It makes “Murdoch is censoring me” seem very mild.

I totally agree with you on the freedom of speech argument, although I’d argue that it is in a national newspaper’s interests to be as transparent and fair with moderation as possible.

I think it is a default position for people to believe that if their comment does not appear then it has been censored for some reason. In our case that leads to allegations that Rupert Murdoch is somehow influencing what content is put through.

But it’s better to set the rules in co-operation with your community, if you can.

Even with moderation policy and guidelines, people will just try to push the boundaries. When you don’t let comments through, or remove them then apparently you can be seen as ‘abusing power’.

People often go back to the ‘freedom of speech’ view, but unless it is their domain you can run it how you want.

Dilyan – you’re right, of course. I think Lucia did allow comments that repeated points to get through, as long as they were well spaced – editorialising much like game broadcasts do. I will, however, have to check that with her and get back to you!

RobM – In the most part I agree with what you’ve said. (although I’m always a little narked when people use my blog’s comment section to advertise their services).

I think there are always ground rules that need to be established from the start. There are things that we know we will not publish – the highly offensive comments and those with legal issues as I mentioned in my post.

It might also be worth noting that we have a separate moderation team for comments that appear on Times Online articles.

However, in certain circumstances I think there is also a value in the moderator responding and reacting to the community as it evolves. Does your moderation policy contain a section for what to do when protesters start to send, seemingly polite, messages in code to each other in your blog?

In addition, some people at Social Media Camp London told us that they had run into problems by making their moderation policy too rigid. When it becomes a strict code, people tend to start using it as a debating tool.

My feeling is that you sometimes have to make a judgment call, especially in an environment as fast-moving as a liveblog.

In my experience so far, as long as you are open and transparent about why you have done that, readers generally respect that.

At every step of the way we were explaining why some of the comments were not being published.

On occasion both Lucia and I chatted directly to individuals who had submitted an unpublished comment to explain why it had not been approved (a function you can do on CoverItLive).

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