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On one hand, I oppose censorship of any kind. However, I appreciate that this forum cannot survive if intentional disrupters, trolls, con-artists, and spammers could have a free-for-all.

I have some complaints with the Free Republic's apparent policy on posting. I'll keep them to myself for now. More importantly, I have a suggestion for improving the way that the censorship is implemented, which I think could offer several advantages.

First, it's important for me to cite what I consider to be the weakest points of the current system. Specifically:

The actual posting policy is vague, and while most Freepers have a general idea of what's inappropriate, many sincere posters cross into a "grey-area."
When a user has a post removed, he rarely receives an explanation of why it was removed. This can create confusion in the mind of the poster. Did he miscategorize it? Did it contain military information? Was it deemed racist? He doesn't know, and if he tries to correct the article to repost, he may easily make the same mistake again.
I'm not an admin, and frankly I would never volunteer for that. I would bet dollars to donuts that it's a difficult and thankless job.

With these ideas in mind, I have a suggestion for handling censorship on Free Republic. It comes with a price--it requires a change to the programming.

The idea is this: when people click on the "Abuse" button, they will get a list of checkboxes (click all that apply). E.g., "Spam/Commercial," "Racist/Violent," "Obscene/Offensive," "Military Information," "Duplicate Post/Wrong Category," etc.

Now, the system could be set-up so that the administrators are not alerted until n different complaints have been registered on the same post for the same reason(s). I suggest n might be set to three, although this should be adjusted according to the system usage.

A handy enhancement of this, would be a method to ban a certain user from reporting abuse, if they abuse that privilege.

The advantages of this system:

It allows people who have messages removed know why they were removed, without requiring the admins to do any extra work.
It saves the administrator's time, for now they need not review every single complaint. I suggest that under this system they would rarely be flagged to a post that's not truly inapppropriate.
It allows the users to see a concise list of what's not allowable, so that they can make an earnest effort to post appropriate messages.
It employs a democratic method behind the posts, and removes a certain element of administrator prejudice. If you can't find n users who are offended by a message, then it obviously isn't offensive enough to worry about. Admins, as a rule, should not bother with messages that don't trigger the threshold number of complaints.

I make these suggestions as something to keep in mind the next time you have the sourcecode on the operating table.