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4 min read community moderation

The Many Faces of Moderation

driLast weekend, over a few drinks, Nicholas Aaron Khoo threw an interesting question to me that prompted his recent discussion on whether the Internet can be self-regulated. The question has been examined in the early days from the submission of the “Proposals for Internet Freedom in Singapore” by a group of bloggers to the engagement with public feedback on the government appointed  AIMS Report – Engaging New Media: Challenging Old Assumptions with regards to the issue of community moderation. To Nicholas’ credit, he constructed a well-thought counter example by looking at the example of Ping.sg, a blog aggregator in Singapore that is suffering from the lack of community moderation despite the tools made available by the owner of the platform. Hence my intention of this article, rather than just argue only on the merits of community moderation, also examines the many faces of moderation and self-regulation of the Internet in Singapore

When the senior Minister of State (Information, Communications and the Arts) Lui Tuck Yew said last month, about the issue of being “quite apparent the Internet is not an effective self-regulated regime as some may have touted it to be”, three aspects of the argument come to mind:

Fundamentally, the regulation of the Internet is a complex issue which we are unlikely to solve all of them in one day. There are many pieces and the Singapore government will not concede some of them in accordance with their own interests. That leads me to draw on this final thought about the implmentation of community moderation. In truth, there are two simple ways to set up a community moderation panel for the Internet specifically pertaining to the blogosphere: either let the government appoints its own committee or the bloggers themselve organize themselves into a committee to police themselves. To be honest, neither choices are possible to be implemented, because in both cases, it’s a catch-22 situation. However, as of all situations, the answer surely lies in the middle or a mixture of both situations to proceed towards an optimal outcome.

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