The majority was against me. It was torches and pitchforks.

Take me at my word when I say that I was gentle but they were violent. I think that either the internet or the role of moderator induces psychosis.

It’s like people lose their moral center or something. Fall into a swimmingpool of their own opinions. Lose perspective and such.

Somebody should do a paper on the subject.

I came across this post after my latest ban. I’m not sure what got me banned this time. Maybe it was posing the question “Can I link to this on the next LOL RELIGION post?” on their “Catalog of Internet sins” post. I’ve been banned before for talking about their LOL RELIGION attitude, on a story about why we should respect women’s right to wear hijabs (surely a case of “lol religion”. More likely it was for my devil’s advocate comment on a story about a Republican senator’s comments about mass media playing more of a role in mass murder than the availability of guns, and comparing it to mass media’s role in shaping peoples’ perception of women, and how Boingers tend to agree that the latter plays a role in “rape culture” but when a Republican says the same thing about violence in media, he’s an idiot because LOL privileged rich white goat-humping hillbilly. I wonder if they feel the same way about Tipper Gore and the late Paul Simon’s similar stance on the issue?

They don’t even bother to make fun of people’s class in an ironic manner, they just do it. Fair game if you’re white, of course, because you will never, ever experience prejudice. Ever. I certainly never did in college. No…wait…I experienced the “you don’t deserve an A because you’re privileged” as well as the “you’ll never get very far because you’re a dumb redneck” attitudes. But do beat me over the head with the privilege stick, because there’s no way my dumb cracker ass would ever figure out that minorities and women have it rougher on my own. Too busy shooting at woodland creatures and humping my immediate family, you know.

Goodness, that turned into a rant. Sorry about that.

However, criticisms of the prevailing ideology there are not tolerated, even if respectfully, thoughtfully, and good-naturedly stated.

Perhaps the fact that I noted their hypercritical sponsorship by DeBeers, even as they continually and smugly criticize corporations for their treatment of people, pushed them over the edge.

I regret not being able to comment at BoingBoing any more, but at the same time I can sleep well knowing that all that really happened is that a bunch of rich, white, small-minded hipsters no longer want me messing up their talking points and Spencer Giftian sales pitches. I guess I’ll live.

Too bad, because I rather enjoyed the vast majority of their posts.

Xeni killed it.

The only Hal canned on July 11 was angry at Xeni for writing about Tosh’s rape jokes — something like “Is this what Xeni has come to? A humorless blogger getting offended by a mediocre comedian.”

You know, it is time to uncheck that “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” box. It’s been unreal, guys!

Rob’s position is very weak. BoingBoing stifles open, respectful discussions in their comment section. That, I believe, is antithetical to what they purportedly stand for. It’s a practice I had previously only associated with extremist sites like freerepublic.

And really, selectively censoring opinions that don’t back up your politics? That’s just weak… It reflects pretty poorly on the strength of those arguments if they can’t even handle friendly comments that happen to disagree… And in this case, the comments didn’t even disagree with the message — just the method. Kind of over the top.

Most of the issues I’ve raised are ones that BB has raised with other entities in the past. I think BB loses an awful lot of foundation to make these statements on when it can’t hold itself up to the same ethics.

It’s not that the moderators don’t operate without any transparency or oversight. They just have a tedious, often overwhelming job to do and we don’t micromanage it.

No matter how it is cast, our support of free speech doesn’t oblige us to publish comments or make us hypocrites for banning commenters. We’re not stopping you from speaking; we’re just not letting you use our megaphone. Tough titties!

When comment threads spin off into heat and argument, the moderators tend to gut them irrespective of who is on what side. As the comments still published in that thread are largely in agreement with your position, some of your complaints don’t make much sense to me.

Hundreds of thousands of people read that post, and only a few dozen commented. So commenters represent themselves, not the readership. I’m not convinced that comment threads amount to texts in their own right that may be “edited” or “misresprensented” by deleting unwanted individual comments. It’s a good idea, though!

The Disqus problems manifested as comments taking a very long time to appear after being posted. It was a different issue, but one easy to confuse with intentional deletions.

It’s a little disturbing to me that your moderators operate without any transparency or oversight. I know you admit to hypocrisy, but still, I find it a little disturbing that BB spends so much time calling — rightly so — for transparency and ethical behavior in others, yet seems to feel absolutely no need to hold itself to those standards. Corey at least has always presented himself as a bastion of modern progressive ethics — I would hate to find out this his views are cynically just “for the paycheck” and he doesn’t actually believe any of what he says.

