Speaking for all the Boingers--
Boing Boing has been caught in the middle of a real internet shitstorm and pile-on over the last few days. A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her. Some people wanted to know why.
Bottom line is that those posts (not "more than 100 posts," as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It's our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn't attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference between that and censorship.
We hope you'll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private. We do understand the confusion this caused for some, especially since we fight hard for openness and transparency. We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved.
Clearly, that didn't work out. In attempting to defuse drama, we inadvertently ignited more. Mind you, we weren't the ones splashing gasoline around; but we did make the fire possible. We're sorry about that. In the meantime, Boing Boing's past content is indexed on the Wayback Machine, a basic Internet resource; so the material should still be available for those who would like to read it.
Thank you all for caring what happens on Boing Boing. And if you think there's more to say, by all means, let's talk. We're listening.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[Xeni] Update, 07-02-08: A number of the BB team were on the phone together today (for the first time since this started) discussing the situation. Several news organizations had pinged us to discuss this, including the Los Angeles Times, so we invited them to join the call and ask a few questions. It turned out to be a good conversation, and we hope the partial transcripts posted on the LA Times contribute to the thoughtful and evolving conversation. Comments welcome; ad hominem/feminem attacks not so much.
(1) BoingBoing bloggers talk about Violet Blue controversy's implications
(2) BoingBoing's Xeni Jardin on unpublishing the Violet Blue posts
[ Los Angeles Times ]
Save the drama for... Andromeda.
I like to keep the drama on the stage... ( insert old jokes here).
I'm now killing myself with curiosity over what Violet did that made you take the posts down. Drama is such fun.
@Gainclone (#1) and @ATOMICELROY (#2), Regarding the drama, the truth is, I agree. That's one of the main reasons we debated on whether to even respond.
We, too, prefer that drama be reserved only for one's momma.
But when the apparent campaign to turn this into some kind of a petty blog fight went on for days and escalated, we felt like the responsible thing to do for you, our readers, was to address it.
Blog fights are stupid, airing personal grievances in public is stupid, picking troll wars is stupid. We just want to blog (and make internet TV).
The "unpublishing" versus "deleting" issue is this: the posts were removed from public view while an evaluation of what to do took place. We didn't want to pay to host them on our blog anymore. This is also why we remove hateful, ad hominem attack comments from public view, too: this is our home, we are proud of the home we built and the guests who visit here with us, and we like spending time here ourselves.
This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful, we have every right to remove it from this directory.
This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times. Boing Boing began as a personal blog, and still is in some ways, even though Boing Boing is a bigger thing now. When new information becomes clear, or someone's behavior changes, sometimes a creator of work reconsiders what aspects of their personal creative work they're proud of, and removes them from public view.
The posts still exist in our archives, and they're also available on the Wayback Machine.
We realize that we're now bigger and more complex, and we'd probably handle something like this differently now that we've grown (and now that we are more aware of how things can play out when someone's determined to pick a public fight over it). This hasn't happened before.
But this was not intended to cause harm to anyone, least of all the subject of the posts. We mean no one any harm.
Nobody was "disappeared." When we start doing extrajudicial blog executions, or showing up to livejournals in the dead of night in unmarked cars and putting bags over people's heads, or slicing the power cords off of other people's own blogs, come talk to me about "disappearances" and "unpersoning."
XJ
I can see not publishing future stories about her, but "unpublishing" seems like a euphemism for self-censorship (or at least denial). This step seems antithetical to the nature of the Web that BoingBoing champions, where everything's a matter of public record, and directing people instead to a Web archive seems a bit disingenuous. If anything, this is bringing more attention to Violet than leaving the posts up would, as most censorship tends to do.
I can't imagine New York Times quietly unpublishing any record of Jayson Blair. I think BoingBoing hasn't lived up to its own ideals with this one.
It seems clear the big mistake was the hushing -- both not mentioning the "unpublication"(?) when it occurred, and vigorously policing comments about it as though that could somehow keep it quiet.
In the face of that damage, y'all's continuing decision not to tell us what's up is disheartening, but maybe we'll get over it.
"Posting in epic thread." (My quotes imply irony!)
At #1. I've found a new favorite phrase. Thanks! :)
Thank you. This is the kind of post from BB I'd hoped to see.
Violet has her own blog which is easy to find, so I have a hard time getting worked up about this.
Kudos for making a good call.
Those who don't understand that the archival nature of blogs, coupled with the perceptive fact of hosting -- even archival hosting -- as a tacit form of active support, makes "choosing to NO LONGER HOST at your own expense" a perfectly valid part of blog "ownership", regardless of the reason, don't really understand the internet.
"Unpublish," indeed. Choosing to no longer host isn't hushing -- because there is no "after the fact" in the internet. It's choosing to no longer support via hosting, period.
@Grobstein (#7), I think you're right. It wasn't a big pact of secrecy though. We are geographically distributed and it was the weekend, so it took time to get everyone on the same page, up to date, and figure out the right thing to do.
The policing the comments thing was delicate, for sure. We probably should have said something like "We hear you, but we're not ready to address it yet." But sometimes when you have people trying to force your hand before you're ready to respond it's frustrating.
