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Wednesday, March 10, 2010

It's not just The Olympian LTE Thread....

I guess the new activity on electronically run forums is to hit the complain link and have the comments pulled, when you disagree.

I've been standing my ground in a musicians forum on an issue about underselling the marketplace and giving away services. It seems my position isn't popular among a few of the crowd and while they call me "ass" and "asshole" in their posts, my clean worded response just happens to get pulled from the forum. Who should honor freedom of expression more than musicians and artists?

Internet forums, ThurstonBlog being no exception, are not run by someone monitoring them 24/7, thus there are electronic devises to lodge complaints about abusive comments. They were not intended to be there for additional abuse by those that can't handle someone disagreeing with their stance on an issue. I noted that at the end of the evening "billo" had a comment deleted that was a response to "OlyRagToo's" ridiculous comment that someone pilfering candy from the bins at Top Foods was an indicator of "entitlement behavior". Since "tin foil hat" is a commonly used phrase on the LTE thread, you know it's not actual abuse. Someone has figured out the magic number of complaints to lodge to have a comment deleted. Of late, on the LTE thread, one of our regulars has noted this and conferred with Tammy McGee, who has confirmed that Pluck has a software glitch that allows for this abuse.

For all the grousing that goes on about freedom of speech, I'm amused at the lengths that people will go to, in order to strangle the freedom of speech of others.

1 comment:

Anonymous98507 said...

Even the entire Puyallup City Council attempted to censor citizens appearing before the Council at its meetings.

Puyallup council ditches attempt to mandate courtesy
The Puyallup City Council voted down a proposal Tuesday that would have required citizens to be “courteous in their language and deportment” when speaking at city council meetings.
[snip]
Residents said the proposed rules would infringe people’s First Amendment rights to free speech and prevent them from publicly criticizing city officials’ decisions. Besides requiring courteous language, the rules would have also banned any “derogatory, impertinent, or slanderous remarks or insinuations” against city council members, staff or citizens, and given the mayor the power to determine whether a citizen’s remarks were “germane and relevant.”
Most residents who spoke Tuesday thought those weren’t objective standards. ...

[snip]
Ashley Brooks, a senior at Rogers High School, compared the city’s attempt to regulate citizen comments to censorship of her high school newspaper.
“Just because a few people are going to go up and be derogatory doesn’t mean everyone has to be punished because of it,” she said. “When someone comes up here and they feel passionately about something, words are going to slip out. They have that right.”