Twitter (for those of you who have not yet been indoctrinated into the cult) is a new type of social networking that lets you keep in touch with friends by posting 140-character answers to the question, "What are you doing right now?" Different members of the Twitter community use Twitter for different things. You might use it to send messages to a group of friends about your weekend whereabouts, or to solicit information about a new product or service that you've been thinking about trying out. A lot of Twitter users use the platform as a "microblog"--essentially, to post the same sorts of thoughts they'd post on a traditional blog, but condensed into short, rapid-fire bursts. If you have a Twitter account, you can befriend other members of the community, and receive their updates (or "twits") on your cellphone, via instant messenger, and/or by visiting the Twitter web page.



Last week, Netscape set up a Twitter account linked to our main RSS feed. This means that every time a new story hits the Netscape homepage, everyone who is following the Netscape Twitter receives a message about it. If you're already a Twitter user and want to receive these updates, you can add the Netscape Twitter here. If haven't yet tried Twitter but would like to, you can sign up for an account at this link. If you have any questions about the Netscape Twitter, let us know in the comments to this post.

As anyone who follows the Politics channel here on Netscape is well aware, our members are extremely passionate, especially when it comes to hot-button issues like Iraq, the war on terror, and President Bush. That passion is fantastic, but sometimes the debate escalates beyond the issues, and otherwise reasonable people resort to personal insults and attacks in their attempt to "win" the debate. When I sat down at my computer this morning, my message box was full of alerts about comments left last night on this post, where a few Netscape members ruined the conversation for the rest of the community with threats, insults, and, most disturbingly, the advocation of violence. I'm going to try to be really clear here: this is not okay. We are not going to tolerate abusive comments. We have taken away the commenting rights of the Netscape members who left the most offensive comments on that post. We have no problem banning users who pollute the community with hate speech.

Unfortunately, this was not an isolated incident. I've spoken with many Netscape users who feel like the name calling is ruining the debate on many posts, and as I've personally been the target of many abusive comments and messages (one day I'm a "liberal Nazi"; the next, I'm apparently "in bed with the Neo-Cons"), I understand these complaints. I don't want to call out specific members or specific incidents; I do want to ask EVERYONE to think about the consequences before entering into a shouting match on a comment thread, or attacking another Netscape user via personal site mail. Netscape isn't a typical news portal -- it's a community, and that community is weakened every time one of these unnecessarily abusive comment brawls breaks out.

Bottom line: Debating and arguing about issues is fine. Abusing your fellow Netscape members via comments or site mail, and/or using the comment threads to spread hate speech, thereby ruining the debate for most of the community? Not okay. It will not be tolerated.

As with any social democracy, anyone who wants to be an active member of the Netscape community must be willing to play nice with others. Here's a guide to a few small things you can do to make the getting-along process easier for everyone:

• If you see a post that clearly doesn't belong on Netscape -- because it's an advertisement or press release; because it's abusive or inflammatory; or because a duplicate of another Netscape story -- please report the story using the red "Report!" button on the post, right under the picture.
• Make sure you report stories for the right reasons. The Anchors get a lot of reports that don't seem to correctly correspond with the post in question, and weeding through these false or mislabeled reports takes up valuable time that we could be spending responding to real reports. When you click the "Report!" button, you should get a pull down menu with a number of options. If you can't access the story linked to by the post, select "Broken Link"; if the post represents the same story as another Netscape post you've seen, select "Duplicate" and, in the box to the right please paste a link to the original story. If the post links to an advertisement, a website that appears to be stealing content, a site with more ads than content, or a site whose main function is to sell products, select "SPAM". These are the three most common kinds of reports; the other three types of reports are a little but trickier, so we'll move on to tip #3...
• Try to leave your personal feelings aside when reporting stories as "Inaccurate". This type of report is designed for stories that are blatantly false or misleading; however, we receive many "Inaccurate" reports, especially regarding stories about politics, from Netscape users who simply do not like or agree with the content. If a post seems to you to be generally offensive, you can report it as "Inflammatory"; and the Netscape team will decide if the content violates our Terms of Use. If the post is not factually inaccurate nor blatantly offensive, but still contradicts your personal beliefs, you can report it as "Lame" -- or, better yet, you can submit your own story showing a different side of the issue.
• You can also report inappropriate comments. If a user is leaving insulting or abusive comments, or is using the comments to post links to a commercial site or to promote a news story or website not relevant to the topic of the post, you can send a report by clicking the "Report!" button on the bottom right side of the comment. Please don't engage in arguments/attacks concerning other commenters within comment threads; those threads exist so we can talk about the stories, and fighting bad behavior with bad behavior makes it impossible for other members of the Netscape community to use the threads as intended.
• Netscape is a social news community, and as such, it's perfectly normal and allowed for one user to message another user about a story they find interesting. However, that doesn't mean that anyone needs to put up with harassment. If you feel like someone who you have accepted as a mutual friend is bombarding your message box with links to their stories, politely ask them to stop. If you have been sending messages to another Netscape user about your stories and they ask you to stop, please honor that request. If you ask a user to refrain from messaging you and they continue to do so, please send a message to an anchor.

