Gone are articles such as, "Why so scared of naming the jew?" You can read it because Google cached it. If you try to go there now, you merely are greeted with a "four oh four, page not found" message.
 |
| Just one example of antisemitism from Occupy Wall Street |
does it make you feel dirty to acknowledge the ethnicity of these bankers/CEOs? jews have been getting kicked out of countries for thousands of years this movement is nothing new. granted there are many corrupt non-jews who also must be dealt with, but the khazars play an overwhelmingly disproportionate roll in all of thisAnd, no, this is not a "fringe" element of Occupy Wall Street. There are dozens of posts and videos that show that antisemitism is extremely high in their "movement." But Occupy Wall Street's hatred of Jewish people is not the point of this article, but the massive scrubbing and deletion of threads and articles that is going on all over their website.
So, for example, in the thread A transportation tip from a local, 41 comments magically become three:
 |
| Nothing Underneath the Third Comment |
 |
| Nothing |
Londons Occupation now Illegal ;-( went from 32 comments to exactly one, which simply said:
And, no, there was not some mix-up in the comment system where, somehow, comments more than a certain number of days old got deleted. In older articles (from late July), comments are still there. For example, in Logistics: Housing, the five comments are still there.
It's a clear scrub-job. The saddest part is that the incoherent ramblings of the members claim that "the CIA" and conservatives are changing facts and deleting history. They're too blind to realize that their "leaders" are actually the ones doing just that.
Please bookmark!
Occupy Wall Street: protesting against exactly what they are doing. Geniuses
ReplyDeleteWait, so you're saying that when their web traffic spiked dramatically they got more crazy people posting on an open forum and they had to assign someone the task of cleaning up their comments section?
ReplyDeleteThat's some incredible detective work on your part.
Why thank you, Anonymous. I noticed that you didn't bother to read the article, particularly when I mentioned that many of the old articles still had the same number of comments on them.
ReplyDeleteOn top of that, of course, is the fact that topics such as "http://occupywallst.org/forum/take-is-all-back-from-the-jews/" are still left up.
So, congratulations, you are a sheep who can't think for him/herself.
Hmmm, so you're saying that the only the active recent forums have been moderated, instead of them undertaking a wholesale review of all of the comments posted in all of the forums since the website opened to the public?
ReplyDeleteThat sounds like a fairly efficient use of someone's time...and you know who else had a reputation for ruthless efficiency, right?
(sorry, couldn't resist)
But Aurelius, I DID read your article, and as someone has been participating in online forums for two decades I have to say this is some pretty weak sauce. If you go to any high-traffic forum, be it FreeRepublic, DailyKOS, or even the comments section in YouTube you'll see that it doesn't take much for the bigots to come crawling out of their holes.
In the case of the occupywallst page it looks like they took a scorched earth approach to the recent comments section, removing everything that wasn't on topic, rather than just deleting individual offensive comments. Whoever the moderator was, they don't seem to know how to delete the thread URLs, which means that they weren't able to remove the evidence of stupid posters.
I do appreciate your reasoned response, but there are still threads (with plenty of comments) that escaped the "scorched earth" policy, as you put it. Further, the argument that the increased traffic caused an inordinate amount of spammers doesn't cut it, simply because there are so many articles after the influx that have few spammers. And yet older articles with a ton of comments were completely scrubbed. For a movement screaming for freedom of speech, I cannot imagine taking down, say, 95% of "legitimate" comments, just to get the 5%, if it's that much.
ReplyDeleteAnyone can post both "articles" and comments on the OWS website--there's no pre-moderation. Because of this, it's inevitable that some individual idiots who don't represent OWS, will post something stupid (with the occasional provocateur too, and kids who know how to push buttons and run away laughing). You don't point out that the comments appended to that now-deleted "article" ("Why so scared of naming the jew?") universally condemn its author--do those people not matter in your equation? Have you done even a rough tally to compare the number of vile "articles" and comments, with those which call for nothing of the sort, if not exactly the opposite? I think you'll find, when looked at as a percentage, that the percentage of vile stuff is quite low.
ReplyDeleteI don't blame the moderators of the OWS website for deleting the garbage--if they left it up, I think you (and everyone else who's trying to be reasonable) would rightly condemn them for that even more loudly.
I've seen this pattern on the Huffington Post too--someone will comment in a ludicrous, incendiary fashion, which sparks an outraged response, etc., and the moderators frequently will delete entire comment threads, for whatever reason--either because they don't have all day (as you point out you don't either) to weed through every comment, or to discourage the appearance of new flame threads if people were to see other flame threads left up, etc. I don't read into this, any particular political agenda on the part of the moderators as a whole, especially since pointed comment threads involving people of all persuasions, as long as they're not too incendiary, making too-personal attacks, etc, are allowed to stand. Occasionally on Huffpo you will see individual moderators deleting, or not allowing to post, comments that simply disagree with the viewpoint of the author of the article, and in these cases, it seems to be the author of the article that's been given the job of being the moderator. But this isn't nearly the practice of the majority of their moderators. I've been online since 1980, reading enormous numbers of comment threads, and if there isn't someone to do some moderating, some of it can get pretty nasty. And when an online forum finds itself being used as a platform from which random individuals and hate groups post pointless garbage trying to muddy the waters, and even to hijack a website, it serves everyone well when it's deleted--it's not a matter of censorship.
The OWS movement is pretty big, and getting bigger, and it covers a lot of ground, so it's inevitable that it will bring out of the woodwork a number of creeps who see it as an opportunity to push their particular agendas. This is a common phenomenon--it's nothing new.
The kind of stuff you're seeing is indeed vile, and needs to be condemned, but either you're mistakenly reading into its appearance on the OWS site, something more than it represents, or you're using it to support your own agenda. You need to do better if you're to aspire to responsible journalism. A true journalist would do some good, objective investigating to determine how much the comments you're seeing represent any kind of official or unofficial common thread in the movement.