CivilBot pools and analyzes everyone's votes, doing thousands of comparisons across users every day, to determine what are "good" votes and what are "biased" votes. Right now, it's a little overly sensitive; we're currently tweaking it to be more lenient. On the whole, though, it is working really well! 

We rely on what the community as a whole agrees is acceptable or unacceptable, as opposed to traditional moderation. With traditional moderation, a single person (removed from the commenting community and employed by the publisher) would decide whether a comment was acceptable or not. We think our system is more fair.

There are plenty of places to comment online where people can say whatever they want with impunity; those places tend to devolve into name-calling and threats pretty quickly. Publishers with higher standards ask that their audience help create a community where everyone can have their say, without resorting to harassment, abuse, and personal attacks.