Blog Comments and Free Speech

Every now and again, somebody comes up with the notion that a blogger is responsible for comments that are left on his blog by readers of the blog. I think that is nonsense myself and so do all blog-savvy people, I think. I would sure have to delete a lot of comments here if I had to be responsible for them! As it is, it is only comments by one particularly foul-mouthed person that I have ever deleted on this site. I have also IP-banned four internet addresses he has used on various occasions. There are no other IP-bans here.

An example of the nonsense I am talking about is recorded here. Some not-very-bright Leftists on Australia's major public broadcaster criticized some of our newspapers over comments people had left on their blogs. One newspaper got its own back a few days later, however, when someone left antisemitic comments on the site of the broadcaster. The newspaper reported that fact with great glee and got lots of people to complain to the broadcaster concerned. The broadcaster actually got a fair bit of flak over it so I imagine they have decided not to throw stones in glass houses in future. See also here.

There is a much more serious case ongoing in Sweden, however. Australians and Americans can do little more than complain to one-another about content that they don't like but in Sweden "hate speech" is against the law. So comments that appeared briefly on the blog of a popular member of Sweden's conservative government are being put under the microscope -- even though the comments were fairly promptly deleted. Swedish officials have already ruled that the blog is not entitled to any free speech protections. See here and here for details.

I am guessing that the case won't go anywhere but it shows how lucky we are in Australia and America to have the freedoms we do.

In the circumstances, I am somewhat surprised that ALL Swedes don't use comment moderation -- where no comment appears until it is approved by the blog owner. Moderation does seriously harm the immediate flow of conversation that blog commenters enjoy, however, so I guess the Swedes don't want to be deprived of that.

Fortunately, Haloscan seems to have pretty good spam-blocking software so I don't have to enable moderation here to stop comment spam -- something that was an horrendous problem on the previous site for this blog. On the old site, I often had to delete over 500 spam comments in one day and legitimate comments sometimes got caught up in that.