Comments Deleted From SFGate.com And Other Sites

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Google says Censorship requests up 71 percent in the first half of 2012, according to the San Francisco Chronicle (?) SFGate.com.

"Google said Tuesday that government requests that it remove content from its search results and other services rose by 71 percent in the first half of the year."


Nifty, huh...






San Francisco Chronicle's comment deletion policy is the subject of this 2007 post at
InvestigateTheMedia.blogspot.com.


The San Francisco Chronicle has recently activated a devious system by which it deceives commenters on its website, SFGate.com. Here's how it works:

If you make a comment on an article posted at SFGate, and if the site moderators then subsequently delete your comment for whatever reason, it will only appear as deleted to the other readers. HOWEVER, your comment will NOT appear to be deleted if viewed from your own computer! The Chronicle's goal is to trick deleted commenters into not knowing their comments were in fact deleted. I'll give evidence below showing how they do this.




In this follow-up piece InvestigateTheMedia converses with SFGate.com's representative about the issue.


I left this comment on the post directly above:



I have been noticing a large number of comment deletions on SFgate.com and did a search and found this post. It is December of 2012. Your post here was made years ago.

The first story I noticed with heavy deletions is linked here:

http://blog.sfgate.com/sfmoms/2012/02/17/study-cell-phones-make-people-selfish/

The second such article in a week I've found with a curious amount of deletions is here:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/articleComments/Gauging-the-pros-and-cons-of-smart-meters-3259771.php

These are health and environmental issues and, as such, the deletion policy of the San Francisco Chronicle is starting to seem pretty interesting to me.

To my knowledge the L.A. Times, my local paper, doesn't delete comments anymore. At one time it seemed apparent that this was happening. I wrote a couple of letters to the Times about it, and blogged about it at my blogspot site. If they are still deleting comments, then they're doing it discreetly--ie, the average reader does not know that comments have been deleted because there is no message indicating deletion as there is at the Chronicle site.

Since these newspapers are essentially talkless talk-radio on a public bulletin board site, they are sources of important local feedback on various issues. In fact, newspapers could really profit from this if they pulled their collective heads out and recognized the importance of these conversations, which are ---ostensibly--open to all, and read by many in positions of influence. So the policies on these conversations are very interesting to me...thank you for your post.




More from InvestigateTheMedia:




The PBS blog "MediaShift" recently had an interview with Rich Skrenta, the former CEO of a commenting-forum-software company called Topix, in which he bragged about this capability in his company's product:

There’s a lot of tricks in it. For instance, if you are banned from the forums, you can actually still post, and see your own posts, but other people don’t see them. That’s a neat social trick, because if you know you’ve been banned, most people will work around that. They’ll clear their cookies and work to figure out how to get around the block; but if they don’t know they’ve been banned, and they seem to be able to post, it won’t do any harm to the environment.
Another software company called Prospero supposedly also makes commenting software with this crypto-deletion feature. However, I don't know for sure if SFGate uses either the Topix or Prospero software. (Hat tip: MonkeySon)


[UPDATE 2, Sat., 11-24-07, 2:20pm]: Reader Documents "Graylist" of Banned SFGate Users Who Don't Know They're Banned

ITM commenter "Bricology" has just documented that, at least in some cases, the comment-deletions on SFGate are automated; that all comments from certain users who have been secretly banned from the site are immediately deleted automatically; but that such deletions are not visible to the banned commenter himself. Thus, he never knows that he has been banned.



DJKonservo documents comment censorship at Thinkprogress.com, too.


Here's a colorful comment:

DAMMMMMM BRO!!!!!

I wondered what the fuck was going on at SFGATE with my postings! I think you nailed it good. it was like I was invisible to the other people there. Never got a Rec on some articles even though the others got plenty. I wonder like what is HAPPENING here??? I thought my cache was screwed up or I didn't know what, but now that you explained it I'm slapping my forehead and Dammmmm......that is IT! It felt like my postings were removed but I could still see them. I'm gonna try to find the old threads and check 'em out on a different machine. I'm pretty positive my stuff'll be missing.

Great digging Bro. I got an email about your post. I'll send it to others I know.



And another:


I'm reminded of the old comedy routine about the depressed man who goes to a psychologist and lays down on the couch and talks for an hour straight, revealing all his secrets, yet his life is so boring that the psychologist has secretly fallen asleep, and murmurs "Mmm-hmmm, mmm-hmmm" as he dreams. At the end of the hour the patient abruptly says "Thanks doc!" and wakes up the psychologist, to whom the patient says, "Your the best listener I've ever encountered! I feel so much better!"

