Any blogger will tell you: It's great to write a blog; it's great to create a virtual communal hub for readers to discuss shared interests and ideas; it's not great to deal with the nastiness that comes along with it. Bloggers are targets. Trolls are common, and more and more bloggers have not only had to contend with trolls, but also with personal attacks and even threats. Some say that comes with the territory; others say it really shouldn't come with the territory. And in the wake of a particularly disturbing episode of blogospheric behavior, some are proposing something akin to a bloggers' speech code to try to clean up the internet and make it a more civil space. Such a code, the New York Times reports, might include default banning of anonymous comments and the freedom to delete "threatening or libelous comments without facing cries of censorship."

The criticism of such measures--as that last detail intimates--is that attempting to codify a sort of bloggers' etiquette manual would interfere with the free exchange of ideas that is so vital to the blogosphere's vitality and, more basically, so elemental to democracy.

I used to be very sympathetic to that criticism--so much so that when I first started writing this site, I allowed trolls to pretty much destroy the commenting community that grew up around it. I didn't feel I had much choice (this was back in 2003) but to open comments to all comers--even if what they did on my site was antagonize others, insult and harass me, and generally derail and corrupt the quality of discussion I was attempting to host. In part, I let that happen because blogs were still a fairly new medium then, software that enabled comments was also fairly new, options for moderating comments or requiring commenters to register were limited to say the least, and I just didn't have any models for what you were supposed to do when people used your site to spray hostility around.

I'm a bit older and a little bit wiser now, and I've been able to watch a lot of other bloggers deal with trolls since then. I've noticed that they don't have any trouble banning commenters who get out of line, and I've also noticed that banned trolls almost always squeal about how they are being censored. But the First Amendment argument should be recognized as the red herring it is.

Unless a blog is federally funded--and I can't think of too many that are--it's not exactly obligated to maintain the standards that, say, a public university is obligated to maintain. Most blogs are private--privately maintained and financed by private citizens or organizations. That means they get to set whatever standards for civility they want for commenters. The best bloggers have a broad standard, and will accept comments from a range of viewpoints. The worse bloggers either delete all dissenters (confusing disagreement with trolling) or appear to operate according to a vitriol-inducing "anything goes" policy that drastically drags down the quality of the site. But whatever standards they set, all bloggers with comments sections are already setting them--they can't avoid it. The trick is maintaining clarity and consistency, whatever their standards are.

I've banned a few commenters over the years -- a very, very few. I don't think I could even count them on one hand. In every case, the people I banned were not banned for disagreeing with me or for vigorously debating ideas. They were banned because their focus was personal--they were less interested in talking about issues than in attacking either other commenters or me, and as such they introduced a quality of nastiness that I just don't want on my site. I waited a long time before banning any of them. I resisted the temptation to "out" anonymous trolls whose identities I knew. And I probably let the problems go on too long, just because I didn't want to ban anyone unnecessarily. But in each case, the person really needed to be banned, and I was *so* glad once I did it. So, for that matter, were the site's other contributors. And that's a big part of this, too -- if you accommodate a troll, you lose the people whose words and ideas you do want on your site. They find someplace nicer to play, and with good reason.

Over time, I've come to regard personal blogs as virtual living rooms. Critical Mass is my virtual living room. Conversely, the blog I write at ACTA is not my living room, but, rather, part of ACTA's virtual office space. When you think of a blog that way, it becomes easier to decide what to do about the people who try to use your site to discredit, insult, or attack you and your commenters; it's easier still to decide what to do about people who threaten you or target you in some way. People who come to my actual living room do so at my pleasure--if they are rude, hostile, or threatening, they get shown the door and they don't get invited back. The same goes for commenters on this site--if you behave civilly and respectfully toward others, then you are welcome to post your thoughts and also welcome to disgree with me and with other commenters as much as you want. But if you cross the line--my line--you're gone.

Likewise, there are limits on how much you can pursue a person electronically before you fall afoul of the law. Harassing, stalking, issuing threats, and libeling people are just as illegal in cyberspace as they are in real space. No blogger should feel they must host comments that fall into these categories because they worry that if they delete them some misguided people out there will cry censorship. And every blogger who becomes the target of chronic harassment or personal threats should report that behavior to the police and to the harasser's service provider.

I understand the impulse behind the movement to create a blogospheric code of conduct, and perhaps a loose codification will help individual bloggers establish their own rules for commenters who come to their site as well as establish general standards of behavior that we can all regard as normative. There's nothing wrong with that, not least because guidelines are hardly laws. No blogger has to adopt them, but any blogger can. And, as I noted above, every blogger who maintains a comments section has already made a series of decisions about what gets posted to his or her site and what does not.