Hans Reiser arrested

Posted Oct 12, 2006 9:09 UTC (Thu) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167) [Link]

There's a distinction between removing comments made by a third party and changing editorial content. The comment about Theo is supposition, and was struck because Theo took exception to it. LWN probably can't /prove/ that Theo cares about OpenBSD on the OLPC so it would be inadvisable for them to ignore his opinion, but on the other hand it might be set a bad precedent to just remove it from the article at his whim, their compromise works for me (though it might not do them much good in a court of law...)

Removing a comment is different, and must be done very sensitively. We of course can't know what it said unless the writer chooses to publish elsewhere, but it is certainly reasonable to remove their text in full if the editors couldn't allow some or all of it to be published on their site, either because it was actionable or for any other reason at their discretion. Much more dangerous to edit, or censor parts of the comment.

I can see why they've been reluctant to do this before, Slashdot enjoys some partial immunity to lawsuits by not having (at least officially) any mechanism for editorial control of user contributed comments. Once you choose to exercise editorial control over some of the user contributed content a court is likely to conclude that you have the same control as the editor of a newspaper and can be sued for anything that appears on your site regardless of whether you actually saw it before it was published.