Well, I'm glad someone said something. That metafilter thread was too hard for me to ignore, and frankly, I have work to do.
Regardless of what anyone says, it's a nice thing to try and keep personal problems from being blown out of proportion publicly - but hot damn, what a cluster.
I don't know what happened or exactly when the un-publishing occurred, and I know that hindsight is 20/20 and all that - but once valleywag and mefi hopped onto this a clear communication (even along the lines of "a statement is being prepared, stay tuned") would have been a good idea. Leaving the Internets speculating in lieu of throwing something out there begats loud raspberry.
Also, just curious - was this a group decision, or the action of a single or minority group of editors?
Thank you for not screwing around with the Wayback Machine.
dangerous territory. telling us to be weary of those who threaten free speech, then threatening free speech yourselves. i agree with number 6. it is as if one day you can proclaim the world to be flat, and then when irrefutable evidence that the world is round is made, you can go back, un-publish the post and say "we never said the world was flat"
very disappointed.
Boing Boing is a collaborative personal blog, not an institution with obligations of impartiality or public service. Which means that the authors don't have to be fair, impartial or even remotely reasonable, but merely interesting to its audience.
It would seem that some people are under the impression that as soon as a blog on the internet becomes sufficiently popular, it turns into the BBC or something, and becomes subject to various nebulous obligations to The Public, which if it fails to live up to amount to betrayal of that trust.
AisleFive, Grobstein, we were trying to avoid embarrassing people. In the end, it was unavoidable. I expect she'll survive it.
Ah, that's doubleplusgood!
@geekpdx: Your curiosity is natural, but airing (and hence overblowing) the details is exactly what we were trying to avoid in the first place.
It was a group decision. Why do you think it took so long?
I'm sure you were. Externally, however, how is that any different from (to pick an extreme, fictional example) what Winston Smith and his coworkers did?
Now, I have to quickly say I'm well aware of the differences between private and government censorship, and it's your site, so your rules.
But you are also aware that other people have links to your stories, and now those links are, inexplicably, gone. With absolutely no explanation on your part, and (near as I can figure) no redirection.
To put it bluntly: it stinks to high heaven of a cover up. And if you act like a secret cabalistic conspiracy, don't be surprised if some people see a secret cabalistic conspiracy :).
TylerSweeney, you haven't been a very careful reader. Go back and try again.
Yep. Save the drama for the llamas.
Links are the driving force of the internet. Every "link" is support for the resulting page. If you no longer support someone or something, you should remove the link; Even if it results in removing past blog posts.
It's your blog, you can do with it what you like. I will continue to read it because it is fantastic.
I wasn't up on this Violet Blue issue, but it sounds like a mess, and I think the best one can do with a mess is clean it up! You're not revising history, you're IMPROVING it!
I probably would have done the same thing, anyway. If the shit hits the fan, then it's time to stop throwing shit.
And probably get rid of the fan. Then buy central air conditioning.
I don't pretend that my blog is even 1/100th as important as yours, and I'm not in the habit of telling other bloggers how to run their blogs -- but I wouldn't have done what you did. At the very least, I wouldn't have done it without one holy heck of a reason.
I'm guessing that I know what this is about. It's entirely your right to decided not to let her publish more stuff to the blog. But was it a sane, reasonable reaction to go back and mass delete everything she ever contributed? It doesn't seem like one to me, and it absolutely seems like an over-reaction to the personal politics she was going through at the time.
s fr s "crng wht hppns n Bng Bng", Dn't nymr.
ws jst chckng n t s f y hd gttn vr bng Mcrsft whrs, nd ths s th frst thng s. Y'll r jst gng t sld n dwn tht slppry slp s, s dn't thnk tht wll vn bthr chckng bck n nymr.
Gd lck n ll y d. Y sd t hv grt blg.
we have always been at war with Eurasia.
Well, there goes my traffic boosting blog-fight picking plan.
Damn, I guess I'll have to stick to trying to write interesting things. Curses, foiled again.
I have to join in expressing my burning curiosity about how Violet Blue "behaved" to prompt your unpublication of her. Could you at least post a link to something about the incident so that your readers can judge for themselves? The shitstorm is a-blowing and can't be unblown. It cannot make things worse at this point to reveal what happened.
@Tylersweeney: Given that Boing Boing is not a public forum, they're not "threatening free speech". They have no obligation to maintain archives, nor to be impartial, nor to continue publishing articles by someone they do not wish to.
If you disagree, you can lodge a formal complaint with the Blog Ombudsman.
"But sometimes when you have people trying to force your hand before you're ready to respond it's frustrating."
"Bottom line is that those posts (not "more than 100 posts," as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago."
Sounds like you guys had plenty of time to figure out a response.
I have much respect for all of the BB editors, but this really does seem hypocritical. How is this any different then a site-wide filter to remove any reference to a particular phrase?
It's your blog - so do what you want. However, with all the post archived on the Wayback Machine... this just seems petty.
I am a meat popsicle.
I can't believe I was so oblivious to the drama. I feel a little left out.
Have fun with your boycott, @Alephnul.
