Hi all. I haven't posted here for a long time, but I am doing this on behalf of both myself and several other people. I hope you all don't find this to be too petty and whiny.
This is a story of what happens when bloggers protect their own over their loyal readers and commenters, but more importantly over their own political ideals.
Let me start by saying that I was one of the most prolific posters at the left-wing website talkingpointsmemo.com (under the username Flying Squid) and I stayed despite it making a slow descent into Huffington Post territory with sensationalist headlines and suspiciously right-wing friendly articles, but the community was terrific and there was a lot of fun to be had.
Then, yesterday, Andrew Breitbart died and a decision was made by the people who ran TPM: He was not to be discussed by commenters. At all. This decision was not made public. Comments about him simply vanished. Then commenters started asking why the comments were being deleted. Those comments vanished too. Talking Points Memo was scrubbing its entire site clean of any discussion of Breitbart.
Josh Marshall, the site's owner, then posted a surprisingly flattering Euology of the man who destroyed ACORN and Shirley Sherrod including a quote from a friend of Marshall's who described Breitbart as a man with a 'huge heart.' This, of course, fanned the flames of the commenters even more. Josh never allows comments on his posts, so the comments flooded in on other posts and were, again, all deleted.
Then it got worse- an article was finally posted about Breitbart… with the comments section disabled. Commenters were furious, but their fury was being deleted as fast as it was being posted. One of the employees showed up and made a half-hearted attempt at claiming that they were simply deleting off-topic posts. It was only after it was pointed out to him that just below where he was writing, someone was allowed to get away with calling Obama a Muslim with no repercussions that he did something about it. Generally, the comments section is relatively unmoderated and we have had a terrible troll problem because of it, so this was new.
Finally, three of us, including myself, all three very regular posters who were well-known and highly regarded, were banned… and banned in a really bizarre way. Our posts just disappeared when we tried to make them. No one actually told us we were banned, we just were.
TPM as of today continues its censorship policy, continuing to delete not only the type of posts I've already discussed, but also any posts mentioning myself and the other two regulars- Eustace Tilley 2.0 and fargo116.
TPM has made no public statement about what they have done. Others have e-mailed TPM about it and gotten this surprisingly press release-like response from TPM writer Paul Werdel:
"We do not ban our regular commenters lightly, however when it becomes obvious that some of them cannot take the message that perhaps we do not wish our comment threads to be overrun by off-topic dancing on the dead - no matter their past positions, statements or role - then perhaps it's time for a time-out.
No one was banned for commenting on Breitbart. Commenters were banned for acting like they own the place, spamming other threads with comments about Breitbart just to prove a point."
So now both sides of the story are at least a matter of record on the internet and you can all decide for yourselves whether or not what TPM did was appropriate. Meanwhile, three of us are all on super-secret time-out, a time-out which will, apparently, last until we either gain psychic powers or the sun blows up since we have no idea when it will be over. We weren't even told about it to begin with.
9:21 AM PT: UPDATE: As of 9:21 AM PST, TPM is continuing to delete all posts referencing Breitbart or the people who have been banned. They still have made no public statement.
9:43 AM PT: UPDATE: TPM regular pshipkey has now been banned for posting a link to this article.
11:56 AM PT: Links to this article are being deleted on sight on TPM.