In an effort to tame the trolls, SFGate's site (as well as a few others like ThinkProgress) use software from an outside company that implements a unique "block user" function. This feature blocks all comments made by a user from view by anyone but themselves (upon login). That is to say, whenever the quasi-banned user logs in to the site, they see their comments intact; but to everyone else, the offending comment is simply invisible. When we heard about this "deception" recently, we thought what most blog editors thought: genius. And heads up.

Investigate the Media broke the story -- its only story, in fact. (Hmm. Just who is this JimJams? Curious.) ITM broke it down like this:

Why would SFGate do such a thing? Because ever since public input was first allowed at SFGate, many commenters who had their comments deleted would come back onto the comment thread and point out that they had been silenced for ideological reasons -- i.e. they weren't sufficiently "progressive" -- or because they had pointed out ethical lapses at SFGate and the Chronicle.

"Silenced for ideological reasons?" Banned for not being "sufficiently 'progressive?'" (Do you hear that? That's the din of collective chortling by SF progressives.) And here we thought that this was simply a more gentle yet passive way of dealing with the gaggle of trolls that park under the bridges of any site with user comments. Admittedly, we do understand ITM's point of view here. But the issue here seems to stem from hurt feelings, not noble anguish over dastardly censorship as we're being led to believe. The blocked commenter is upset that their comments and thoughts simply haven't been read. We don't think censorship is the real issue here. He or she simply didn't know that they were banned.

Anyway, we asked former SFist Editor and current Deputy Managing Editor for Online, Eve Batey, just what in God's name is going on. (Full disclosure: Batey is a friend of the site and personal friend.) When asked whether or not commenters are banned for varying viewpoints, she told SFist that "neither The Chronicle nor SFGate would delete a comment based on an idealogical stance. ... Why would we bother to have comments on the site if we didn't want varying viewpoints to be expressed?" She goes on to tell us that "[w]e've stopped using the 'block user' function as of today, even at the risk of having comments 'disappear' and at having some article comment section conversations suffer as a result."

Batey's entire statement after the jump.

We don't have folks moderating the comment sections of every article -- that would be impossible. Instead, we have a "report abuse" button on every comment. If any reader sees a comment they consider to be a violation of the TOC or Comment Policy, they're encouraged to hit that button. At that point, the comment is flagged for (brought to the attention of) a set or Chronicle editors, one of whom will look at the comment, evaluate it for compliance with the TOC and Comment Policy, and either delete it or allow it to remain. It's not always easy to decide, so we try to err on the side of caution and delete very few comments, overall.

Given the questions raised recently, I'll spell it out for you: neither The Chronicle nor SFGate would delete a comment based on an idealogical stance -- if you don't believe me, take a look at any of our articles, and you'll see that viewpoints of all stripes are expressed there. Seriously, why would we bother to have comments on the site if we didn't want varying viewpoints to be expressed? And how successful would any comments section be if the only comments that were there were in agreement with any agenda? Even if, philosophically, we didn't believe that squelching any TOC-abiding viewpoint was wrong, business-wise it would be really stupid to kill every conversation by only allowing one viewpoint.

We delete comments that are brought to our attention and do things like use racial slurs or threaten or suggest violence against others. We would never delete a comment just because we don't agree with what someone says.

The software we use for article comments isn't an SFGate creation -- it's provided by an outside company with which SFGate has contracted. When we gave them our requirements for article comments, we made it very clear that we really, really needed a way to indicate that a comment had been deleted -- something as simple as having the text of the comment replaced by "This comment has been deleted due to violations of SFGate's Terms and Conditions" would have done the trick nicely.

However, this wasn't something the company was able to provide to us immediately. We at the Chronicle and the folks at SFGate weighed this problem, and decided not to let this keep us from moving forward on article comments. This nagged at me and at my colleagues, that deleted comments would just "be disappeared," but we felt such a sense of urgency to add article comments to the site that we pushed this worry away, and hoped that this transparent deletion function would be added soon.

Unfortunately, the commenting company hasn't been able to provide us with this tool yet, and suggested that we use their "block user" function as a stopgap measure. (This "block user" function is what you see your colleagues in the blogosphere calling us out about.) The "block user" function blocks all comments made by a user from view by anyone but themselves (upon login).

So, what we've been doing is deleting TOC-violating comments from folks who only occasionally violate our policy, but in cases where mass disappearances of comments would make the article comment conversation completely incomprehensible, we opted to use the "block user" function. This function has been used very, very sparingly (and only a few of us have access to this function), and only for those few folks who have repeatedly violated the TOC.

Clearly, however, even though this only has impact on a few users, it was the wrong thing to do -- and that, in our eagerness to have discussion and conversation on the site, we failed to take into consideration those users who would feel hurt and deceived by having their comments blocked from view.

I'm glad that this issue has been raised because I think that this will help make our commenting software providers understand the importance of having a function that makes it clear that comments have been deleted. We've stopped using the "block user" function as of today, even at the risk of having comments "disappear" and at having some article comment section conversations suffer as a result.