Today I ran across three situations related to censorship. They are not related to each other, but the coincidence struck me.
First, I found out that my hosting provider bloghosts closed their support forum. Bloghosts gives excellent service and support and I recommend them to everybody looking for a reliable hosting provider. A few weeks ago they had some internal technical problems with their servers, resulting in lost support tickets. While normally support tickets were answered within a few hours, in that period tickets got lost and were not answered. To get the attention of the support staff, some customers started complaining in the support forum. Since normally this forum is very, very quiet, about one post a day, these few people completely took over the forum. The forum is now closed…
Directly after that, I read the comments on Robert Scoble’s Are you afraid to blog?, which suffer from a troll called J.Toran. Some commenters requested Robert to remove these comments, but until now they are still there and I expect them to stay there.
And finally D. Keith Robinson wrote about Comment Moderation and Censorship after having to remove a whole thread.
As for censorship on this site, until now I only removed commercial comments (spam), but I reserve the right to moderate comments in some other situations as well, as is explained in the Comment posting policy of this site.
