Social self-regulation

There have been some interesting issues around social media/social network self-regulation over the last few days. 

In the UK right now there is pressure on Twitter to lift their self-regulatory performance. As far as I can see, Twitter gets rid of users that post harmful or illegal content. Maybe not as fast as they could though.

I think it was Facebook (FB) that recently got rid of some 5,000 sex offenders from their site.

However, in an interesting twist, FB has gone social in developing a new set of self-regulatory controls. FB has proposed a set of principles and rights & responsibilities on their site and invited users to comment on them. I’ve copied the draft Rights and Responsibilities statement on safety to illustrate what is being proposed. There is clearly a significant burden of responsibility proposed on users.

3. Safety

We do our best to keep Facebook safe, but we cannot guarantee it. We need your help in order to do that, which includes the following commitments:

3.1 You will not send or otherwise post unauthorized commercial communications to users (such as spam).
3.2 You will not collect users’ information, or otherwise access Facebook, using automated means (such as harvesting bots, robots, spiders, or scrapers) without our permission.
3.3 You will not upload viruses or other malicious code.
3.4 You will not solicit login information or access an account belonging to someone else.
3.5 You will not bully, intimidate, or harass any user.
3.6 You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.
3.7 You will not promote alcohol-related or other mature content without appropriate age-based restrictions.
3.8 You will not use Facebook to do anything unlawful, misleading, malicious, or discriminatory.
3.9 You will not facilitate or encourage any violations of this Statement.

The question is, will self-regulation be effective? Where should the onus lie – on the service provider or the user: social self-regulation?