence, or are posted in all caps, bold, or other formats will be deleted.
All comments on this page will be subject to moderation according to the rules found in the Code of Honor. This means you may find your comments deleted. If that is the case, read the CoH and User Agreement to find out why.
To help produce a strong discussion please refrain from personal attacks, derogatory language, and off-topic remarks.
If you would like to learn more about Newsvine, and I strongly suggest you do take a moment to look around, you can find a mentor over here, or general help in the Newsvine Help Group.
Feel free to email me directly if you have a question or concern about the moderation of this article.
Lastly keep in mind that free speech laws do not apply at newsvine, as killfile explained in a classic seed here.
