Presumption against taking over responsibility on third party sites
The responsibility for measures of protection and intervention lies first with the social networking site itself. We should never set out to duplicate measures of protection and intervention which the social networking site already takes eg against illegal or against harmful and offensive content, whether by using its own staff or by working with the community to alert them to breaches of the site’s terms and conditions.
In practice, different social networking sites offer different models of intervention in different areas.
For example, the photo sharing site Flickr has worked with its users to moderate the most offensive images itself quite effectively. But it does not appear to offer its own user facing mechanism for removing the most offensive user comments. Instead, Flickr gives the right to moderate and comment on user text comments to the Administrator of each Group. BBC producers have used this facility to actively host BBC Groups and to remove some comments.
So there are some circumstances where the BBC will need to plan and implement an additional “ light touch” intervention, for example to remove comments which are likely to cause extreme offence. We will need to work out how this should be done, who will do it and when. Where necessary, Editorial Policy can advise on a suitable threshold for “light touch” intervention. Recent research suggests that this approach matches audience expectations.
One problem is that while social networking sites may publish clear rules of acceptable behaviour for their users, they are often very reluctant to share much information about how they intervene or to what level. If you are not familiar with how eg MySpace, Facebook and Bebo deal in practice with different forms of harmful and illegal content on their sites, ask the Central Communities Team in FM&T.