For more on basic social bookmarking etiquette, check out this blog post by our Navigator, Neophile. Is there any aspect that you think we've missed? Let us know in the comments.

This morning, one of our members submited a story with the sole purpose of using the comments to allege that he had been censored by Netscape anchors due to our political bias. We closed that post because the intent of the post had nothing to do with the article the post linked to. I'm writing this blog entry to try to answer that user's allegations.

Yesterday, the Netscape member in question submitted a video titled "Die Taliban Die". The video was set to song in which the phrase "die motherf****er die" was repeated over and over again; the images involved war footage and titles reading "die terrorist die". The video was reported as offensive, and as it violated our Terms of Use (see specifically section 8), we removed it (see Terms of Use, section 13). The Netscape member asked why his video was taken down, and was told by an Anchor that the title violated our Terms of Use. The member then reposted the video, unaltered but for a new title; it was reported again, and as the video still contained content that violated our terms of use, we pulled the video again.

At Netscape, we do not censor user submitted content based on our own personal biases or whims. We do pull down user submitted content that is deemed by a significant sample of our members as offensive, in terms of language or theme. A video that advocates the killing of any person or group fits the definition of "offensive" for a significant sample of our users.

There's been some confusion and debate over our policy of flagging some stories as "OpEd", and I want to try to explain what's been going on behind the scenes.

We clearly have a very vibrant, politically active community here at Netscape, and though it can be very difficult at times, we try to be fair to both sides of that community. We initially began flagging some posts as "OpEd" because stories that were clearly opinion pieces were being voted up the Homepage, and some of our members, accustomed to a traditional, professionally-programmed news portal, asked us to intervene in some way. We figured that since newspapers have a separate section for opinions and editorials, it would only make sense for us to develop a system to demarcate the same kind of content, and still allow Netscape members the freedom to program our pages with their stories, votes and comments.So we requested that our members, when submitting a story that they knew was more opinion than fact, include the phrase "OpEd" in the title, and the Anchors team began appending that phrase to stories based on Netscape member reports.

However, we soon began to notice that many members were requesting that we add "OpEd" to stories that were not editorials - conservatives would report a hard news story about a an anti-Bush statement made by Hillary Clinton, for example, or a liberal member would ask us to add "OpEd" to a news story describing a Bush success. When an Anchor would decline to treat these news stories as editorials, the members who made the reports would often accuse Netscape of political bias. We decided to pull back, and to let stories that were clearly opinion-based stand on their own, and only intervene when there was some ambiguity over whether a story was editorial or fact. This, essentially, brought us to where we were in the beginning: editorial stories with a strong political bias were sitting along side unbiased news stories, with no clear delineation between the two.

This is an example of a post which gave us great difficulty. Keith Olbermann is quickly becoming a hero to the American Left, and as such, conservatives are generally suspicious of his work as a journalist. Though many of the segments he fronts for MSNBC are, indeed, purely opinion based, this was a case where Olbermann was presenting an investigative report. One could question his motives for producing the report on an ideological level, but the report itself is hard news. When this story made our homepage overnight, the Anchor team awoke to many messages and reports, asking us to add an "OpEd" flag to the post. This was not a situation where we felt an "OpEd" flag would have been appropriate; instead, I added Commentary acknowledging the reports and offering some counterpoint.

At Netscape, we want our members to have a great deal of say in how we create and implement the editorial practices that help support the content submitted by our members. We know that when talking politics, it will be impossible to make every member happy, all of the time, but hope that, with your help, we can more often than not get it right. So, I turn the question over to you: how would you have handled a situation like this? How do you think we should handle the "OpEd" issue in the future?