Discouraging to say the least; troublesome and then some if censorship of serious discussion of MA health reform is the reason.
Over many months posting at the HCFA “Healthy Blog” I’ve never had a comment blocked or seen this: “Please note: Comment moderation is enabled and may delay your comment. There is no need to resubmit your comment.” but that’s what’s there now.
I just spent a great deal of time posting a thoughtful, informative and, yes, a hard hitting reply to this HCFA post : “MA Health Reform & Health Care Market 10 Mar 2007 Early Summary Judgments: Commonwealth Choice and Daylight Savings Time”. I did so because the current reform law is wasting huge amounts of money and time as its misguided privatized approach fails to lay the groundwork required to meet people’s unmet health needs–very urgent physical and mental health needs–and fails to bring fiscal stewardship to our state healthcare spending.
But my reply comment is being blocked. Why? (I wasn’t vulgar or spewing untruths) Is it wrong to block it? (It sure feels wrong to me.) What can be done about it? (Maybe posting about it here will lead to my comments there getting posted; we’ll see).
The same thing is happening to many of my comments submitted to the new NPR/WBUR “CommonHealth” Blog. WBUR reporter/blog moderator Martha Bebinger is looking into it but I must say it seems creepy. The same questions apply as stated above about the HCFA blog.
Am I overreacting?
raj says
…Example, Dan Kennedy has had comment moderation for some time. It’s not a problem. It’s to avoid spammers and trolls.
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It’s also an indication that the proprietors of the site want to keep comments to a post somewhat focussed on the subject matter of the post. Some sites worry about that sort of thing, some don’t.
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It may be the case that those sites were getting a lot of spam and off-topic comments, and wanted to stop them. That’s generally the case.
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On the other hand, with some sites–particularly conservative ones, they either moderate or delete comments that disagree with their world view. I doubt that that’s the case with the sites you mentioned.
annem says
Does your hypothesis account for a number of days going by and still no sign of a number my comments on the BUR blog? (like the critical one I posted here and remains absent a week later. I mean, is it still a blog if they do not have a mechanism to screen and post replies in a timely way?
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Or are they censoring? Which is it?
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p.s. raj, any chance you can come to MassCare’s annual Ben Gill Event 3/24/07 2-5pm at Ryles in Cambridge? Bob Kuttner was scheduled to be the keynote. There’ll be workshops on Univ. HC and you might be perfect for a workshop panel about other country’s hc systems, ie Germany. If you’re interested, that is.)
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Of course everyone is invited to Ryles on 3/24 (scroll down a bit for event); please try to come!
raj says
…Does your hypothesis account for a number of days going by and still no sign of a number my comments on the BUR blog?
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Long answer, I tried to log onto several right-wing blogs to post a few months ago, and never got any response. They still refuse to post my comments. They ignore me, and so I laugh at them on other web sites.
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I’d be surprised if BUR was actually trying to ignore your posts (“censor” is the wrong term) but you might contact the WBUR web master to try to find out what’s going on. There’s usually a “contact us” tab, page, or whatever, which should get you to the webmaster. As I understand it, each website has a webmaster, who can be contacted at least via email.
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Regarding the MassCare event, sorry, no. We’ll be in Germany then.
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Quite frankly, there are only two columnists at the Glob whose columns I read and print out for my partner–Kuttner and Derrick Jackson. Actually, make that three–McNamara. Well, maybe four, Elaine Goodman, but I print out her column from another web site. Vennochi and Lehigh, sometimes. Jacoby is an idiot, IMNSHO, and their pseudo-libertarian (Cathy Young) was a nut.
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I tried to comment on PZMyer’s blog (a science blog) a few weeks ago and got no response. I emailed him and asked him what was up–was he blocking me? He emailed back and said no. After that, my comments went up immediately. Try emailing the webmaster at ‘BUR.
peter-porcupine says
Your wholesale condemnation is more to advertise your own agenda than to respond to complaints about BUR.
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SOMETIMES – people enable moderation and confuse it with having to type a letter sequence to avoid trolls. If the blog has changed platforms (and this might not be visible to users – I recently went from Old to New Blogger and had some internal changes while the blog looked identical) a blogmaster might have set up a parameter that requires approval above above and beyond spam blocking tools. However – that would probably block ALL comments, unless you also activate a ‘trusted commenter’ feature which posts comments from certain people witout moderation required.
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I would contact but BUR webmaster and find out if your comments are in limbo or rejected.
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But – like some left wing blogs – they perhaps cannot tolerate disagreement, or even the injection of facts into a discussion.
raj says
…I write only from experience. I have not been banned from left-wing blogs. I might have been if blogs had existed in the 1990s when I was pounding Billary Clinton. But there weren’t.
trickle-up says
Organizations that blog have to walk a fine line.
