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Seems trainee Indymedia censor hid my posting just for a practice

freddie | 07.07.2003 21:59

In general I support the right of our censors here to hide whatever they choose. But when I tried to find why a posting of mine had been hidden, I found to my amazement that it had been almost randomly chosen to be used as the example in a "censorship tutorial" for a newbie censor.

If you ever wondered how the IndymediaUK censorship process works, have a look at
 http://lists.indymedia.org/pipermail/imc-uk-features/2003-July/004124.html
for an example of what seems to me an irresponsible training exercise which eliminated a posting of mine without any proper consideration.

I didn't really want to post to the newswire with a complaint, so I just added a comment to the posting in question, in the hope of getting a response. None has been forthcoming, so I am now hoping this full posting will elicit a response.

My posting was not hidden entirely. Just the summary remains, with the actual posting erased.
You can have a look at
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/07/273551.html

I can't tell you what I actually said because the link to read deleted postings, as given on
 http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/static/editorial.html
appears to have been broken since this incident.

Here are the details :

I was puzzled that my posting has been radically curtailed, with the summary showing, but with the posting itself disappeared (hidden ?).

To investigate, I first clicked to view hidden postings. The link seems to be broken.

I then looked in the features list, and found this:

Jul 03 12:13:08 ok let's try and find some wire article that looks
'dodgy'
Jul 03 12:13:19 some times you have to read them carefullly...
Jul 03 12:13:45 i tend to look suspiciously any thing to do with
palestina and especially with israel...
Jul 03 12:16:11 ekes if you haven't got to this posting yet, go to:
  http://www.indymedia.org.uk/en/2003/07/273551.html
Jul 03 12:16:52 Yep
Jul 03 12:17:04 thats abot the Neturi karta who are a sound bunch
Jul 03 12:17:07 i suggest we hide it
Jul 03 12:17:27 we can unhide it later if you don't agree with it,
shall we?
Jul 03 12:17:38 we just need to hide something :)
Jul 03 12:17:40 ok?
Jul 03 12:18:00 For the purposes of demonstration... lets keep going

I can't find any discussion of whether my posting was in fact deserving of being hidden, as it partially has been.
Just " i tend to look suspiciously any thing to do with palestina and especially with israel..." and
"we just need to hide something :) "

While of course people have to be shown how to do things, is it possible the teacher just forgot to reinstate the posting, or to evaluate it properly to see if he/she should ?

Or did the pupil practice further on it, with little skill, leaving it unintentionally in a strange state, half hidden, half showing ?

Of course you have absolute right to hide whatever you wish, but it would be nice if a bit more attention was paid to content than seems to have happened here.

The only attention seems to have been

Jul 03 12:17:04 thats abot the Neturi karta who are a sound bunch
Jul 03 12:17:07 i suggest we hide it
Jul 03 12:17:27 we can unhide it later if you don't agree with it,

which seems to have misunderstood. I was in fact praising every aspect of Neturi karta's announcement except for its call for the total dismantling of Israel, which surely no reasonable person would support ?

Normally I would think it quite wrong to try to argue with any of your editorial decisions, but is it possible that what happened here is that my article was almost randomly selected for a tutorial exercise, which was then accidentally not followed through ?

freddie

freddie

Comments

Display the following 7 comments

  1. Oh come on Freddie — dh
  2. can't repost it....... — freddie
  3. could just be glitches — Mayler
  4. Re post it — anybody
  5. fuck up — ian
  6. Sorry! But... — ekes
  7. Apology gracefully accepted..... — freddie