However, activist and blogger Alex Au and National University of Singapore (NUS) new media lecturer Lim Sun Sun both believe there are already shades of community moderation online and that the status quo is hard to change.

'Where this discussion is going to go wrong is if people approach (moderation) thinking of a single structure on top of a media platform,' says Mr Au. He does not believe there will ever be such a structure given the Internet's unbridled nature.

His take on community moderation is that it is the 'aggregate of all decisions' made by owners of forums and blogs who decide what content to put up. 'The only thing amenable to change is how the website owners go about their actions,' he argues.

[Then the article discussed Choo Zheng Xi's ideas for a superstructure, ombudsman or code of conduct.]

For Mr Au, something less formal might have value here. He is opposed to approaching community moderation as the idea of some formal superstructure sitting on top of the Web.

When he signed off on the community-moderation idea in the Bloggers 13 proposal, his idea was that it would take the form of a 'talk shop' - a place where bloggers and Web administrators come together to discuss the choices they make in moderating their own sites: 'What to allow, what not to allow, how much space to give to something, these are problems everyone faces. The talk shop would allow them to tap each other. The outcome would be intelligent, consistent moderation.'

I think I need to expand and explain what had been quoted. I basically said that even without a superstructure, moderation can be alive and well. The reason is that every website, whether a blog or a forum, has somebody in charge. He is not going to be absent, because maintaining these things takes work. But he's also human, and human beings are ultimately social animals. They tend to get into similar patterns of behaviour as others. This social instinct means their behaviour is amenable to change in ways they are not even conscious of. Or when they are, it is entirely voluntary.

The question then is how can we promote this possibility? One is through socialisation among owners of websites and producers of content. Which was why I mentioned a talk shop where people could tap each others' experience in handling issues or bounce ideas off each other.

In contrast, erecting a superstructure means that webmasters will see behaviour modification as an external force. It will be resisted.

 
But there is community moderation even now

I also said to the Straits Times that we can see moderation at work all the time -- if we know how to look. The problem is, the elephant (the government) comes into the room and tries to define what a moderated internet should look like: It has to be civil, it has to be "balanced", it must not contain "immoral" content and so on. Then everyone puts on his best Sherlock Holmes outfit and goes around with a magnifying glass looking for such a thing, only to find that it's not there. Together we then conclude that since the expected result is not evident, no moderation has taken place.

What a farce!

To me, moderation is evident even now, if only we know how to look for it. There are two kinds of moderation: post-publication and pre-publication.

Post-publication would include instances when either the webmaster or moderator intervenes or when other commentators criticise the viewpoint of the original writer or comment-maker.

A classic example would be when someone tries to cite religious scripture to support an argument. You can bet that lots of others would jump on him immediately. Singaporeans seem to recognise a norm that religiously-based arguments cannot be valid in public discourse.

This is not universally true, you know. In many societies with a majority belonging to the same religion, it is quite common for religious citations to be used and not objected to. For example, I have for some time been observing the discourse about homosexuality in Jamaica, one of the most violently homophobic countries on earth, and the typical argument used is a scriptural one. Even the pro-gay equality argument, on the rare occasions when it is surfaced, is sometimes scripture-based.

Pre-publication moderation is when the writer self-censors. It is much harder to spot. However, we can detect it at work by looking for pattern. Organic self-organisation is usually indicated by the presence of pattern.

One that is quite obvious is the almost dreary uniformity of viewpoint in the socio-political cyberspace of Singapore -– anti-elite, pro-opposition, and rather provincial. As Tan Tarn How, a media researcher with the Institute of Policy Studies, said recently, we don't see blogs taking strikingly different ideological viewpoints; we don't see pro-communist blogs, for example. Do people with pro-government views or unusual ideological stances censor themselves, and not even put up their arguments?

Related to the above is the narrow range of topics people discuss. We see cost-of-living issues, government mismanagement issues and the like, but we don't see much discussion of foreign policy, our attitudes to law and order, our drugs policy, capital punishment, public health, corporate behaviour, pollution and the environment, for example. Might it be that content producers, even if they are personally interested in these topics, have learnt that they get few readers (and therefore little gratification) if they write about such things?

