Yes, you posted that thing at Digg. You also registered a second account there at the same time you registered your first, and posted a response agreeing with yourself an hour later. Almost all the comments that have been posted here at Boing Boing in support of your cause, and that agreed that you’re being oppressed, were posted by your sockpuppets.

You’ve known all along why your comments have disappeared: you were temporarily not allowed to post comments here, and you insisted on doing it anyway. You’ve had this explained to you so often that I have to wonder whether you’re literally incapable of understanding it.

I didn’t have to peaceably suspend you. I didn’t have to explain, over and over again, in comments and in e-mail, that not being allowed to post comments means you’re not allowed to post comments — not even if you use a series of transparent pseudonyms to post them. I could have spared myself the trouble and just flamed you to a crisp.

But I can’t. No matter how tiresome you are, you’re still too hapless and dumb to fight with.

You are prohibited from engaging in any other activity, illegal or not, that AT&T determines in its sole discretion, to be harmful to its subscribers, operations, network(s), reputation, goodwill, or customer relations.

This appears to the the part of the AUP were talking about.
Methinks this may backfire on them. Once they do start kicking people out for criticizing them, those people will end up at another ISP…and THEN they will be FREE to say whatever they please. Speaking of which, do you think they have the technology to trace a posting back to you, if you post from say work or someone elses computer?
Would they be able to terminate you, even if you used another ISP to complain?

But when I pay for something like AT&T, which I currently do unfortunately, I’m saying what I want. Reading their TOS further and it indicates that even them cancelling your service on the grounds you made negative contacts still has no bearing on the rest of the contract. In other words, I’m assuming you still have to pay each month regardless.

Otherwise, if this is one way to get out of your contract without paying an ETF, I’m guessing there’s going to be a lot of ‘AT&T sucks’ posts from customers in the coming weeks.

More than there already are.

I could do a moment-by-moment analysis of what happened in the burqini thread. I’m not going to do it. Has it not occurred to you that you’re putting Tim in a very uncomfortable position?

Onward.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds the level of comment control here disturbing-

The lurkers can speak for themselves. Or not. But I hadn’t heard that they’d deputized you to speak for them.

I’ve seen a lot of things that wouldn’t make anyone blink –

I cut my teeth on the GEnie SFRT and Usenet. I don’t blink for trifles. What you’re saying is that you personally didn’t dislike those passages.

Congratulations on being such a fast reader, by the way. Not all of Boing Boing’s readers are so thoroughly on top of things that they see all the first states of comments, and then re-read all the comment threads frequently enough to spot the changes as they happen.

– get vandalized.

Do you think so? Yet I recall you having no trouble reading Cpt. Tim’s disemvowelled text.

I don’t like deleting comments. It lessens the integrity of the thread as the record of a conversation. It doesn’t tell the author of the deleted comment what portion of it prompted the deletion, and it doesn’t tell the other participants anything.

I’m not willing to edit comments in the sense of deleting some words but not others, or changing one word for another. I’ve been an editor for a long time, and I know too much about editing’s powers and limitations to think that’s a good idea.

I run into an occasional reader who can’t read disemvowelled text. I’m still puzzling out what to do about that.

In the meantime, when I think about vandalism in online conversations, what comes to my mind is bad behavior, careless language, failure to pay attention to other participants and their remarks, dragging in boilerplate arguments only marginally connected with the topic, attitudinizing, taking cheap shots, engaging in self-dramatization at the expense of real interaction, and posting comments without reading the thread.

It makes the bloggers look oversensitive

No. They’re not the ones doing it. I am.

and certainly dampens the conversation-

Uh-huh. Which is why Making Light has all those vanishingly short comment threads.

should people really have to worry so much about expressing an opinion here?

You mean, should they think before they type? Of course they should. We all should, here and in any other forum.

You can “just be yourself” in terms of your self-presentation, or you can care about the responses you get from others; but you can’t do both.

And if so, what is the point of opening comments if the conversation is so restrained?

The conversation isn’t restrained. Engagement, civility, clear language, and valid rhetorical and logical structures set conversation free. The absence of them does far more to keep interesting things from getting said in online discussions than any moderator ever born.