The readers at the SFGate are just like that pathetic depressed man, imagining that the world is listening to them, when in fact their comments have been deleted and no one is listening at all.

This whole thing feels like a fairy tale, about a mute fool who thinks he is speaking, but who says nothing.

The San Francisco Chronicle should be ashamed of itself.



And finally---an indication that this might happen on more articles than the two that caught my attention:

Robert Holmgren said...
I have noticed that the Chronicle website has an unusually high number of deleted comments at the end of their stories. Good to know they're protecting other readers from knowing too much.


cookylooky said...
After the comments have been removed by SFGate they are still [link=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cache]CACHED[/link] on the writer's computer and are therefore still visible to the author. This is an issue with your computer not with SFGate.

To clear your cache, go to the TOOLS key click on CLEAR PRIVATE DATA and then when the clear options appear mark cache and hit the CLEAR PRIVATE DATA key. Now the cache which includes your posted remarks will be cleared on your computer. Sign back into SFGate and you'll see that your remarks have been deleted. In essence your computer is fooling you it isn't SFGate.

And Jimjams:

cookylooky: You're wrong. I just tried what you suggested, and I deleted my cache, and even afterwards my comment was still visible when viewed from my account. Also, it goes against the experiences of many other people who now have tested it out at SFGate, and discovered that my original claims were accurate.

If you can PROVE your claims about cache-clearing fixing the problem, using screenshots or whatever, I'd be glad to check out the evidence. But I suspect you were just taking a guess. Sorry.


And here's something really interesting:

Bricology said...
As a postscript -- What's particularly ironic to me is that, AFAIK, I've never had a comment deleted on SFGate for any reason, but I have gotten a number of e-mails from SFGate Comments editors, asking for permission to reprint my comments in actual news articles. I've screen-grabbed the e-mails below (redacting their personal info, and mine):

http://tinyurl.com/3acfm7
http://tinyurl.com/3bpw8m

As you can see, the most recent one was 2 months ago, shortly before my posting tapered off due to questions about why it seemed that no one else was reading them. So if SFGate is interested in quoting me, and I never violated the TOU, why did I get "graylisted"? The only conclusion I can draw is that some individual there personally doesn't agree with my posts.




It doesn't matter to me. Whether it's the computer or the newspaper. Contributors should be notified when they're blocked. When there are so many comments deleted, one really wonders what's going on.

I don't want to believe Evgeny Morosov when he says the Net won't save the world, but I'm starting to believe it is not effective for communications. Information retrieval maybe---in a limited sense; but any device that f's with human communication as much as the computer really ought to be approached with a clear understanding of where the communications are going and who hears or sees them. We have no idea what the people running Computerland or Google are actually doing. I do know this---my Google searches, in the past, turned up a lot more in the way of independent blog sites, one-person sites. These days, the search results are limited. For example, you could search for a five-word phrase in quotes and Google would find a number of sites saying that exact phrase. Depending on the phrase, Google now might turn up one or two sites--or none.

I do notice the difference, and it is a difference in that fewer results come up; and this makes me wonder, "Are there no sites on earth that say those words in that order? Because I used to get them all the time..."


Here's an example of what SFGate.com (apparently not one and the same as the San Francisco Chronicle according to its comments rep) is doing to the discussions on its site:


Name withheld 1:28 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.

4 replies
Name withheld 1:31 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.

Name withheld 2:04 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.

lilacsunday 2:21 PM on July 5, 2010
why not now, it's voluntary for now. The article quotes regulators as saying that smart meters are part of a plan to get people to use less electricity. When we don't fall in line, they'll change the rate structure. It's inevitable.

(2) (2) POPULARITY: 0 | | [Report Abuse]
Name withheld 2:26 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.


And:



Name withheld 12:28 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.

4 replies
Name withheld 12:31 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.

Name withheld 1:20 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.

peppy945 2:09 PM on July 5, 2010
Usage is measured without a smart meter, why-not. But the old meters can't signal back to the brain what time of day you're using electricity.

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Name withheld 3:03 PM on July 5, 2010
This comment was left by a user who has been blocked by our staff.





---So you see----LOTS and LOTS of contributions are being censored. I personally don't care if there's profanity. Could that many contributors really be worthy of deletion? As a reader, it's incredibly annoying.

That's from this 2010 "Smart" Meter story.