Comments Too Hot for Minnesota Democrats Exposed to Handle
Every blogger can make up their own mind regarding which comments go live on their sites and which do not. It’s not a free speech issue. Yes it’s still interesting to track the bloggers’ comment moderation behavior to see what it reveals.
For example, I’ve pointed out the pathetic choices made by Andy Post and Ryan Lyk at Minnesota Democrats Exposed, where they let tasteless jokes and ad hominem attacks of other commenters fly on their site.
However, it’s even more interesting to track comments that go live on a blog, only to later disappear without explanation. In cases like this, the blogger(s) have made a clear editorial choice to remove a comment from their website.
Ryan Lyk and Andy Post at Minnesota Democrats Exposed recently created an interesting example of this. Two of my recent comments on their site went live when I wrote them, stayed live for a day, and were later removed without explanation. Considering the quality of the comments that they DO allow on their site, I must have said some pretty awful things in order to have my comments censored.
Below is a screenshot of the censored comments. The first comment from “Wade Seeker” provides some context for my comment. Notice next to my comments where it says “Your comment is awaiting moderation.“. This means that Post or Lyk flipped my comments from public to censored on their site. Now, only Post, Lyk, and I can see my censored comments. This link would take you directly to the first of my censored comments, if it were not censored.
Without further ado, here are the scandalous comments that Andy Post and/or Ryan Lyk decided to censor on Minnesota Democrats Exposed:
Yes, that’s it. That’s what Post and/or Lyk decided to censor. You may recognize much of that content from yesterday’s post here and on MinnPost. Why waste perfectly good political arguments?
What was it about those two comments that made them censor-worthy. If you have any theories, I’d love to hear them in the comments.
And, again, this is not a First Amendment case. Post and Lyk can create as much of a cesspool as they’d like within the comments of their blog. I’m simply pointing out examples of comments that are too hot for Ryan Lyk and Andy Post to handle on Minnesota Democrats Exposed.
December 28th, 2010 at 3:46 pm
You really can’t engage with these people on economic issues because they lack the intelligence to understand views they do not personally hold.
About half a dozen years ago I was at a “cocktail party” with some rightwing bloggers. Among other things, I said that I found the 20-30% profit margins of the news media to be obscene. I was told that profit margins of less than 20% were the real obscenity.
You can say Ponzi to these morons all day long and they’ll never ever get it. It’s all about timing and catching the bubble as it grows, and to hell with anyone who buys in late. I sincerely hope the gents I was talking to held on to their Strib stock.
December 29th, 2010 at 1:20 pm
[...] again, this is not a First Amendment issue. It’s just fun. [...]
December 29th, 2010 at 4:35 pm
While Mark is right that you can’t engage with these people on economic issues because they lack the intelligence, so too is Ed right that you do have to try and then when they censor the discussion…you have to expose MDE’s failings.
Of course, if there was anyone there paying attention, they could use the discussion to improve their policies…but seriously, what are the chances they will do so given their lack of intelligent, interactive debate up to now?
Quite simply, they have chosen to diminish themselves and limit their own political growth, which is why they continue to play that one old card that they think is trump (lower taxes) without realizing the game has moved on and the tax card has been outbid and is no longer trump.