I also don’t think it’s fair to say that the vast number of on-topic comments deleted were “concern hype”. As someone who is both a parent and a political activist — and has solid credentials in each and I think the right to speak with some degree of “expert status” — I think when a video is posted showcasing a highly controversial method of activism that it’s not unreasonable to discuss that. I think you’ll see that most people agreed with the message, but not the means, that the woman in the video took.

As to the rest of the “don’t want to publish, never, never” stuff, the only reason that any of the speculation about moderation policy was there in the first place was because of political extremism acting out on the part of the comment moderators. When large numbers of comments espousing a certain viewpoint get deleted you have to expect people to notice!!! Don’t turn it around and blame your readers for wondering why their comments were disappearing — this was wholly the fault of your moderators for being so sneaky about it. Personally, if I was BB, I would be extremely pissed off at the moderators. It’s one thing when Antinous posts his rather far-out views and slags commentors — at least he has the balls to do it publicly and with his name attached, which I can respect — but a completely different matter when the moderators abuse their power by selectively censoring based on political views that are in this case way out of the mainstream from BB’s readership. That demands transparency. That demands an explanation as to what’s happening and why. It’s wrong for it to happen the way it did, and I sure hope that behind closed doors they’re not getting the pat on the back that you seem to be giving them here. This whole episode reflects very poorly on the site.

And again, the issue isn’t BB’s political take on the use of children as political pawns and when that is and is not appropriate (for example, I’d say in this case, it’s not appropriate, but in the other recently posted case of the police ripping up the paper hearts, it IS appropriate). The issue is the censorship and subsequent “editing” of the conversation thread to attempt to misrepresent the stance of the readers. The fact that this went on silently, with no transparency, and so on, is disturbing. If the moderator’s wanted to state their view and say “no more comments on this aspect”, then fine, while I’d disagree with their stance, that’s at least ethical. But now, if anyone were to check out the comments on that post, they would come to a highly erroneous belief about the ststus quo among BB’s readership, when that’s not at all true — it’s just that posts have been carefully censored to present a false reality. You can’t seriously tell me that if another entity behaved like this that BB wouldn’t call them out on it? Again, I think BB loses all legitimacy to call out other entities on these subjects when this goes on. You don’t get to suspend your ethics to promote your political goals any more than America can eliminate its freedoms to protect freedom.

Frankly, the only good thing that BB has done on the subject of this post has been your responses here, and I do greatly appreciate you taking the time.

PS. And please don’t try and tell me that this came down to a Disqus bug in ANY way. I find it extremely hard to believe that this had anything to do with anything other than rampant, overreaching moderation. If Disqus hiccuped, it was because it never assumed moderators would behave like this.

It’s true that in a trivial sense of the word, our moderators censored your comments—from our website. But you have your own website, and we are not censoring you here. Our disinclination to publish your submissions at our website is not quite the same thing as what you equate it with here — stories about campus cops macing kids in the face in public, being murdered in one’s bed by the Syrian secret service, etc.

It’s also true that we are all hypocrites, now and again, being human and frail. But refusing to publish you is not hypocrisy, because we’ve always been picky about what stays up. I admire your stated goal of publishing all submissions to Zentastic, but Boing Boing is moderated.

As you can see, the top comments remaining in the thread are largely in agreement with your position. So the idea that it’s all got something to do with disagreeing with the editors is silly.

I don’t actually know specifically what you got booted, because our moderators operate autonomously and don’t file reports. It’s entirely possible that you were canned without much thought, by someone who has not the slightest idea who you are. My guess is that they found your postings liable to encourage hostile responses and just deleted them and any subsequent threads en masse.

Looking at the Disqus dashboard, I see that the comments that were deleted in that thread followed a theme: concern hype about the child’s wellbeing; speculation about long-established comment policies; and people accusing Boing Boing of being under the nefarious control of our part-time system administrator, Ken Snider.

We just don’t want to publish that sort of thing. Never did, never will.

Post it here. If you want to publish at Boing Boing, which you clearly do, you have to post less flamebait and less crazy talk about the help.

P.S. Our comment system, Disqus, was having problems last week (and continues to). obviously canned many comments in that thread. BB editors aren’t a collective, but generally don’t care much about comment moderation. This is because we have moderators to care about it for us, and we trust them.

P.S.S. The big picture deal is that we see Boing Boing as a publication by us, not a platform for others. I’m sure an argument could be made that the presence of comments establishes an implicit social contract otherwise, and that’s an interesting debate. Regardless, our stance may at least explain why most of us don’t care when people accuse us of hypocrisy or censorship.

So… say something critical of BoingBoing on another site, and you get banned from posting on BoingBoing? Is that really how it works there?

Trying to change history is even worse than not talking about it at all I think.