(I really should add: I don't think there was malicious intent; I don't think it's all that important; and it's the internet, so people love making mountains out of grains of sand. But it's very hard to hide some things, and when you try to do so, it looks suspicious. And people love a story that has a good suspicious act in it.)
I lost all basic interest in Violet Blue when she sued an adult film star for appropriating the same Crayola name as her.
As if before this blogstress came along no one had strung the words "violet blue" together.
I support Boing Boing's (or is Boing's Boing more grammatically correct?) right to make any of their articles available/unavailable at their own discretion. Curiosity is nagging me a little, though.
Anyway, I got go, I'm meeting with a guy about trademarking Beergood.
Also if I had to make a guess over what BoingBoing got their panties in a twist about, I would say it had something to do with Violet Blue trademarking her name.
@ Joel
I guess I wasn't trying to get at the sauce of this matter so much as answer a more general curiosity of whether a group consensus must be reached before something that materially changes content in such a manner is done. I expect that editors have a lot of leeway with what they can post and edit without calling in TEH COMMITTEE, and was wondering if this sort of thing crossed that threshold.
Of course, I can see that copping to whether this was or wasn't a group decision could strain things further.
@ Teresa
Not sure if you were responding to me, and if you were, I'm not sure if you meant that the un-publishing or the statement was a group decision.
Taking down all the posts about somebody you're mad at...and not telling her...and then just leaving it to be discovered...seems kinda shitty to me.
The author Peter Carey, after his divorce, wanted to retroactively remove the dedications to his former wife from all his earlier books. This looks like the same bonehead kind of move.
You can't un-ring a bell. I know nothing about this situation except, it appears she was a friend, and now she isn't. But why remove all evidence of a positive relationship in the past?
Of course now everyone will want to know what she did to piss you guys off so bad. I'm sure as hell curious now.
@Teresa (#22), I think that Geekpdx (#15) was asking whether it was a group decision to unpublish the posts. @Geekpdx, the BB bloggers act autonomously with regard to editorial decisions.
@34: would it really have been better if they paid service to transparency posted an article saying "We've removed all references to Violet Blue for personal reasons"? That sounds a little too much like the passive-aggressive "I'm unfriending some people who are not true friends, they know who they are" LiveJournal drama posts.
In social situations, transparency is not always the best solution.
"Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her."
Can someone explain what this means? What exactly did Violet do that was so wrong?
I think it would help a lot of people in their understanding of why this action was taken if we knew what she did.
You are probably realizing that posting this was a mistake. The problem is that this article itself references a non-person and as long as it exists it will generate curiosity about the non-person.
Your only remedy is to delete this post and never mention the name of the non-person again in any context.
Yours sincerely,
Winston Smith
Ministry of Truth
The day I pay BB's wages is the day I get to tell them what can and cannot be posted on or removed from this blog. It's only censorship if VB forces BB to remove posts about her.
Is this a suggestion that BB should not be allowed to make changes to their own opinions and their own work that remains under their control on a server that they pay for?
What was that about threats to free speech?
When BB goes out and tells other bloggers to remove quotes from the posts they removed, then we'll talk.
If this is the same as 1984, then anyone who's ever gone back and friends-locked their old livejournal entries is Big Brother.
Get a sense of perspective. You can argue about whether this might've been the best way to handle whatever dispute it was, sure. But you can't seriously argue that this is "censorship" or "against free speech."
In fact, I've come to believe that it's a law of nature: whenever anyone on a comments thread starts complaining that the blog owners suppress free speech, they've lost the argument. So long as you can get your own blog, your free speech is assured. No one else is obliged to give you their microphone.
And Alephnul, don't let the door hit you in the ass.
Another victim of the Streisand Effect.
For a blog that prides itself on fighting censorship and championing internet freedoms, you could have done a heck of a lot better, especially the clandestine "editing".
I respect your right to manage your "hosting" any way you see fit, but you should have been more upfront about it, from the beginning.
AARRGGHGHGH. This whole thing has been raising my blood pressure all weekend. The world is full of crap and all you trolls can worry about is whether Boing fricking Boing is on the side of censorship evil? Hypocritical?
Jesus Mary God save us from you morons. I know calling a spade a spade is throwing gasoline on this fire, and Teresa, feel free to disemvowel or delete if I'm being too harsh here, but this has gone just too far. Arrogant know-nothings hate BoingBoing for being more successful than they are, then they spill over onto Making Light, and they probably even vote. Or worse! They probably don't vote! And are holier-than-thou about being above that system!
I really don't suffer fools gladly -- so please! Shut the fuck up! All of you!
Jeez Louise, I just hate these people, and it's not easy to provoke me to that kind of antipathy. I even try to understand Donald Rumsfeld. (I do draw the line at Cheney.)
Why don't you all take all that righteous outrage energy and do something with it that won't make the world worse? Go, I dunno, dance energetically with Matt Harding or something. And get the fuck off BoingBoing's back! They owe you nothing -- they give you endless entertainment for free and you repay them with enough hatred -- not just on this issue, but on every little fricking thing that comes down the pike -- that it has to make them wonder why in hell they do it. Seriously. Grow the fuck up.