(I am a bit of a masochist to write the recent long article about Asean [2], when I know full well it will get few eyeballs.)

In the same vein, might it not be true that people do hold themselves back before they say offensive things which they fear would not be well-received by others? That what offensive speech we currently see now is already a reduced amount, culled by self-censorship? Could it be that what is noteworthy is NOT how much offensive speech we see, but how little?

Coming back to the uniformity of viewpoints and topics, I find the above evidence of self-moderation, or self-censorship -- and you really can't separate one from the other -- somewhat disturbing. It begs the question: Is moderation/self-censorship necessarily a good thing? Does it not also drain vitality from public discourse? Is Singapore cyberspace too uniform, too boring, in terms of interests, viewpoints and writing styles?

But what sticks in the craw of the government is not that it is boring. What sticks is that it is not boring IN THE WAY THEY WOULD WANT IT. The interests are not focussed on the GDP and how to promote economic growth. The viewpoints are too oppositionist, and the style nowhere near deferential enough for their egos. And so the elephant says there is no moderation, and now we're all running around like clowns trying to create a superstructure.

 
Where moderation is needed

While I have raised the question above as to whether the kind of moderation we currently see is always such a good thing, we should also ask: Is there such a thing as worthwhile moderation?

I guess a case can easily be made for moderation of speech that is malicious. Speech that is intended to inflict social and psychological injury upon a target person or group. If anyone goes about vilifying an ethnic group or bullying a fellow student, then reasonable people would consider this out of bounds.

The problem may be that Singaporeans don't know how to speak up against anti-social behaviour. It is not only in cyberspace, where we are tongue-tied or over-reticent. Singaporeans do not tick off the able-bodied person occupying a seat meant for the elderly or pregnant, they do not speak up when they see people not queuing up, or an abusive parent taking it out on a child.

It is a much more general problem than merely a cyberspace one. I describe us as a society that understands and is submissive to vertical authority, but has no clue about our responsibility to our peers. That, however, is for a separate article.

The point that I think we need to take away is that the more we rely on vertical authority to put things in order, the more negligent we are about horizontal responsibility. So, pace the headline used by Jeremy Au Yong in his article, and which, curiously, is taken from the words of the free-speech advocate Choo Zheng Xi of the Online Citizen -- "Moderate, so government can deregulate" -- the order should be the other way around: Deregulate, so people will see the need to moderate.

 
"New media" is really new

Where the whole discussion also falls off the tracks is the use of the word "media". We say "new media", "digital media" and so on, and unthinkingly class the internet alongside other "media" that come to mind, such as television, newspapers and cinema. We then start asking ourselves what models of moderation in these more familiar media can be replicated to serve new media.

Words are like blindfolds and we won't see where we're going if we do not critique the way we use and understand words.

The internet is different from the other "media" in a crucial way. While the rest are few to many -– that is, there are a relatively small number of TV stations, newspaper titles or film studios providing content for large numbers of information consumers -- the internet is many to many. There can be as many producers of content as there are consumers of it.

Even book publishing, which is characterised by millions of titles, is not as "many to many" as the internet.

"Few to many" media have choke points at which governments or public opinion can exercise influence. The few can be leaned on to abide by a code of conduct.

Imagine how difficult it will be to get the zillions of book authors and publishers to do the same. Now multiply that difficulty for a medium that is virtual, borderless, and which does not need editors, publishers or bookstores as intermediaries, and therefore do not have these chokepoints either.

You'd be dreaming if you thought that any model of regulation or moderation from the "few to many" media can be applied effectively to the internet. The starting conditions are just so vastly different.

Moreover, as Au Yong wrote in his report,

In a medium where freedom is everything, the thought of someone telling you what not to do is difficult to overcome. Netizens indeed seem particularly sensitive, and the slightest hint of control triggers a need to bite back.

 
 
Don't look at other media, look at the psychology of human behaviour

So we come back to the one sure thing we know: Content is created by humans. And humans are social animals. Popularity, peer acceptance and social esteem are perennial motivators. Thus, if we want to dwell on the topic of moderation -- and I am not sure I do -- then think along those lines.