Is Palin's Facebook Page Hers to Scrub?
BY Nancy Scola | Wednesday, August 4 2010
Over on the Next Right, the always thoughtful Jon Henke pushes back on my implication that Sarah Palin is doing anything particularly noteworthy in curating the comments on her Facebook posts:
So, the Big Story here is that Palin's staff tries to maintain a decent community by keeping things civil and focused, and weeding out the jerks?
Look, we've gotten too wrapped up in the idea of politicians and/or technology having clear, defined and consistent rules. That just doesn't work in a social medium. If you create any kind of bright line "no racism/cursing/personal attacks" rule, then you have to make decisions about exactly what does and does not qualify as racism/cursing/personal attacks - and you will be attacked for your decisions no matter where you draw the line.
I'm not so sure about this. Jon's of course right that whenever you start to filter posts, you open yourself up for attack. But (a) online norms have evolved to the point where people generally aren't held responsible for their commenters and (b) Palin seems to have drawn the line well short of "jerk." John Dickerson's original piece for Slate reports that the safe zone seems to be a narrow range of comments affirming what Palin posts. Some of what Team Palin scrubbed seems innocuous. One, for example, opposed Palin's endorsement of Kelly Ayotte in New Hampshire's Senate race in language that seemed to fall well within the band of polite speech.
Thinking about this a bit more deeply, there seems to be a fairly important question at play: who, exactly, does Sarah Palin's Facebook page belong to? The most natural offline analog is probably the political townhall event. There, though, there's a presumption that it's an engagement between the politician and citizens, and if it "belongs" to anyone, it's the latter. But, when it comes to politicians on Facebook, what are we up to? There seems to be a disconnect in Palin's case. Her commenters seem to assume that they're taking part in some sort of community, or at least a forum. Palin, on the other hand, seems to be thinking of it as -- for lack of a better term -- a chance to do advertising.
Jon suggests that "discretion is the better part of moderation." But we might also borrow and tweak something from Oscar Wilde: moderation in everything, including moderation.