Calling yourself a "blog" as a defense for exercising lower standards of journalism than a news organization does not persuade me about this event being handled as a complete PR mess for BoingBoing.
No news organization, including Boing Boing due to its well established popular status, can avoid the label of hypocrisy by hiding the facts about what is now a newsworthy issue of interest to the public. Whatever private nature the initial issue was has now become a public interest. Therefore, everyone involved with Boing Boing better look hard and long into its soul as a journalist and make a choice about whether to serve the public's desire to understand the facts and make their own judgments about this news or simply shutter its doors. Because the moment you hold back the news like this and hide behind platitudes, you can no longer credibly zealously demand the truth for the sources you go out and report on.
News is pain. If you can't take it, don't bother dishing it out.
I don't mean to be inflammatory, but there are quite a few crybabies here. I'm not sure which meaning of "post" BB is using here, but we have two options:
#1 "Post" refers to the updates to the BB blog itself. They've written several endorsing snippets about Violet Blue as kind of a sexuality activist. If she crossed a line, and they no longer felt like they could endorse her, then it's entirely reasonable that they would withdrawal that support.
#2 "Post" refers to user comments. If Violet Blue left comments that were inappropriate for the blog, then if they were deleted it would be no different than removing the posts of anybody else who spams, flames, or trolls. This is standard maintenance for any blog. I doubt they would "censor" her just for disagreeing, or being controversial (which is what they seemed to have loved her for in the first place).
And either way, they didn't chisel her name off every corner of the blog; all references to her are still available in the archive, and if you don't trust that then there's an independent archive as well.
If you're terribly curious about what caused the withdrawal of support, then go read VB's blog; that's my next stop.
I am now going to be inevitably disappointed when the truth comes out that it's all due to Violet mocking papercraft dildo cozies.
In all seriousness - I understand that you want to play rumor control and nip the whispering hysteria in the bud ("principle skinner says we have no backbone, purple monkey dishwasher!"), but without being transparent as to the underlying disagreement, rampant speculation is going to flourish in that void, at the very least. More than likely, negative opinion is going to take root as well, and I'd honestly hate to see that, as I really like boingboing, and have since i picked up those weird little zines at the local bookstore, back in the day.
While at first, my obvious standard internet reaction was "OMG FIRST AMENDMENT CENSORSHIP! WHERE'S MY GUY FAWKES MASK?!?obligatory1insteadofexclamationpoint," but then I thought, BoingBoing isn't about posting everything that's out there, it's about posting what the editors want on their site. People are free to post anywhere on the net, or say what they want, just not in the front yards of people who disagree with them.
I can respect if it's personal, and I'm sure if it's something either side wants to reveal, they will. I think saying you guys are "unpublishing her" brings about Fahrenheit 451-like images in posters minds and encourages generic rabble-rousing. Either way, I have to appreciate the maturity of the posters here at BoingBoing. If this were any of the other newspost blogs out there (coughrhymeswithBiggcough) people would be more rampant with the internet-napalm than Bill Kilgore.
Is there anyone on the internet that Violet Blue hasn't started a blog war with by complaining how mean people are to her?
"Don't take any guff from these swine..."
I can't believe the Blog community is up in arms and talking about how this goes against the "standards" for the blogosphere.
Standards? Anyone with a computer and a place to post can put up a blog, let's stop pretending otherwise. Yes, Boing Boing is a giant among blogs, but that doesn't change things. They removed articles that they no longer wished to host. End of story. They have the right to do so, and they did.
What part of, "They have the right to do so" are people not getting?
Editorial decisions are usually about changing the future, or at least the present. Trying to change history is something different. History shouldn't be subject to editorializing, should it? Saying you'll not "lend her any credibility or associate with her" going forward? That's defensible. Trying to make it seem like you never did in the past? That's not very Boing Boing-y. Or, maybe it is and I was just projecting my hopes and dreams on to you. :-)
If you're in favor of transparency, you can add notes/updates to posts in the past clarifying your lack of endorsement.
"Unpublishing" is now a creepy euphemism.
Just my two cents.
Thanks David, you answered my question.
Also, good on you guys for being active in the thread.
Why would the team go back and delete her posts? This seems very juvenile. No matter what went wrong, she spent HER time helping YOU. Bringing attention to her work- only by deleting and then telling bb about it shows us that you are just asking for more controversy on the subject. Pointless...
The "unpublishing" does seem rather to be a rather Orwellian term, Xeni's explanation notwithstanding.
Perhaps you should list them all as strike through as it seems you now wish to retroactively remove all the good things you've said about the person. That would have been more transparent than "unpublishing."
As to the wayback machine, it would never have occurred to me that BoingBoing would disappear a story, let alone everything ever written about a certain individual so I would never have thought to need to go to the waback machine to look up BoingBoing material.
I support your ability to do whatever you like on your blog, but I feel like noting that however justified, the manner in which you did this was passive-aggressive and opaque, and "unpublishing" is a stupid and useless weasel word.
You deleted a bunch of posts. That's fine. It's your server, you're allowed to delete whatever you like. You decided you weren't friends anymore, and everything she did was poison, and not newsworthy or at least worth being in a "directory of wonderful things". Just, try to avoid the 'ban everyone who embarasses me' approach in comment moderation and response. It's kind of embarrassing.
