Petty and pointless censorship by rabble.ca

Just dropping by to let you know about how rabble.ca censored a comment I posted on one of its blogs. In fact, they didn't just censor my comment, they deleted it entirely - three times - without a word of explanation. Perhaps someone here can help me figure out why.

Ironically, it was a blog post about censorship!

Paul D. Boin, an assistant professor of media studies at the University of Windsor blogs for something called the Media Justice Project, and it's mirrored on rabble.ca. Prof. Boin was unhappy about the television broadcasts of the video showing how Nodar Kumaritashvili died on the dangerous Olympic luge run last week, and he made that a subject of his blog post on February 13. He called it "the Olympic equivalent of a snuff-film" and labelled the decision to broadcast it "callous", "barbaric", and "Machiavellian". As a supporter of open media and an opponent of censorship, I happen to disagree strongly with this view.

Not only was Boin chagrinned by the broadcast of the video, but he also pointed to the hypocrisy of the TV networks who censor stories and images of war-related deaths, and who (he was quite certain) would, presumably, not have shown the luge video if it had been a Canadian or USian athlete.

Of course, the TV networks are hypocritical in what they choose to broadcast and what they choose to suppress. But it seemed to me (and it still does) that Prof. Boin was himself being hypocritical by complaining about the media's decision not to suppress the luge video. In effect, he was saying that the video ought to have been suppressed, while at the same time decrying the networks' suppression - both actual and presumed - of other newsworthy stories and video.

In my opinion, the only non-hypocritical position to take is that the media ought not to be in the business of suppressing news and video. The unnecessary death of Kumaritashvili was important news, and broadcasting it, with a suitable advance warning that the images were disturbing, was the only correct thing to do. To argue that the video ought to be suppressed because (a) it is intrinsically disturbing or because (b) the TV networks (wrongly) suppress other news and video and ought to be consistent by suppressing this one as well, is to advocate more media censorship, not less. To me, that seems bizarre and counterproductive for someone associated with the Media Justice Project. I posted a response to the blog (see below).

In replying to my response Prof. Boin tried to insist that he was only concerned about the consistency of media censorship, not censorship itself. "Show all or show none," he said, as if it were a matter of indifference to him whether or not the media practice censorship, so long as they are consistent in their actions.

As I have said, this seems bizarre and counterproductive from a media justice standpoint. Moreover, taken in the context of his very clearly expressed disapproval of the decision to broadcast the luge video, it seems to me that Prof. Boin is not really concerned about consistency; after all (as we must conclude from his comments), if it were up to him, the shocking luge video would have been suppressed, while video of "Canadian and American soldiers dying in Afghanistan or Iraq, or innocent civilians in said countries" would not.

Surely it is significant that Prof. Boin's blog posting comes in direct response to an instance where the media did not censor something that he found distasteful. That's what triggered his complaint; if the media had suppressed the luge video, there would have been no blog post. To me, that clearly indicates that Prof. Boin places a higher value upon consistency in media censorship than he does upon any principled opposition to media censorship itself.

And when I pointed this out on rabble.ca, my comment was deleted. I didn't save my original post, but I reposted a similar comment the next day, pointing out that my previous comment had been deleted. Then that post was deleted, and I reposted it yesterday (as I had taken the precaution of saving a copy), pointing out that I had been censored twice. Then today, for the third time, I found my comment had been deleted by rabble.ca, again without any notice to me, or any explanation.

- - - - -

Here I reproduce Prof. Boin's blog post:

Here I reproduce my initial comment in response:

Here I reproduce Prof. Boin's rejoinder to my comment; it has been amended at least once, but this is the latest version:

Here I reproduce the comment in reply (posted for the third time yesterday) that was censored by rabble.ca:

- - - - -

So, what do you suppose is going on at rabble.ca? Is it just that they don't agree with what I said, so they censor me? Are they just insisting that Prof. Boin gets the last word and the discussion is closed? Did I violate an element of rabble policy, either written or unwritten? Did Prof. Boin insist that my second comment be suppressed? What exactly is rabble.ca's policy with regard to "media justice", anyway?

Hey MS longtime no hear...come on back!

