Public takedown log

[RichardTaylor]

A public page enabling us to be more transparent about when we remove material from the site.

When censor rules are applied or individual messages hidden we are already open about what we do and why - it is explained on the relevant request page, we just don't point to all our censoring activity from anywhere.

Perhaps including a delay period before anything appears on the log so we're not drawing attention to material people can then go and obtain from Google's cache (or similar).

Where we've removed entire threads from public view we could just give a count of how many have been removed; including where it's recorded in the system why eg. vexatious / a request for personal information.

I've added this in relation to #1198

[RichardTaylor]

Just to link this to #2657 and #2658

[garethrees]

Linking to https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/423

[RichardTaylor]

What are some potential first/next steps?

• We could use the system we have now and present links to lists of threads collected via tags eg. for takedown substantive_takedown and takedown reasons. This isn't ideal as it wouldn't be automated and comprehensive, it would be another manual exercise, and it would omit any deletions of whole threads.

• We could start with a log which doesn't link to specific threads, and doesn't quote material from them. This wouldn't be very informative to the reader, but might be a starting point. It could be along the lines of the admin timeline we already have.

• We could start with an admin version of the takedown log, that would a new view of the admin timeline, but showing just events which reduce the prominence of material.

I think any other option which publicly identified threads/messages would unfortunately (given WhatDoTheyKnow's current policies/approach) require some complexity to allow for delayed inclusion in a takedown log, or even exclusion of identifying details of the thread from the log.

On WhatDoTheyKnow we balance transparency against other factors eg.

• Legal risk
• Data protection
• Public protection

Where we've decided to take material down, and be transparent about it on the relevant thread, but not draw attention to it (eg. by not taking action which would bump it up the order of listings on user and body pages) should it appear on a takedown log, or can perhaps be "slipped in" low down a takedown log list, or included with no link to the thread?

Another complicating factor is temporary take-downs. Perhaps ideally even temporary take-downs should be included in a takedown-log, but in such a way that they can be filtered out.

Do we want to show titles of vexatious/spam/not_foi correspondence on a transparency log? It might be good for giving confidence that we're removing the right things, but such titles may contain personal data, links to spam sites, and generally unpleasant material.

Ideas:

• Automatically add tags when prominences indicating a take-down are present on a thread, along with tags for not_foi, vexatious and spam enabling a public takedown log to be created via the existing search features. A risk here is drawing attention to issues where we want to give a greater weight to factors other than transparency.
• Produce a general, but delayed, transparency log. Again a risk here is drawing attention to issues where we want to give a greater weight to factors other than transparency.
• Introduce a specific tag for cases where we want to exclude the title/link to a thread from transparency reporting.
• Introduce a specific tag to use in cases where we want to delay transparency reporting (and publish a other cases on a live transparency log).
• There are lots of ideas at https://github.com/mysociety/alaveteli/issues/2658 including logging rejected takedown requests.