At the bare minimum, it seems a redirect from past stories to their respective archives is in order.
But I think the decision to "unpublish" is fine. The whole value of blogs is that they are a filter, an active, human filter that sorts in real-time, not some archival history-keeping automaton.
Good move, now I won't even have to see her godawful English.
"And this. And that. And I was naked. And I did this. And it was amazing. And wow. And hoo. And haa."
Gives me a headache. Would someone tell her what a conjunction is please.
"If this is the same as 1984, then anyone who's ever gone back and friends-locked their old livejournal entries is Big Brother."
If you think BoingBoing is the same thing as an old livejournal, then yes, absolutely. I wouldn't.
I'd never say that Boing Boing didn't have the right to delete whatever they want. They also have to right to post glowing reviews of Exxon Mobil gas stations and tell us that Mike Huckabee is a visionary worthy of our support.
Clearly Boing Boing has the right do do wrong things. Just as we have the right to voice disagreement if they do.
"What part of, 'They have the right to do so' are people not getting?
I totally get that they have the right to do it. I just disagree with it and am saying why. Is that OK?
BoingBoing, I am highly disappointed that you promote tyranny but choosing to publish only those things that you want on your own website.
Let's not forget, they did this a YEAR ago and people are just now bitching about it? Sounds like someone just has an axe to grind with Boing Boing and is using this as easy fodder.
So now BoingBoing is a tool that its masters can use to settle petty, personal disputes with other internet bloggers? Not good, and I don't care what the explanation is, or how many people agree with it. If this were a print magazine no such luxury would be possible.
Moderating comments is one thing--people may post scurrilous, base, profane defamatory comments that do not add to the commonweal, so to speak--but deleting posts is quite another, especially when no rationale is given other than it having to do with "personal" reasons.
I see it as the exact sort of thing that BoingBoing would nail another site for, and I believe has. Whether it is redaction, bowdlerization, expurgation, or censorship I see no place for it here.
Who the fuck is Violet Blue anyway? Probably just another one in the legion of harpy reprobates who has a knack for turning depravity into cash. Who gives a damn? But now you are hoist by your own petard. The smart thing to do would be to swallow your pride, apologize to your readership, (and maybe even Violet Blue) and republish the goddamed posts. That's really your only option at this point or you lose all credibility, at least with me anyway.
hooray BB. do what you feel with the page, I'll keep drinking in the wonderfulness.
Gainclone , July 1, 2008 9:56 AM:
*wince* I can imagine George Orwell writing this, only he'd be using sarcasm.
My sympathies are with BB, here. Hopefully you've realized that you handled this badly and you'll do better next time. You certainly have a right to host what you want on your site, and you can be as arbitrary about it as you like.
I wish I knew what VB did to anger you. I've skimmed her blog and I couldn't find any reference to BB in amongst the 'sex toy of the day' reviews. I hope you BB moderators understand why everyone wants to know what happened -- because they're scared that *they* might be 'unpublished', suddenly and without warning. You have legions of contributors (*not* 'readers', in this context) that are willing to adapt their behavior to whatever rules you deem proper. You have to give them the rules. Not the published rules of the comment threads, but rules of behavior outside of BB.
Because from all appearances, you've decided to police that sphere of behavior. Your choice. Good luck with it.
I know, everyone wants to save the drama for the mama of the llamas from Andromeda. But shoving those llamas under the carpet just makes the drama fester, and the llamas start to itch and buck, and you end up with a bigger mess than before.
Revisionist history?
Tempest in a Teapot?
From my vantage point it's like people yelling over a fence at each other about last years ruined party that I wasn't at anyway.
Does seem kind weird for Boing Boing to do stuff like this in light of their opinions about similar matters though.
Meh, do what you want, just shut up before 10 PM or I'm calling the cops.
Keep the wonderful things coming. ;)
Umm... Respect means that one gives as well as recieves honesty and civil behavior. If one does not adhere to that code than they can not play in the pool with the big kids.
You do not debate with a-holes, rocks, coma victims, rain or two year olds. You will only look stupid.
'Nuff said.
If BB wasn't getting respect, neither should it be given.
#58 "What part of, "They have the right to do so" are people not getting? "
Having the right isn't the same thing as being right.
Apologies for the length; complex issues should not be discussed in soundbytes.
Perhaps actions to unpublish entries relating to Blue should have been accompanied by some sort of warning -- to Blue herself. Or perhaps not. Certainly, anything that is bad enough to warrant this removal but cannot be discussed openly in an editorial manner is likely to be of a more personal nature than a professional one, hence the desire for secrecy.
On the other hand, after my divorce, I didn't go backwards and remove all posts by my ex-wife from my own website. I respected her privacy by not airing our business in public, but I allowed the previous record to stand.
I think there are two issues here. First, BoingBoing is considered by many to be a journalistic source, which is probably not the correct mode of thinking (except for, perhaps, BBGadgets). While many journalistic tricks have been employed due to the size of the site and ethics of those involved, BoingBoing remains a site of opinion and editorial. When things like the Wayback Machine exist, BB isn't necessarily responsible for continuing to host content that it actively dislikes. As pointed out, other items have been removed in the past without much controversy.