Dunno but definitely interested in hearing rabble.ca's answer too

Probe: Olympic track didn't cause luger's death

They've found themselves not guilty. So why did they put up a wooden wall where Nodar slid through? And beyond the new wall they've placed padding on the same steel girders that killed the Georgian luger. But their boneheadedness was not responsible for Nodar's death. Was it a case that some genus cut corners on track design to save a buck?

Excellent post, M. Spector.

Is this the line that made rabble nervous?
"The death of Nodar Kumaritashvili probably resulted from incompetence and bad decision-making on the part of Canadian Olympic officials, designers, planners, and/or the International Luge Federation.
Libel? Did you repost the same response every time?

The removal of your posts is incomprehensible, Spector. But I'm more interested in you coming back to babble. I promise we'll never censor you here!

Is it censorship if it's a privately owned publication? I would think that's just editorial rights.

And/or yes, maybe libel was a concern?

Libel of whom? There is no difference between Spector's deleted post(s) and the one they left up. I repeat - incomprehensible.

Hear-hear!

Welcome back M.Spector hope you are sticking around.

Rabble didn't censor that statement, or any part of that post, and it remains as written. It was my second post that they deleted three times.

And the private ownership of rabble.ca is irrelevant to whether it was censorship. It's not only public authorities who censor:

Wikipedia

I have no idea if the writers of the blogs have the power to censor comments.  I have been deleting a LOT of blog and other news related items on rabble which were commercial spam, and ONLY those items.  Because of the way things are set up, plus the huge amount of spam I'm dealing with, I could have deleted a legitimate post by accident, but no way three of them.  Like really there's a lot of volume and I go through it kinda fast. I don't even read the posts in the blogs because I don't have time, I just scan for certain  links.  If I saw your name I'd pass over it.

Mspector, before I started thinking about censorship I'd consider technical problems first because god knows we've got lots.  If you think the author of a blog is censoring you you should probably contact the publisher.  That sort of censorship really isn't our style.

Wow, see the new ebblab even has built in excuses.  Nice retort M. Spector, sorry to hear about the difficulties.  I'm not surprised we don't see you often, much as I regret it.

It doesn't make sense that in a blog dealing with censorship, reader comments would be subjected to it.  In the absence of any feedback as to why your remarks were deemed to be controversial enough to merit removal, perhaps a technical problem does exist. 

Hi M. Spector. I'm not sure what happened with the deletions (I may have mistakenly deleted one comment because I thought it was an identical duplicate/technical computer glitch...a fault of my lack of technical blog management, not  anything censorious). Please re-post your initial comment that was deleted. All the best and thanks for your interest and feedback. pb

rabble isn't "privately owned" - it's a non-profit run by a Board of Directors. We do have an editorial policy and reserve the right to remove offensive content from our web site, but we only exercise it in the most extreme cases, or with spam.

As soon as I saw this thread yesterday, I alerted other rabble staff about it to see if anyone knew anything about it - the first thing I thought was "glitch" too, since I've had posts disappear after I hit "post" and thought they'd gone through.  No one knew anything about it at the staff meeting last night either.  I'm glad you confirmed that it was a technical issue, Paul.

Why do bloggers here get to delete anything  at all  by way of a response to their blogged postings?

Good question.

As for this being a "technical issue", I could believe that if it had happened once. But once a day on three consecutive days? Uh-uh.

Each time, my post went through and appeared on the blog page (it wasn't a case of it disappearing into the ether when I hit "Post") and each time it had disappeared from the blog page by the next day.

Cornish pixies?

As a blogger, I noticed that I can delete comments if I want. Not sure what the thinking is behind that and I'm not sure I'm opposed to it as long as it is used sparingly and not to stifle discussion.

I am opposed to it.

Me, too.

Other than getting rid of commercial spam, and maybe out and out vandalism, (which I guess is what I'm here for) I would agree with that also. 

I think that the original thinking behind giving bloggers power over their comment sections was that people would moderate their own comments in their blogs.  It's a way of offering some autonomy to bloggers, and a way of ensuring that they can remove spam or extreme abuse or libel (which happens occasionally) from their own blogs, since no one on rabble staff is currently paid to moderate comments on blogs.

