Debate is crucial to a healthy university. At a university, disciplines, perspectives and opinions collide to form an education, and the New Mexico Daily Lobo has been a forum to facilitate that collision for more than 100 years. We’ve opened up our website to allow immediate feedback on our content, to foster dialogue and encourage healthy discussion on relevant issues.
However, the Daily Lobo’s forum is not meant to be a cesspool of racism, libel and personal attacks. And, while the Lobo is not legally at risk for anything posted on its website, it would be irresponsible to simply let the forum’s mission be perverted from its original goal of healthy discourse and debate.
We seek not to censor but to cultivate, to allow opinions to resonate and intrigue by identifying and discarding counterproductive and irrelevant comments.
I’ve outlined a comprehensive policy for the enforcement of the Daily Lobo’s online forum. I sought to establish a thorough policy that provides a set of criteria to be followed for years to come. We are eager at the Daily Lobo for input and suggestions for policy improvements. Here’s what I have so far:
Criteria:
The Daily Lobo reserves the right to remove comments, and it will not tolerate:
Posts that attack others on the basis of gender, race, class, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual preference, disability, etc.
Posts that invade the privacy of others, purport to be written by someone other than the author and/or are libelous.
Posts that are plagiarized.
Enforcement:
With these criteria in mind, the editors at the Lobo will monitor and remove comments if, and only if, they meet any of the criteria. By increasing the number of monitors for the online forum, while still mandating that each monitor base his or her decision on a specific set of criteria, offending posts will be removed quickly.
This policy will allow for a healthy debate on our website and will allow the Daily Lobo to responsibly fulfill its duty as the independent student voice of the University of New Mexico.
Pat Lohmann
Daily Lobo editor-in-chief