I’d also lioke to address the continual arguments about censorship on privately owned fora-

As long as you’re clear that it’s not negotiable here.

I think that yes, it’s a given that one has a right to censor one’s own propterty. That being said, it seems awfully shortsighted to exercise that right when not truly necessary.

What you’re saying is that you’ve disagreed with my judgement. We already knew that.

There is no public square on the net anymore, so in effect, there is no free speech.

Oh, malarkey. Usenet hasn’t gone away, and speech there is as untrammeled as ever. All the species of online pest still freely romp through its newsgroups. Nothing’s stopping you or anyone else from hanging out there — except the lousy signal-to-noise ratio, and the lack of an audience. Funny about that.

Consequently, one would hope that the people who provide a forum would be as restrained as possible when policing it.

Sorry, but that doesn’t follow.

If you undertake to run your own forum on those lines, I promise I’ll watch with interest.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who finds the level of comment control here disturbing- I’ve seen a lot of things that wouldn’t make anyone blink get vandalized. It makes the bloggers look oversensitive at best and certainly dampens the conversation- should people really have to worry so much about expressing an opinion here? And if so, what is the point of opening comments if the conversation is so restrained?

I’d also lioke to address the continual arguments about censorship on privately owned fora- I think that yes, it’s a given that one has a right to censor one’s own propterty. That being said, it seems awfully shortsighted to exercise that right when not truly necessary. There is no public square on the net anymore, so in effect, there is no free speech. Consequently, one would hope that the people who provide a forum would be as restrained as possible when policing it.

AT&T’s policy is within their rights and typical of consumer TOS agreements which tend to place all restrictions and obligations on the side of the consumer and none on the provider. Most have nebulous limits that the user must abide without knowing what they are. They are also written such that the provider can change the terms of a de facto contract without agreement from the other party.

It remains to be seen how strict AT&T will be on enforcing this. It is doubtful they are going to track down every non-positive comment to the user and cancel their service. However, they have left themselves the option to do so if they wish. The sad thing is that the consumer often has few if any other choices for internet access and are thus chilled from airing their, perhaps legitimate, grievances.

Let me ask you this: if AT&T cancelled your long-distance service because it objected to the content of one of your phone calls, would you be OK with that? Correct me if I’m wrong, but wouldn’t that be analogous to this?

On another topic: Please ya’ll, stop the griping about the moderator. You’re using up space that should be used to discuss the articles. Remember the articles? I’m interested in a discussion of what the parameters should be for fora like this, but not every time I read a comments section.

And I personally consider some of the posts made by the more aggressive critics to be flames, or astroturf, or whatever you call posts that are inappropriate in this context. Conducting a private war with a moderator to me smacks more of narcissism than idealism. Please stop.

and actually the statement i was referring to was:

“oppression can not be made fashionable. any company that does is capitalizing on said oppression.”

It got disemvoweled

Yes i understand that some people disagreed. it was a divided thread, but the person i engaged most in that thread was jacobdavis, but thats it. i’ve seen flame wars friend, and that wasn’t it. I didnt’ expect boing boing to have the johnson and johnson no tears shampoo of comments sections.

“Critics of Boing Boing: Why do you visit this site? There are millions of websites and yet here you are, commenting, just waiting to pounce on any thing that looks like a contradiction. Are you payed to be critical of Boing Boing or are you just looking for some attention?”

I love boing boing, i come here everyday. It gives me stuff to read at work. I like all the people that post. I just had a problem with a moderator, and then one of the editors insisting several times i hadn’t been moderated. You’re allowed to think aspects of something is lame without thinking the thing in itself is lame. I also think that pointing out what you think is lame acts as a sort of quality control “Hey, a lot of our readers thought that was out of line.. maybe it was.”

Also i’d like to point out that i just delved into this because of the topic at hand. since the burquini thread i’ve been posting here and there, some of my opinions here and there have been strong but i haven’t encountered any censoring of comments since. So it could be a non issue now, i’m just speaking to the comments of another poster.

