Free Speech Advocate and Author Cory Doctorow’s Site, Boing Boing, Systematically Removes Blogger Posts
Publishing Newscensorship / Free Speech8 Comments
According to Gawker Media (who sounds like an idealist whose idol was shown to have clay feet) reports that Boing Boing, a site helmed by Cory Doctorow and others, has been removing the blog posts of Violet Blue. I haven’t found a reason. Violet Blue was engaged in a controversy for having the gall to actually touch Steve Jobs at this years’ Macworld conference but that was in January. Violet Blue also contributes to Fleshbot as a sex advice columnist. Others have speculated about the disappearance but no answers are forthcoming from Boing Boing.
Via Gawker.
Looks like Boing Boing has replied.
Thanks for the link Kat. My own personal belief system does not include the deletion of posts and I guess I’m surprised that Boing Boing, being the free speech, open air dialogue folks that they purport to be, took the unpublished route. Of course, BB has every right to do what they want with their blog.
I used to read Boing Boing occasionally, but the overzealous moderation got on my nerves. There always seemed to be drama of some sort going on in the comments, and it all came back to the tone set by one or two of the moderators.
I like the approach here at DearAuthor. If someone’s a big enough jerk in the comments, the other participants and/or the blog owners will sort things out rather efficiently, without resorting to removing comments or disemvoweling. That just seems petty to me.
“unpublished”? [rolls eyes]
“Unpublished” in this case probably refers to blogging jargon. Some of the popular blogging software offers different options for posts held in the database — “published”, which is visible to the public at large, “unpublished”, which holds the post in the database but keeps it private, and “deleted”, which deletes the post from the database. “Unpublished” is used for things like drafts, or finished posts that are being held for publication later, or published posts that are past their use-by and being taken out of the public view but not deleted.
But if you don’t know that, it sounds decidedly Orwellian.
OK, so, um, if that’s really what happened — VB asked Jobs for a picture, and he called her rude and said no — and now Boing Boing has decided to remove all her posts . . . then that’s super-ridiculous. Also, it seems like Boing Boing cares more about the well-being of Jobs — who, I’d like to point out, is anti-Open Source, anti-transparency, and anti-Linux (following A and B) — than of one of their bloggers.
But this can’t be the whole story . . . can it?
And their inability to appreciate how it would look to the ‘average’ reader (both what they did and how they explained it) says rather a lot. I mean yes, from blogger point of view it was unpublished, from reader point of veiw it was deleted.