At the heart of this issue is the mystery of the "why." Again, it seems to me it is likely of a more personal nature, else the removal would have been accompanied by a detailed justification (and perhaps an apology, such as in the Le Guin case). The reasons for removal may be valid and defensible, but without any clues, the issue will likely provoke thought for some time.
Bottom line, the internet doesn't have some weird privilege that means it should get to know why these posts were unpublished. And BoingBoing shouldn't have to defend itself. But BoingBoing often hold themselves to higher standards than merely what they "have" to do. The removal was valid, but reads as petty.
In any case, it's all in the past, too late to do anything differently now. Worth thinking about for the next time around.
And whether or not you, the Happy Mutants, feel it's justified, a quick apology for the manner in which you acted (not for the actions themselves) might go a long way to stopping all the noise.
'Unpublishing'? Puh-lease.
Anyone else see the eerie parallels with BB's after-the-fact editing and the listing about the pro-family group replacing 'gay' with 'homosexual'? If the whole point of that listing was about the dangers of misinformation, what's the point of this one besides 'don't get caught'?
Maybe each BB listing needs to come with a EULA now.
You people are so volatile! We're talking about Boing Boing here! The people that bring us Unicorn Chasers and Web Zen and tell us about candy shaped like lighthouses shaped like penis! The people that document the life of mixed-nationality action hero startups and tell us how to Macgyver a microscope out of a webcam!
The endless fun and joy that BoingBoing has brought me is FAR GREATER than that of any news organization that has ever existed.
@52. Yes. News is pain. But BoingBoing is not news. It is LIFE. BOINGBOING FOREVER.
It is clear to me that none of you are worthy of my blood or my life, but I will stand for you. And together, we will restore honor to the ship, and bring glory to the Empire.
To say "we have a reason, but we wont talk about it" is not something I was expecting from BB; even if it is better than saying nothing at all.
Not being able to speak about some fact, possible for legal reasons, creates the feeling of a corporate entity, and not a personal blog (and that post and discussion here reminds me about flickrs infamous "we can't say anything about it" safefilter disaster) . As do the rules you introduced some weeks ago. Being viewed as a corporate entity and not as bunch of cool people changes what seems resonable behavior -- we all agree that corporate entities should not delete arbitrary posts, start censorship and so on, if they want to be remembered as "do no evil" corporate entities.
So I guess the secret deletion of posts you don't like any more is a bit more than an editorial decision, or at least, a bad one. Even replacing these posts with [insert explanation] would have been better than doing it in the dark of the night.
"They have the right to do so", but they have to life with the consequences, especially a damaged reputation for their freedom of speech agenda.
So what was the point of unpublishing the posts? No really, I'm completely missing it here. Maybe it is that as stated they no longer consider Violet Blue or her work wonderful, but in absence of additional explanation, I find that answer alone hard to accept. In my mind (and perhaps only) it would seem to indicate some sort of disapproval of her actions, thus my comment: I suspect the fallout from this unpublishing (whether or not directly resultant from unWonderfulling) will only serve to further her fame.
Come to think of it, I've written a few books myself.. any way you guys could see your way clear to blacklisting me? I'd kill for that sort of PR.
@61 a quick scan of the relevant blogs show that there was already a controversy brewing, to such an extent that comments like this:
"the crew over at boingboing are douchebags. If you say something they don't like.. blam, you or your comments are deleted"..and more in the same vein.
http://valleywag.com/5019738/blogger-completely-deleted-from-boingboing-archives
were becoming common.
A cool and measured response was appropriate in this case.
Still waiting to hear what Violet did that warranted the deletion of all her submissions.
For a blog that values and promotes transparency in media I find it odd that you're being so quiet about this.
Boing Boingers, this is your front porch, and I am but a happy guest.
I don't know what happened, nor do I care (though it may be fun to watch). My advice:
Don't give an anklebiter the ladder they need to reach your knees.
Boing Boing should offer those who feel betrayed their money back, in full.
Xeni wrote:
"This is a directory of wonderful things. If we no longer think something is wonderful"
Maybe the problem is simply with your tagline! This statement implies that everything posted here is a "wonderful thing", however his doesn't seem to always be the case.. at least by the standard definition of "wonderful".
Are airplane pilots falling asleep during flight a "wonderful thing"? Is watching a monkey yanked around on a chain while ridding a small cycle a wonderful thing? I could go on, but you get the point.
Your argument centers is that:
1) all things boingboing are wonderful
2) Violet Blue is not wonderful
3) therefore, Violet Blue should not be on boingbong.
But upon review of the archives, one will find many not so wonderful, and some downright rotten things.
So maybe the simple solution is to change the tagline to "A directory of wonderful and sometimes rotten things" and republish Violet Blue's post.
Problem solved!
I have no idea what happened.
I think one of the things that drew me (and probably others) to your blog was that I felt like I was part of a club. A place where I could find "Wonderful things" and revel in them alongside you. You have always worked to NOT have this huge wall of Us (the writers) vs. Them (the readers). I felt like I had kindred spirits watching the internet for me while I was at work. Buddies by proxy.