I volunteered, while moderating babble, to simply look in on the abuse queue at any comments that were flagged by other users in articles or blog postings on the site, since the flagged posts show up in the same place as flagged posts on babble.  The condition I agreed to was that I didn't really have to "moderate" (since that takes too much time) or to include blog or article comment threads in my "reading rounds", but simply make the decision whether to delete or leave intact postings that were flagged.  I think oldgoat does the same now that I'm not moderating anymore.  But no one is paid to actually moderate the comments the way posts are moderated on babble (that is, stepping in if people get angry with each other and bicker, that sort of thing).

That's why bloggers have permissions over their comment sections.  We figured that each individual blogger would be most likely to look at their own comment sections more than anyone else at rabble, and could deal appropriately with problems that come up, just as they might if they were hosting their blogs elsewhere.

M. Spector, if you're not happy with the explanation that the blogger in question gave you in this thread (personally, I have no reason not to take him at his word, having screwed up more than once myself, and even deleted a babble post by accident once or twice when I thought I was quoting it, for instance), you can always e-mail the publisher, Kim.  Her e-mail address is publisher AT rabble DOT ca.

OH!  You know, I just thought about something, oldgoat.

For those of you who do not have mod superpowers and can't look at the flagged post queue, there IS a glitch with it that could explain this.  First of all, we get tons of spam on the site.  Secondly, we get tons of posts flagged as "offensive" for not very good reason by other users.

The problem with the flagged post feature is that they show up in order of posts flagged.  But if you "skip over" a post that you don't think is a problem (and believe me, tons of posts that are completely legit get flagged), but then try to delete the flagged comment AFTER it, it's always the comment at the top of the queue (e.g. the one you skipped over) that gets deleted.  It forces us to do it in order.

Could that possibly be what happened, oldgoat, during a spam run through the flagged posts?

i've never deleted a blog comment (not that I've had that many) - even the completely dismissive one from M. Spector on my last post a couple of weeks ago that should have cast aspersions on me but instead, falsely cast aspersions on Canadians Against the Prorogation of Parliament.

It's quite possible that oldgoat got to your comments first if there was spam posted on your blog.  He's the fastest spam-slinger in the east! :)

Delete the flagged comment? Thought there was no deletions? Or do you mean spam deletions?

Why would you skip over and leave one in queue?

Exactly, spam deletions.  I've never used the delete function in the flagged messages for anything but spam.  I don't think anyone else has either, unless it was by accident while we were getting used to how it works.  But yes, there is a delete function for all flagged posts, and a delete command on every post on babble that only mods can see.  With the exception of spam, we pretty much never use it.

Re: skipping posts in the queue - sometimes we would skip posts in order to leave them up long enough for other mods to take a look.  Or it's possible that instead of hitting "allow" (which means that it no longer shows up in our flagged post area) someone hit "delete" by accident since the buttons are right next to each other.

I mean, these are just guesses - I have no idea what happened.  But human error does happen. :)

How does your theory account for the deletion of my post three times in three days?

Can't buy that explanation either M. Spector, as a fellow volunteer moderator on a totally different board.  Actually, I guess I can considering how hard they freaking make it to post properly on this board.

A little benefit of the doubt seems difficult to come by for habitual cynics, which is not necessarily a bad thing.  Still, the invitation to re-post the comments appears as a good faith gesture.  How many of us scour over draft posts for spelling, confident in its perfection, only to find glaring examples after they've been posted.  The eyes can sometimes fail even the most diligent effort and intentions.

It doesn't.  I'm a bit technically clumsy, but not even I can screw up that badly.  I still wouldn't rule out a glitch in the system.  God knows complaining about our technical shortcomings accounts for no small part of Spectors post count.

Oldgoat wrote: God knows complaining about our technical shortcomings accounts for no small part of Spectors post count.

I assume God will be along shortly to confirm this?

Well funny thing, I actually didn't know that.    

I don't know how I'd get by without Spectors constant policy advice though.

If this isn't proof of omnipotence and the all seeing eye of providence, I don't know what is.

Not me, this is a freaking talk forum, not a legal or official missive...

