Nah. Best practice is to follow specifications. You can add validation if you feel like the client/user is implying its requirement, but the description definitely does not imply that. In fact, based on the description, it sounds like something would be feeding validated troll comments to this function, so the implication is that arguments are already validated. He added completely unnecessary code. Even though it was a few characters here, that kind of mind set can lead to a lot worse outcomes in real production.