Ted Clayton

On the one hand, unlinking URLs is a pragmatic-enough ‘solution’ or ‘action’, in the face of what certainly seem like ‘marginally-exploitative’ comments.

On the other hand, ‘adjusting’ – editing – comments (even just the source-link) to make them more suitable to our own purposes/aims can clearly nudge us in the direction of various slippery slopes.

I noticed in recent years, that our large corporate media and institutionalized journalism have consciously dropped the casual, common practice of ‘benevolently editing’ quoted speech.

It used to be normal to ‘clean up’ what a person (actually) said, usually just to ‘fix’ little mistakes & glitches. Going back many decades, my eyes have squinted down on occasion, when I see someone speaking on film, and realize that in print the words had been doctored ‘just a teensy bit’, to give the delivery a better polish … or to put it differently, to remove distractions. And I think that really was the – entirely honorable – intent. As here.

I’m certainly not having a cow over selective editing of URLs … but if folks are scratching their head over whether this is something to put more of an effort into addressing at a higher level of principles, I’m going to guess that those who chose to do so will eventually be glad they did.

Basically, using ‘shady’ comments without compromising ourselves will probably mean more work & time. We are on solid ground to visit a suspect comment-site, then edit-in a warning/disclaimer. We moderate comments anyway (properly), so we might communicate with dubious commenters, encourage them to ‘work with us’, before ‘passing’ a comment.

But of course, pragmatically, the usual crude-but-proper recourse will be simply to mod them out.

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