If you are involved in marketing you probably have heard of Kathy Sierra’s blog, Creating Passionate Users. If you’ve followed her site over the last few weeks, you will have seen her cancel a speaking event due to some pretty disgusting and threatening comments as well as posts on other sites.

I’m not going to touch on the details as they’ll be hitting CNN but I do want to touch on an important subject; Freedom of Speech on blogs, forums and chat rooms.

As followers of Jesus, it is pretty clear that not everything said about us will be nice. The question is, what do we do about it.

We need to protect ourselves and our websites. Have a terms of use and display it prominently around any public comment forms. It gives you the ability to moderate and point to specific reasons comments were deleted or chatters banned. [Example]

It is not our desire to censor comments or kick people out of chat. However, we realize that it sometimes has to happen so our sites don’t hit the news for the wrong reasons.

Moderate with care. Sometimes it makes more sense to use someone’s words to make a point. The way one shows class and love when the battle is on can often make more of a difference than making a comment disappear.

Any other thoughts, feel free to comment.