I don't care that you chose as a group to make something not "wonderful" anymore. I just want to know why. The secrecy detracts from that closeness that I cherished.
I'm NOT claiming doom and gloom and I'll never surf here again. We both know better. For me this illustrates that you have grown and you are a business now. you need to pay attention to the eyes on the pages and how your image is maintained. As a grownup I can respect that. The teenage geek in me is not so easily soothed.
I really don't care about the feud but ...
This is a directory of wonderful things.
I'm sorry, it stopped being that quite a long time ago. I'm looking to the left of this text box and I see...
Devo sues McDonald's
Pretend cops bully videographer
Pseudo was a fake company
AT&T making jokes about the wiretapping
But maybe you define "wonderful" differently down there in the US.
And, I'm sorry but I have to say "unpublish" is a just a delete. It's obvious this whole business makes you all uncomfortable and raw but coining a new word is just denial.
Now, it's my nation's birthday. If you're near the border, come on over and have some cake - the red and white icing is at once disturbing and delicious.
Newspapers are also privately owned entities run by an editorial board or even one editor depending on the size of the publication. They can do whatever they want too. They can pull stories, priortize them, fire writers, and print retractions - just like this blog can. But here's the thing - when an event catches the public attention and becomes a bonafide piece of news, which I believe this issue has evolved into, then there's something called journalistic ethics that kicks in.
When you create a blog, what is it for? For BoingBoing, a immensely popular blog, the duties to act in a manner that is consistent with the expectations of the audience and the public interest should be one that BoingBoing acknowledges. Instead of shirking these duties because "we're just a blog", you should own it and act as though you are a responsible organization that gives reasons for the actions you take and act transparently.
If you don't acknowledge at least a duty to act transparently, then you are no better than the right wingers you accuse of engaging in coverups and conspiracies.
The defensive rhetoric I'm seeing here is disappointing. It's like the pro athletes caught doping saying "hey I'm not a role model so don't treat me like one." Well, sorry Boingboing, you are a successful source of news for many and you are full of it if you act surprised about it. Come clean or go home because you will never ever be able to speak credibly when criticizing someone else's lack of 'transparency'.
The bottom line is that not every word one writes is worthy of permanent preservation. I know it, and the fine editors of BoingBoing know it. That standard is, and always should be, maintained by the owners of the work.
I think I would have kept the existing posts, assuming they weren't part of whatever the mystery issue is. Then, if disassociation were necessary, I'd have not accepted any more submissions.
Removing the posts seems a bit like whitewashing the history. She wrote for you, I gather; she no longer does.
It's your backyard, do what you want with it. Personally, I'd "unpublish" everything that has the word "steampunk" in it, along with a variety of other things around here, but hey; it ain't my backyard.
This is not big brother, it's not censorship, it's private property.
Still, doing this is counterproductive. I have a vague recollection of someone called Violet Blue, but that's it. I don't know who or what she is, and have no idea what kind of controversy or drama you're talking about. But rest assured, I have Google at the ready, and I shall now set out to discover every sordid detail I can.
"This is not Wikipedia or the New York Times."
If the NYT decided to "unpublish" material from a person who had fallen out of favor with its editors, I doubt BoingBoing would cut them much slack. Does BoingBoing aspire to be taken seriously? If so, then it needs to apply similar standards to itself as it does to other publications. But if BoingBoing believes that blogs are not real journalism, then it should make that position clear so we as readers can set our expectations appropriately.
Oh, for a "buzz down" button...
Your blog. Your editorial decisions. If folks don't agree with those decisions, they're free to browse elsewhere, or to start their own blog.
As far as whether doing the edit silently was a good idea or not... Damned if you do, damned if you don't. As a past editor of an online discussion board myself, our standard practice was to return questionable posts to the author with an explanation of why they were removed. That does generate nosyparker inquiries about what happened, but we felt that handling those offline was wiser.
Online metadiscussion tends to escalate rapidly as people feel compelled to defend themselves and/or each other rather than being able to let it go with "We agree that we disagree".
Just because someone has the right to do something, doesn't mean it's the right thing to do.
Just because someone was within their rights to do something, doesn't mean that nothing can be done retroactively to help correct the mistake.
To quietly unpublish the articles was a mistake that BB had every right to commit. They can never uncommit the mistake, but they can take steps to salvage their somewhat unclean reputation, if they should so choose. I hope that when their feelings become unhurt they will be able to unentangle this mess somehow, and maybe things will become a bit more unobscure.
#77 - "tell us about candy shaped like lighthouses shaped like penis! "
DOH! You beat me to it...
While I honestly think the best way to handle this would have been to simply state where BoingBoing parted ideological ways with Ms. Blue, I understand the desire to have done so without embarrassing anyone.
I have to say though, you really should have seen these problems coming. Unpublishing is a perfectly valid way to handle online content, but I think we would all have preferred some kind of notice explaining why. (the comments conflating it with censorship or attempting to alter history are fundamentally incorrect as you are voluntarily removing your own content, not attempting to make it seem as though it was never there)
I'm certainly not about to stop reading over this, and wouldn't expect you to care if I did, but I would respect the authors and editors a great deal more if we got a more explicit explanation of what went wrong.
