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More appalling censorship on Webcameron

Posted by webcameronator on Thursday, 08 March 2007 23:01:45


David has sacked a member of the shadow cabinet for making a statement containing the phrase "Black Bastard" and a comment of mine here on Webcameron quoting the phrase has been moderated.

If it is site policy to disallow the use of the phrase "Black Bastard" then at the very least it needs to be consistently applied, it would be much better for moderation to be transparent and as "hands off" as possible. ie. Reasons should be given for moderator actions, moderator actions should not be invisible, and where possible comments and posts should be edited (with a note from the moderator attached) to bring them into line with site policy rather than deleted outright.

The comment in question was:

https://www.webcameron.org.uk/blogs/2940-2#comments

I have edited and re-posted it.

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Posted by canvas on Thursday, 08 March 2007 23:43:40

Comment deleted by webcameronator on Thursday, 08 March 2007 22:05:29


Webcameron always leave a post saying when they delete or remove a comment.

These do not appear on your comments.

 

Comment edited by canvas on Thursday, 08 March 2007 23:43:56

Posted by webcameronator on Friday, 09 March 2007 00:02:37

A statement saying my comment had been removed by a moderator was at first present in place of my comment.

I then clicked on "Manage" and saw the moderated comment was still present. (With a red square next to it)

I edited the comment by changing "bastard" to "b*****d", and clicked publish, the comment then re-appeared without the moderator's statement.

As well as an error by the moderators, this also highlights one of the many problems with the site's coding.

Posted by webcameronator on Friday, 09 March 2007 00:09:38

A problem we've got here is that the site's rules forbid:

"Abusive, threatening, obscene, or offensive material"

Yet the debate on this site, and nationally, this evening is on David Cameron's judgement as to what constitutes an offensive statement, and if his response to what was said has been reasonable. It is difficult to have this debate on a site censored in the manner of webcameron.

 

Comment edited by webcameronator on Friday, 09 March 2007 00:15:37

Posted by Votedave on Friday, 09 March 2007 18:13:03

Must we be reminded that this website did not even exist before last autumn? Few political leaders allow such extensive interaction.

Posted by DaveGould on Saturday, 10 March 2007 16:19:20

Fair point however, why was the following post censored?
216.239.59.104/search?q=http://cache:S4zjXiDMKLAJ:www.webcameron.org.uk/blogs/2895+%22New+Zealand%22+site:www.webcameron.org.uk&hl;=en&ct;=clnk&cd;=1≷=uk&client;=opera

Took me ages to find my comment and obviously only found it in Google's cache.

Posted by kozmicstu on Saturday, 10 March 2007 16:53:21

That's an easy one, DaveGould. It was removed because most of it comes directly from the article at http://www.opendemocracy.net/democracy-opening/failure_2968.jsp without being properly sourced or attributed. That's against site rules.

Stu

Posted by Kenenth on Saturday, 10 March 2007 20:26:53

Komic...how do you know the reason why this chap's comment was removed?

Posted by kozmicstu on Saturday, 10 March 2007 20:36:36

I looked at the link that DaveGould put up and worked it out. If you take a random section of sentence from the original post in that thread and put it into google with speech marks around it and look at the top two pages, one is the post DaveGould is referring to the other is the site I just linked to.

Try it: google "The picture of democracy as a defender of civil liberties and human rights did not apply"

Easy.

Stu