I love social media experts. There’s one born exactly every 0.017 seconds, and they all have great opinions that prove Dirty Harry’s second most famous quote right. One piece of advice they like to give is:
“You should not blog, at least not right away.”
Take it from a social media practitioner (I’m not a “social media expert” that is a title for an “interactive user” who has hung out a shingle), blogs are important. In fact, blogs are the center of the social media universe. Why?
Blogs are the root source of content for nearly everything.
If you plan on doing anything meaningful in social media, you have to have a landing point. Preferably one you can measure and is engaging. Often times you need a place to break a story. Other times you need somewhere you can bring together ideas. Blogs are perfect for this.
Is It Ethical to Edit Spam Comments?
Spammers are getting more and more sophisticated in their methods. Thanks to Akismet on WordPress and Blogger’s new spam filters, the days of gibberish-filled comments with 50 links to different spam sites are over. So the spammers have had to get creative and try to slip one over on us bloggers.
These days, the common technique is to leave some flattering yet generic comment like “Hey, this is a great post. I bookmarked it, and I’m going to tell all my friends. You rock!”The spammer has also included the URL to the site they’re pimping in the hopes that this seemingly innocuous comment will slip through our radar. What they really hope is that the search engines will follow the URL to their site, and they get a little “Google juice” out of it.
This is a common SEO technique, so I understand the reason for it. But it’s really kind of slimy, especially because some new bloggers don’t catch on right away, and they’ll publish these comments, and will sometimes even respond to them.
The latest technique is to actually read the blog post, leave a semi-generic message about that particular topic, again with the URL, in the hopes that this will get through.
“Hey, this is a great post about ghost blogging and I bookmarked it so I can come back again later. I’m going to tell all my friends about it. You rock!”
Here’s my ethical dilemma: Can I, as the blog owner, delete their URL, and then publish the comment? I’m “defanging the serpent,” as it were, and not allowing the spammer to get what they want, but I still get the benefit of a semi-generic praise-ish, if falsely made, comment.
The Pro of Editing Comments
I can argue that many of these spammers are only trying to deceive people into buying their stuff (usually porn, pills, or counterfeit watches), and as such, are not very moral people. I’m not doing any more harm by editing these comments than I am by deleting them. I’m removing the offending URL, and blocking their attempts to direct people to their nefarious websites.
The Con of Editing Comments
This could be a slippery slope. If I edit a spam comment today, what’s to stop me from editing a regular comment for spelling and grammatical errors tomorrow? And then deleting a negative comment the next day? From there, it’s a short step to editing a negative comment into a positive one.
The Question: Can I Edit Spam Comments?
So, my question is, assuming I don’t slide down the slippery slope, can I remove the URLs and publish the comments? If I promise not to cross that line, and never, ever edit a real comment for any reason whatsoever, can I tweak the spam comments and remove the one thing that makes them spam.
What do you think? Do you edit or just delete? Is it dangerous to edit these spammy comments, or perfectly acceptable?
Photo credit: Cookipediachef (Flickr)