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February 28, 2007
ReWriting the Past without notice, Bad Form, Bad form indeed.
Since my kids recently re-watched the movie Hook, the term "Bad Form" has re-entered the house. It came to mind yesterday on my day off when a piece of proper Blog Etiquette was flouted by one of the most popular political blogs on the net.
At the Huffington Post yesterday a thread was began concerning yesterday's attack in Afghanistan that targeted the Vice President. A fair amount of the commentators choose to express themselves in an impolitic way. Well it is a blog and you can't hold the authors of the blog responsible for all the behavior of commentators. However an interesting thing took place;
As the story became known first through rival blogs and then through radio media; comments were first closed and then edited to remove the impolitic statements. The effect was to change the general tone of the reaction of the commentators.
This is not only foolish when trying to hide already posted items (this stuff is cached on the net and one person even saved the page as a PDF) but it is contrary to blog etiquette to make a note that said comments were removed or that some inappropriate comments were removed. It is my opinion that if you have a policy to removed or edit comments already approved it should be clearly stated.
Again it is their blog and they can run it as they seem fit but it addresses the point we have made more than once here concerning the net. You can't always trust what you see at first glance and get multiple sources since the net is easily manipulated.
As for the method used to edit the post; In my opinion, Bad Form gents; Bad Form.
Update: Ms Huffington answers in this post
And I stand corrected on one point there is a comment policy at the bottom of the page with the normal site stuff.
Huffington Post Comment Policy
We never censor comments based on political or ideological point of view. We only delete those comments that are abusive, off-topic, use excessive foul language, or include ad hominem attacks. We pre-moderate comments on our blog posts and post-moderate comments on news stories.
Personally I think it should be programmed so it shows up when posting comments but that's me. The policy is there and I should have seen it. I must assume that the comments deleted were under the "abusive" category.
UPDATE II: Looks like they aren't taking chances anymore.
Posted by Peter at February 28, 2007 04:33 PM