The Obama campaign deleted my blog post!
A couple of days ago, as part of my experimenting with how political rumors get started online, I created a blog in the community section of barackobama.com, and added a post. As background, there have been several dust-ups lately where commentators have--disingenuously, I think--singled out blog entries posted by the Obama site's users and tried to imply that these posts originated with the Obama campaign itself.
As in, just because someone posts a crazy blog on a web site (the blogs are published automatically--without an approval process), suddenly that blog represents the opinion of the site's owners. By that logic, you could say that all of the comments on every political site represent the opinion of the site they're posted on -- and that's preposterous, especially with sites that allow tens of thousands of comments from users across the political spectrum.
At any rate, I wanted to see if the Obama campaign was actually reviewing and approving the posts being put up on its site. So I put up a blog to see if it would get published without first getting approved. It did. Here's the Google cache of my post, which got six comments from people "LOLing" about my spurious and irresponsible assertion about Obama.
But today I see that the post had been removed, and I can't possibly imagine why. If you read the text of it, it's clear (I hope) that I was making a statement about the way outlandish rumors originate, and how they spread.
From the Obama site's Terms of Service (my emphasis):
We have the right, in our sole discretion, to edit, refuse to post or
remove any material submitted to or posted on our Website including,
but not limited to, material that is unlawful, threatening, libelous,
defamatory, obscene, pornographic, graphic, or otherwise objectionable.
So my Martian joke was objectionable? Or was it defamatory? Geez, Martians really must have thin skins.
image by David Sarno, you like?
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posted by wickliffp1996 @ 19:26
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