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Blogs work best as a kind of community, at least an intellectual community, and clearly that can be of tangible benefit to an organization or campaign.
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But advocacy groups need to maintain a tight message discipline to be effective. Blog comments are beyond the control of the organization except through moderation.
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This is a real built-in tension that is not simple to resolve and suggests limits on institutional blogs. That those limits might in turn vitiate the blog is unfortunate.
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Also, apart from that, some organizations have trouble understanding the approporiate use of the internet, let alone that of blogs. That might lead the organization’s leadership to view its own blog with further suspicion or misgivings.
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But even without that misunderstanding, I can see how an organization’s legitimate institutional agenda might lead it to put constraints on this medium.
annem says
Say, on the homepage or something. Maybe I’ve just been spoiled by the open forum here at BMG; wide ranging discussion and dissent is something I place an extremely high value on.
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btw I am waiting to hear back from Martha Bebenger, the BUR site’s moderator. I contacted her and she got back to me. She was solicitous and concerned about my experience and asked me to send her an example if I had saved any of my comments (which I had). She said that at first the bur blog had a comment moderation feature planned, but then decided to not use it, then said they might install it as some comments seemed to be attacking the posters…
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I’m a bit green to most things techie, including blogs, so I really appreciate hearing the various perspectives/opinions on this. Thanks.
peter-porcupine says
annem says
“..that was given a Zero..”
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I didn’t give you a zero, did I? And if i did, I didn’t know I did! đŸ™‚
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Who’s on first?…
trickle-up says
I thought you were writing about something at HCFA.
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I suppose BUR would have its own institutional issues.
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In either case, I’d suggest not taking it personally.
annem says
thanks but the concern isn’t about it being personal, rather it stems from concerns that it’s a form of censorship by not allowing dissenting views in supposed “public forums” about the MA health reform plan as it is rolled out. (Rolling over many people is what lots of folks are rightly fearing.)
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Update: looks like just this morning the bur blog has posted some of my missing comments; great. But the hcfa blog continues to block my comment in reply to their [recent convoluted post] http://blog.hcfama.o…] on health reform and daylight savings time.
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Is anyone else who’s following our MA health reform getting really tired of so much gooblydygook being used to, in effect, try to mask how needlesslessly complicated and wasteful this law really is? It’s quite tragic especially when much of the current waste in hc spending could go a long way toward filling our budget deficit of >$1Bil without cutting programs or services; this is what calls for corrective reform actions, and quick.
lasthorseman says
get used to it as the polarization of issues on the internet becomes more pervasive.
I am a specialist in this regard and I do daily surveys of wildly controversial websites.
Censorship of the internet is fully active yet not as complete as the censorship in China. Really did you think your “right” to address a potential world audience would not get drowned out in the infinite sea of others?
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I do positively know from simple Google of controversial subjects that those returns on said controversial subjects have in most recent timeframes greatly diminshed.
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The second factor in this is the enforcement of bans by political boards of left and right varieties. Note the new terms troll, shill plus filtering software Websense, Surfpatrol and others.
raj says
…troll is an old internet term, as is sockpuppet, from the old Usenet days.
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It’s become fairly obvious that weblog sites (as opposed to Usenet–does that still exist?) have become more corporatized. That is, they are supported by particular parties, corporations, whatever, and they want to attract particular audiences, and won’t tolerate people who present dissenting opinions who might tend to discourage those audiences.
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The only thing that amuses me is that more than a few of the sites apparently believe that advertising will support them. That’s ludicrous.
dweir says
Hackers and spammers are always outwitting the lates technology designed to keep them at bay.
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It could be that these sites are getting flooded with spam and turned on filtering so that it didn’t take down their site.
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If one site links to another, it’s not unheard of that if one was hit, the other would follow. So what appears as a conspiracy of sorts on the surface could just be an artifact. That said, might be worth scrubbing your e-mail addy if it appears on either one of those sites so that you don’t get hit, too.
annem says
re: “That said, might be worth scrubbing your e-mail addy if it appears on either one of those sites so that you don’t get hit, too.”
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I did submit the remaining comment that’s still in limbo to the HCFA post (the one about Reform and DST) under my email, then the next day using my husband’s, and the next day with a nurse collegue’s email. All 3 times the comment seems to have been blocked permanently (we’re on the 3rd day now). If it’s being blocked for containing dissent and attempting to point out a better way to advance universal health care reform, then that’s a real bummer.
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(I assume “addy” means address, correct me if I’m wrong. So how soon will my 6 yo be able to teach me this stuff? đŸ™‚
raj says
…I’m amused that people use abbreviations like that just to save a few keystrokes.
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But, then again it annoys me to no end that people don’t do paragraphing in Emails. Even lengthy ones.