frjohnsen - Beyond 2.0

The headline says it all, and it’s probably a question most of us have asked at one point or another. A week ago, we got this dilemma at our company blog for GCI Communique (in Norwegian). The story is as follows:

On February 28, my colleague Nina Kersten Nilsen posted “Help! My child is online!” (in Norwegian), which sparked a bit of debate about children and internet usage. But a comment posted on March 15. restarted the debate. The comment was from a mother or father who had explained “everything” to his/her child at a very early stage, and seemingly proactively. The language cannot be described as anything but a bit creepy, and possible too graphic for a corporate blog. The comment shocked me, and I, along with my colleague Marius Eriksen, wrote a new post “When a blog comment makes you sick” (also in Norwegian), explaining why we didn’t delete the post. As far as we’re concerned, the debate it sparked, was more valuable than our personal discomfort.

But when is it right to delete a comment? Obviously, spam comments are removed as they are posted, but when a comment moves close to the border line of off-topic, do you leave it alone or remove it? If the language is too graphic, do you delete the comment? If the content is over the line, morally or legally, is it safe to leave it? Is everyone responsible for what they write, or is the blogger himself/herself to a certain degree responsible for what is written?

I’d love to hear your input on this.

Update: Shel Israel sent me the following link via Twitter: http://redcouch.typepad.com/weblog/2008/01/time-to-repeat.html It deals with a similar problem. For the record, our commenter was also anonymous, but the content was probably too sensitive to have been written under full name. It would have identified the daughter of the commenter, which would not have been good. That also complicated the situation.