The importance of Freedom of Speech is impossible to stress enough, and has
become evident to virtually everyone, especially to those who have been a victim
of censorship of any kind. The advance of digital information technology gave
rise to the possibility for all of us to freely share our ideas, thoughts and
knowledge with everyone over the Internet. The Internet could as well be the
oasis of Free Speech in the world. There are many reasons that things are not
nearly as perfect as they should be, and we do not wish to elaborate on these -
we think that actively promoting and defending Free Speech on the Internet would
be too much of a goal for an Advanced Chess organization. We wish to point
everyone interested in these matters or needing protection of their rights with
regard to Freedom of Speech, to the
Electronic
Frontier Foundation.
CCO has, however, decided to actively promote and defend Freedom of Speech on
Internet forums, message boards and other sorts of discussion groups (we will
further refer to all of these as "forums"), and especially those pertaining to
chess. CCO strongly advises that you should run your own forum according to the
principles of Free Speech. Absolute Free Speech is not always desirable though,
and sometimes it is not possible to enforce due to infringing on rights of
others, as well as due to legal barriers. CCO agrees that you could exercise
minimal censorship, such as to prevent hate propaganda or criminal libels to get
posted, however we think that you should run your forum at least fairly in
accordance with Free Speech principles. CCO understands that you are not
obligated to respect Free Speech on your forum, however we strongly advise that
you should - it will at least significantly improve your forum's image - no one
likes censorship. Should you decide to establish your forum's rules as to
restrict Free Speech, we strongly advise that such restrictions should be
reduced to a minimum - enforcing strong censorship will only turn away your
participants and readers, some of them being the most useful contributors. And
you should absolutely never claim that your forum is pro-free-speech if it is
not - if you apply strong censorship later, you will look extremely goofy when
exposed, and you may even lose all your readers - we have witnessed such cases
before.
Here are some guidelines that CCO suggests you should run your forum according
to:
Either make it an unmoderated forum, or if moderated - allow all messages to
get posted without going through a queue for approval, and only moderate upon a
complaint, and in accordance with the guidelines outlined.
Allow everyone to post. It would be ideal if you allow unregistered users to
post, but if you do not wish to do so, you should at least allow everyone to
register and make registration as easy and as instant as possible.
Allow everyone to speak their mind as freely as possible.
Do not delete flame wars or troll posts - you should make a special place in
your forum (be it a subforum or whatever other special place) and then MOVE (not
censor) otherwise inappropriate discussions to such a subforum.
Do not delete off-topic postings - the above guideline applies to them too -
in fact many forums have "Off Topic" subforums. Off-topic discussions are meant
to be moved to "Off Topic" or the like subforums, as opposed to getting deleted.
Protect unpopular speech. Protecting unpopular speech promotes tolerance,
which is an essential value in our society, and protecting unpopular speech is
an act of tolerance in its own right. For example, if a user says that he hates
all Americans (or Arabs, or Jews, or whatever group of people for that matter),
but says so in a tolerant manner, without encouraging others to do the same, it
should not be censored by the forum's authorities, rather it is a form of
unpopular speech that should be protected. The same applies if a user says that
he likes to steal money, share pirated software, etc. You could move such
postings to a special subforum, as explained above, but you should never apply
censorship of any kind.
There are certain kinds of speech, such as hate propaganda or criminal libel,
that you cannot tolerate and could/should remove them, however you should always
try to communicate with the user who exercises such speech - you may be able to
reach a compromise - communication is essential. It is important to clearly
distinguish hate propaganda from what only resembles it - for example, if one
says "I hate USA because they kill innocent civilians all over the world", it is
not hate propaganda, it is merely speech that may be unpopular in the USA
(regardless of how true or untrue it might be), however if one says "I invite
everyone to kill all Americans..." - then that is hate propaganda and should be
dealt with.
Do not apply double standards. Do not remove postings merely because you don't
like them, or because a well-known and respected forum member complains. The
same rules and same standards of interpretation of the rules must apply to
everyone.
Do not censor criticisms towards your forum's authorities - this may be
extremely dangerous to your forum's reputation, should such censorship be
exposed.
Do not be too harsh with sanctioning - we are aware that there are problematic
users, but most of them are able to change in a positive manner. Lifetime bans
are simply ungrounded, plus the banned user will most likely return with a
different name in that case.
CCO maintains a list of online forums, mainly chess-related that we think are
extremely anti-free-speech or exceptionally pro-free-speech. Occasionally we
have sent our activists to online forums to test the latter's adherence to Free
Speech, and occasionally our members have declared viewpoints that they do not
agree with, merely for the purpose of the mentioned test. Here are our lists at
present:
