by Duane Gundrum

Created on: August 25, 2007

People generally do not understand the concept of "Freedom of Speech". When the Founding Fathers of the United States decided to invoke the concept of freedom of speech, they were thinking of the owners of the presses that would have the ability to make such speech, not the employees or the visitors to the presses. Internet community sites are effectively just that, visitors to the owners of the press, except in this case the press is the moderator of the Internet community site.

Some sites offer more freedom than others, but in order to continue the model of what makes that particular site unique, the owners of that site need to be able to maintain some type of control, or you will end up with what we were seeing in the early days of the Internet where message boards went through several phases, outlined below:

Phase 1: Community was able to communicate at length with mostly no restrictions.

Phase 2: People who realized there was no enforcement mechanism started using the site to flame and interject hostility into conversation, stifling most other conversation by changing the way people interacted with each other.

Phase 3: With no enforcement mechanism, a new breed called spammers joined the noise and turned normal message boards into nothing but hostility and advertisements for porn and undesired advertisements.

Phase 4: People left the uncontrolled boards and went to moderated ones.

What's somewhat funny about that is it fits the logical direction of a Hobbesian process of state of nature to a state of societal standards.

What moderated sites offer is the opportunity for people to be able to discuss many issues without the worry that someone is going to arrive and destroy the community itself through many different techniques available to those who would love to do so.

But this does not mean it needs outside governmental regulation, but the power must rest with the entity that controls the Internet community site, which has an agreement with the members of that community that enforcement will be much as necessary to keep the community striving. Much like Hobbes and Locke, if the community believes there has been a breach between the owners and the community, the community can leave and form a new community with different administrators.

I'm sure Locke and Hobbes weren't thinking of the Internet back before the invention of electrical appliances, but I'm sure they would see the logic of how today's process makes sense with their original arguments.

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