Verizon’s says:

You may NOT use the Service as follows: …..
(j) to damage the name or reputation of Verizon, its parent, affiliates and subsidiaries, or any third parties

I interpret this to mean that if you’re using Verizon FIOS, you cannot use it to criticize anyone, even AT&T!

It makes sense seeing how BoingBoing editors believe in:

1) the masses
2) free speech
3) democracy
4) technology that empowers all three

Am I right?

I am not who you are accusing me of being. I am not playing games, and I have no desire to get into a flame war with you.

I have sent you two emails offering to prove my existence either by mail or by phone. I sent those emails to your makinglight email account. I am sorry if you didn’t receive them, but I have indeed sent them. I also sent them to the other editors here.

I am posting this without the use of Tor so that you can log my real IP address and see that I do indeed live in the continental U.S. You should be able to trace it to my real city using any of the available online tools.

I don’t know much more than I can do to prove to you that I am real. I did indeed post the digg link, but I did not post any of the replies to it. All of my accounts here contain the name, TruthFriction.

Please, email me if you need further verification. I don’t know what I did to cause you to think I am someone that I am not, but I will do what you ask to prove who I am.

While part of that is a smart community, part of it is also a solid moderatorship that trims the excess.

If AT&T bans you from their high-speed internet service, you get to (a) sign up for a competitor, such as Comcast (the dominant cable provider, which deliberately degrades their customers’ service by sending RST packets to block BitTorrent connections) or satellite internet (which is expensive, incredibly asymmetric, and has high latency), or (b) move. In either case, you’re likely to be deprived of internet access for up to a month or more while you wait for the technicians to hook you up.

as for the original comment about comparing boingboing to at&t, i don’t think it was an apt comparison, i was responding to a specific point in his post. I think boing boing is cool, i think at&t is the antichrist.

“I say this because here in America we have reached a funny pass. People are doing and saying odd things as if they don’t know the meaning of the thing they say they stand for. In particular I mean we used to be proud of whom we allowed to speak, and now are leaning toward defining ourselves by whom we don’t speak to and will not allow to speak. This is not progress.”

link

The thing is, let me know exactly which ISP that will be. Furthermore, am I going to be able to afford it? I got AT&T because I was able to pay 25 dollars less than I would’ve to comcast. I can’t afford to switch to comcast and i wouldn’t really want to switch to comcast either, based on a year of service with them which was refunded through my work.

and. that’s about it, for my choices. verizon doesn’t service my neighborhood and i’d rather puke on their lines than get any kind of high-speed service from them . . .

talking about freedom and setting up new ISPs is great, but i’m not quite sure that’s going to be a feasible alternative for too many people.

In providing internet access AT&T is providing access to a resource that they neither created nor control. Because they are only providing access, they are not held legally accountable if their users use their access for something illegal. But now they want it both ways. They want to keep their legal immunity from being prosecuted for their users’ crimes, while at the same time they want the power to terminate those users if they express opinions that AT&T doesn’t like. Do the people arguing for AT&T believe that the power company should be able to cut off my electricity because I used it to power a computer on which I composed letters criticizing said power company?

Some people will say, “well, if you don’t like the terms of service, move to another provider.” There are a few problems with this, the most notable being the lack of broadband internet providers in the US. Where I live, I have two options (neither of which is AT&T), and only one of those works reliably.

Unlike an ISP Boingboing is a publisher of original content. They choose to make that content available, for free, to anyone with an internet connection. They have also recently begun allowing their readers to leave comments, but reserve the right to edit or delete those comments as they see fit.

Unlike ISPs, which are scarce (at least in this part of the world), there are millions of blogs and internet forums. If I’m unhappy with the way posts are moderated at boingboing, I can go somewhere else, or even start my own blog.

Finally, even if you believe that AT&T should be allowed to terminate their customers service for posting opinions that AT&T doesn’t like, it doesn’t follow that their customers should shut up and not complain. I don’t believe it should be illegal for companies to be rude to their customers, but that doesn’t mean their customers shouldn’t complain if they are treated rudely.

Cajunfj40 (78): Hi there! That’s a stack of interesting comments you posted.

