Some people call this censorship. We've been through that conversaion over and over again. Censorship is a thing governments do. When a publisher cuts or rejects content, it's called editing and that's the way the world works.
We call it doing our jobs to maintain OEN as a place people want to come and spend their time reading, conversing and sharing ideas.
We do have some rules-- no hate speech and WE the editors are the arbiters of that. And we believe that people can strongly disagree without calling names.
We, the editors, believe that this approach will make the OEN experience a better, more pleasant one. People who need to call names and get nasty will ultimately find that they are not welcome at OEN. If you're smart enough to have an intelligent opinion, you need to be emotionally smart enough to disagree with civility. I am personally working my hardest at living up to these rules.
In the coming weeks, we're rebuilding our commenting system-- new software to make it faster and easier to post comments, using "ajax" software, so you'll be able to see the article and other comments while you are creating your comment. And we'll have a better system to deal with flagged comments, back panel-wise.
These will also enable us to see patterns of abuse by members. We really want an open forum where there's freedom to discuss ideas, but when it comes to nastiness and incivility, we're drawing the line.
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)
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