Sunday, December 09, 2007

Censorship or Editing?

Those of you who read the comments on my site already know that I rarely take one down.

If a comment slams me personally, I often hit back with a comment of my own. We both get our ideas out there and it's over, right?

On those occasions when I do remove one, I like to think of it as editing.

If a comment appears an extra time or two, I'll get rid of the extras and leave the original.

If someone is using my site to slam someone unfairly, I'll sometimes blow the whistle, call a penalty, and delete that comment. That doesn't happen very often, does it? I usually say "play on" and forget all about it.

If (when?) the lawyers come after me, I may have a change of heart.

Now for the censorship portion of our program:

A comment on Timed Finals from Thorjohnny accused them of taking something from Swimming World.

Rather than respond, Timed Finals simply deleted the comment. They've done this before.

I think Scott Goldblatt's site needs to a) begin crediting other sites, and b) stop censoring comments that call them on it.

On blogcatalog, they describe their site as follows:

We are a swimming news and content portal founded by Olympic Gold Medalist Scott Goldblatt. Timed Finals is written by dedicated writers who hold an infinite passion for the sport of swimming. We are focused on building an interactive swimming community through the use of social media; first and foremost by providing extraordinary subject matter related to all aspects of the sport while allowing readers to freely interact with the content by providing their own thoughts, experiences and reactions.

HAHAHAHAHA!!

...while allowing readers to freely interact...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Censorship is always wrong. Deleting solicited comments is the hypertext version of book burning. 'I may not like what you have to say, but I will defend your right to say it.' Isn't that what democracy is all about?

Anonymous said...

"Isn't that what democracy is all about?"

Only if you really mean it.