We try to provide a nice safe place for a good deliberative discussion to occur.

This is Boing Boing, so I’d say “civil” rather than “safe,” but otherwise that sounds just about right. I think one of our problems is how many people have never seen a good deliberative discussion, and don’t even know it’s possible.

We get “trolls” in physical space too. It gets very frustrating to the people who are trying to have a discussion when someone keeps ranting off-topic, won’t let anyone else get a word in edgewise, keeps repeating the same thing over and over again, uses rude or crude language that is not germane to the topic or that is well outside the usual “comfort zone” that a generally patient non-prudish person has.

What’s doubly frustrating is that the arguments they’re trying to get across, in their destructive way, are usually fairly unremarkable. I’ve wondered whether they’re so unused to taking part in the public discourse that just having opinions feels earthshakingly new and important to them. They haven’t yet had the experience of voluntarily altering their ideas in response to new information, so anything they perceive as a threat to one of their opinions feels like a threat to their sense of self.

I don’t read every set of comments on BB, just the topics that interest me, so I don’t know what all is going on regarding who’s getting suspended, who’s consistently getting disemvowelled or deleted, or whatever.

No one’s consistently getting disemvowelled. We’ve only had one suspension so far, but the tantrum he’s thrown over it stands at two weeks and counting. We’re unpublishing comments more often than we delete them.

As I view now, in the comment post window, the existing comments are not numbered. A quick check shows that they are numbered when I’m just viewing the comments. If I can be so bold as to make a suggestion, please show the existing comment numbers on the page where we enter our comments, and when deleting a post, leave a blank line with the comment number all alone. If everyone responds by comment number as well as or instead of by username, this will at least show that respondents to deleted posts aren’t crazy.

Unique unchanging sequential numbers for comments in a given thread were part of the original spec. We’re still trying to get those.

Thanks. Do please come back.

I hear the same thing out of countless republicans. “if you don’t like it, move to canada.”

i say to them, have you gotten a load of canadian winters? they reply, don’t worry, that’ll be taken care of soon.

If there must be a line, I’d prefer to see it drawn between “civil people who are contributing to the conversation” and “everybody else”, with the latter category becoming vanishingly small over time. I don’t have faith that that’s the line any voting system would draw, because too many people egg on incivility. It takes a person.

The debate form, since it’s structured and encourages precision in the statement-response process, is a highly effective way for people to come to grips with the complexities of an issue or subject.

It’s not about anyone winning, it’s about the issues and positions discussed getting a really thorough airing.

Debate also does not preclude comments that are not related to emerging conversation threads, but are still related to the topic.

(Damn! I swore I wouldn’t get drawn into the moderation disscussion again!)

I once saw a phone truck with the words “Ma Bell is a stingy bitch,” painted on it.

AT&T has always been a snotty bitch on the telephone too (at least until the robots move in and the snotty bitches are fired). Go figure. Anyone who has to deal with the public on a daily basis knows just how charming some people can be.

IANAL but this smacks of prior restraint — something we’re likely to see more of as Corporatocracy cancels our liberty stamp. Love it or lick it.

You know, sort of how I’d rather live in a democracy with elected representatives rather than a popular vote on every bill.

Anyway, I think it’s time for a “consumer’s terms of service”. This would be full of outlandish terms that are favorable to consumers. Then people could mail them with the typical “if you do not object within 14 days this agreement becomes binding” kind of language.

Imagine the fun that could be had…

“fuck that noise” wasn’t in response to what xeni said. It was my response to the idea of making oppression fashionable which is what i saw the burqini as. after that other people posted opinions of their own on that. Xeni liking them was never really what crossed my mind, what i posted was a pure reaction to the existence of the things themselves. I never meant to attack xeni. And i was told that my comments were not modified, which was actually a bigger deal to me than later finding out i had been modified.

but anyways.

“He’s made some astute comments in subsequent threads.”

I’ll take that as a sign that my normal thoughts and posting jive with the general population here and that anything that happened on the previous thread was just a clash of ideas between people that can sometimes happen, no matter how like minded they are.