Sunday, May 8, 2011

Banned for a Trig Truther Comment

Here is a new example of censorship from Huffpo user nalinpalinnow:

Hi, here is my summation of my banning experience at HuffPo which I posted in comments at the Business Insider article on Palin's story about Trig's birth. Once again, no profanity, bombast, ad hominem, etc. Just a comment that rubbed someone the wrong way. My entire commenting history of 2 years deleted without recourse. I wrote politely twice asking to see the comment which they banned me for no response.

BANNED!!

I would like to share this weird experience here. I am not a particularly passionate commenter on HuffPo and more often than not I make a light joke on a puff piece. Nor do I comment every day but maybe 3 or 4 times a week. Like many here, yes I am fed up with their hypocrisy and sad excuse for a liberal newspaper, but I don't particularly boycott sources of information. For example I am quite proud of nominating C4crap for worst blog of all time which they well deserved, but it doesn't mean I won't go there and look at it.

Imagine my surprise when this comment which I attempted to post only twice last night (count 'em, once, twice, that is it) resulted in this email today:

"Your account has been suspended for possible violations of Huffington Posts Term of Use until it is possible for a senior moderator to review. A senior moderator will review your account in the next two business days and will reinstate it if possible.
If you wish to contact us about this situation, you may write to: community-support@huffingtonpost.com

Thank You,
Danielle
Moderator-In-Charge

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Here is the comment which got me banned:

AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, the far right conservative who now controls Huffington Post, also happens to be a major financial supporter to SarahPAC. Is this why “Trig Birther” threads are now disallowed on Huffington Post?

Here was the piece that was passed on by Huff Po, "Sarah Palin's Version Of Trig's Birth May Be More Troubling Than The Hoax

Read more: Business Insider Article on how Huffpo's new AOL Overlords are Conservative Republicans
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I have never been banned from any site on the entire world wide web, including even C4P. I've never even gotten a warning from any site ever. I used to double, triple and quadruple post links to my old blog or to palingates on HuffPo back in 2009, and never heard a thing from them about that. But an attempt to post this comment twice last night results in this. Wowser.

I really wanted to share this here so that others would know the level of censorship on this issue. Actually it is quite mind blowing to me. I don't care, because frankly I'm always a little uncomfortable that my snark and some personal opinions of mine will live on in the annals of HuffPo for all eternity, so they may be doing me a big favor if they decide to continue this ban. Whatever. I will not be writing to them about this because I just don't care to engage their silliness.

Back in Feb. Business Insider didn't seem to think that the new CEO TA would make a difference in the "progressive" slant of the rag. I beg to differ.

"Armstrong had AOL buy Huffington Post because, unlike AOL blogs, it has been able to attract a dedicated and loyal audience. If the Huffington Post does that by appealing to progressives, Armstrong is not likely to fix what is not broken. He's a capitalist with too much money on the line to do anything like that." This article goes on to talk about some of the political donations "libertarian" TA and his wife have made.

To read more: Business Insider Article on how Huffpo's new AOL Overlords are Conservative Republicans

Click here for NalinPalin's blog.