Q&A: What is the basis for the permission to delete questions
What is the basis for the permission to delete questions
Question
A question just for the sake of playful pilpul, but I really am interested in the definition. Suppose that on some website where there is an option to upload questions online, someone posted a bad, nasty, inappropriate question, with all sorts of unpleasant features, one that deserves only condemnation and to be ignored. What is the formal halakhic permission for the site owner to delete it? And how is this different from someone who rolls his ball (intentionally) into another person’s yard, where presumably it is forbidden to burn the ball? I thought of a few possibilities: 1) No permission is needed at all, because there is nothing problematic about deleting it; the questioner has lost nothing. 2) There is an implicit condition that anyone who uploads questions does so subject to the site owner’s wishes. 3) The nuisance to all the readers and to the site owner is worse than the upset or loss the questioner will suffer. 4) The deletion is also a kind of response and education. 5) Deletion is not the destruction of an existing thing, but only the stopping of the continued renewal of its life on the server.
True, this sounds childish, but if the answer is short maybe you’ll still agree to answer.
4
Answer
I debated whether to delete this bad question, but I’ll answer briefly anyway. 🙂
Deleting the question does not involve any harm to the writer’s property. His ideas remain with him, and he can publish them anywhere he wishes. Just not with me. You could also ask what permission I have to close the windows of my house when noise comes in from outside—after all, I have deleted the sound of the noisemaker, may he live long and well.
The question of what the justification is for doing so, and for what reasons it is or is not appropriate, is a different question. But the right to delete is absolute.
Discussion on Answer
You could compare this to an art exhibition (the bedrock of our existence…) in which some center named after some creature hosts artists and their works, and one of the works includes an offensive display for some reason. No one turns to the artist to remove the work; they go to the exhibition host demanding that it be removed, because etc.
Even though no one disputes that the monetary ownership of the work belongs to the artist and creator.
So too, an internet site hosts the creations and nonsense of those wandering the web, and the site owner gives space to things as he wishes: if he wants, he maintains them, and if he wants, he deletes them.
In an art exhibition, is the exhibition host allowed to burn the work that he decided to remove from display?
A bad question, but the answer is strange too. Obviously you can delete it without even thinking, because the questioner intentionally put his stuff into someone else’s domain, and there is no point to this discussion. If it got there unintentionally, then one could discuss the laws of returning a lost item. The answer is odd in both parts: the claim that the ideas remain with the questioner is not enough, because the wording itself may indeed have been lost (and maybe the ideas too were forgotten). Someone who has had something he wrote deleted, even when he remembers more or less all the ideas, knows that this is a loss in every respect. And so the comparison to blocking noise from entering is also incorrect, both because the noise remains where it is and because the action is not performed on the noise itself. If someone threw a stink bomb into my house, obviously I can flush it down the toilet. And even if he threw a perfume bomb at me, I have the right to throw it out. If he doesn’t want me deciding, then he shouldn’t shove himself into a place that doesn’t belong to him, that’s all.