..if it comes off with no typos or spelling errors  thats's nice, if it doesn't, I shrug and walk away  usually anyway, unless the typo/spelling error changes the meaning.

Think perhaps my resistence comes from the  CGA who was the President of the BoD of a non-profit I was Ex Director of. He was a petty man with petty issues.

Typical cheap shot. I'm not the one who tried to characterize this episode as a technical problem - it was in fact your good self who first brought up that excuse, and there were plenty of others eager to jump on the wagon in order to squelch any suggestion that the repeated deletion of my post might possibly have been deliberate.

The post is now reposted as of yesterday, and whoever has been deleting it seems to have backed off. Thank you very much.

Now please go back to your fascinating political debates. 

I still think it was Harper's Cornish pixies. They're incorrigible little buggers.

Don't you mean his Cornish pasties?

Well I think modern hard drive technology is certainly made the storing and retrieving of data more accurate and error-free than at any time before, and at speeds close to Shannon's limit. But they admit that cosmic rays knocking bits loose could be attributable for some tiny percentage of disk errors overall. I don't know. It's beyond my understanding for the largest part. Ghost in the machine?

Hi again.

At least two comments disagreeing with Judy Rebick in this blog post have been removed between yesterday and today, without any explanation or acknowledgment. They were not made by me, but by two other people.

Neither one was libellous.

Did you take a snap of the screen?

is there an issue  with bloggers sensoring their critics, which is not cool....if so.

There are a bunch of comments that disagree with Judy after that blog posting. I have a hard time believing that someone is purposefully censoring M. Spector's posts because he is critical of her blog posting when no one else's posts are being deleted. There has to be some other explanation. Once again, no one on staff can figure it out - we haven't been deleting them. And it's weird that this only seems to be happening to M.Spector. As far as I know, we haven't had complaints from anyone else about their comments being removed from blogs. So I'm wondering if there's a problem with M. Spector's account.

My account's been screwy too, with my input format being all messed up, but that doesn't account for lost posts, of course.

Anyhow, if you feel like it, try reposting and see what happens, M.Spector.

Oh sorry, I misread - I thought M. Spector was talking about HIS posts. My apologies. Okay, I have no idea what's happening then. I guess we'll wait and see if the people who made those posts complain. For all we know, maybe the people asked for them to be removed, or perhaps there is some sort of glitch that is removing posts, I don't know. There are a whole lot more posts in that thread that are critical of Judy's blog entry, so I doubt that anyone's selectively removing posts because they're critical.

Michelle, M. Spector didn't write the last two comments he claims were deleted. Do we know that the commenters did not delete the comments themeselves?

But if it were up to me, I wouldn't spend any more time indulging this enormous [redacted].

That gas light.  It's flickering.  See?

What do you mean it's not flickering??  I just saw... there it goes again!  How did you miss it?

Frig, I just lost my whole post because I was logged in under another account to test out my theory that blog comments might be able to be deleted by the person who posted them, then logged into my regular account in another window, and it screwed up this window! :)

Anyhow. Here's the deal with blogs at rabble.

Bloggers are hosting their own blogs on rabble. Bloggers have the ability to delete posts as a result. (I'm not saying that this is what happened in this case, since Judy hosts highly critical comments about her postings at her personal blog site and here, and there are lots of critical posts in that thread anyhow.)

But bloggers can moderate their blog comments as they see fit, and according to their own standards. This means that they may have different standards than babble around when a post might get deleted. People might delete posts for a variety of reasons - if they're insulting, they don't consider them to be useful to the debate, abusive, whatever. And they may have different standards than you do when it comes to what constitutes abusive, insulting, etc.

They might also delete a comment upon request from the person commenting, or if the poster deletes the post except for one character, which one of our staff noticed in a blog posting recently and then deleted it for them. We have no idea what happened in this case because we don't have anything to go on beyond a claim that a couple of posts, from unnamed posters, were deleted. If the people whose posts were lost contact us, we'll look into it further.

But what it comes down to is this: if you want to make absolutely sure your post stays intact, post it on babble, where there is a pretty standard policy of not deleting posts unless they cross the bounds of legality or spam.

P.S. Just spoke with Judy - she didn't delete anyone's posts and neither has anyone on staff.