"We unpublished our own work. There's a big difference between that and censorship."
I'm interested here in boingboing's understanding of censorship. For this reason, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary. The definitions for censor lead the reader down an interesting path. First, we see the legacy of the word: "The title of two magistrates in ancient Rome, who drew up the register or census of the citizens, etc., and had the supervision of public morals." A censor is responsible for the maintenance of morals. Interesting, as the grounds for the "unpublishing" of Violet's posts were that she "behaved in a way" which "made [boingboing] reconsider" itself as a promoter of her content. If academics decided that Herder or Nietzsche or any of so many other philosophers conduct rendered their work impotent, or worse, simply off limits, our ways of being in the world would be significantly less explored, less understood, and the conversation in the very least would be much smaller. As the fellow who mentions the New York Times writer points out (in addition to the other implications of the example for the value of history, journalistic integrity, archives, etc, which I will refrain from making or taking up as arguments): work produced and producer (author, writer) should be considered detached at birth, for better or worse. This is a directory of wonderful things, or was, not a directory of wonderful people and people’s actions.
The second definition for censor reads "One who exercises official or officious supervision over morals and conduct." Seems to me this is precisely what boingboing has in mind in the removal of her posts. Her "behavior" made them reconsider whether they would "lend her any credibility or associate with her." Something she did violated their unwritten code of morals and conduct, and in the unfortunate opaqueness of a lack of an explanation or delineation of this code, our collective imagination will now run wild. Her morals or conduct violated their code, values, and now she's "unpublished."
The third definition for censor reads "One who censures or blames; an adverse critic; one given to fault-finding." I'm uncertain how this could be argued not to be in line with the actions: the staff admittedly found fault, and is finally explicitly (yet nebulously on its grounds) critical of this fault (a known unknown?), which resulted in the removal of her content. She is the one blamed for the removal of her content, a result of her actions.
The fourth definition is the most unfortunate, in the context of what my understanding of boingboing was (past tense, after this one) about: "A mental power or force which represses certain elements in the unconscious and prevents them from emerging into the conscious mind." This seems to be the hardest hitting of all, given the ardent denial by the boingboing staff that they didn't "silence" Violet, rather, they merely "unpublished" her and the concluding argument which suggests a difference between "unpublishing" and silencing, which seems somewhat synonymous with, or at least as egregious as, censhorship. I'd argue that as with many popular blogs, especially those allowing comments, that boingboing is representative of a social unconscious, one from which (ala Lacan) individuals integrate various elements in the continual and dynamic formation of a self, its identity. There's also an argument for deliberative democratic values being snuffed out in what seems (in the context of this blog) a very righteous (she did something bad, now her work isn't worth reading, or at least we imply this by removing it from our provided content) decision. Boingboing went out of their way to prevent what they believed (and maybe still do believe, though their actions speak differently) once to be perfectly good content from reaching the conscious minds of their readers. In the information age, a blog like boingboing is undoubtedly a mental power or force. This force intentionally repressed (through the technique of removal) content for whatever (unknown) reasons which admittedly have to do not with the content, but with conduct. This somehow seems even worse than content-centered censorship for that reason. I don't like the behavior of the body behind that voice, so I will forget what they said in the past, and take action to prevent those recorded statements from remaining easily accessible. Then I will covertly attempt to delete the past. Historically, this rarely is a successful or popular action, especially in what I imagine to be the hearts and minds, the values and beliefs, of the readers of this blog.
What’s more, is that the administrator attempts to argue that unpublishing isn’t an attempt at silencing. Removing a voice from a forum, even if the voice exists in other forums, is silencing. It’s taking one of the amplifiers, one of the relay switches for content, and turning it off, blocking it. Those who listen to the content amplified now hear silence. Those who received the content, now receive a blank. What boingboing did was successfully silence within their arena, their amplifier, their forum, their switch, the content of Violet Blue. And in the wake of this poor decision, a thousand bloggers’ voices cried out in unison, and based on boingboing’s lacking response (nothing more than an acknowledgement of their actions – no explanation, no discussion) as of my reading, were lost on the editorial staff (of course, I’m initially looking past any comments posted – and deleted – regarding this matter on the boingboing blog). Boingboing is right in that they didn’t silence Violet Blue – she is louder than ever, brought to the forefront. What they did is far worse. They censored her content, silencing what was deemed once of value. Then they played semantics and failed to explain.
To conclude, I am aware that boingboing is a public forum, run by those whose private interest controls the enviroment, and that they have no responsibility (in their EULA, or their fine print, whatever) to archive or act as an internet library. Though, I’d ask them to reconsider their “directory of wonderful things” in light of this behavior. Keep the wonderful things coming, just make sure the readers read them fast, that is, before the makers of wonderful things (authors, writers, hackers, whatever) do something that flags the censor.
And who knows, maybe they’ll censor this too. I would have doubted this in the past, but in an attempt to censor, change the past, especially based in their unstated reasons for doing so (perhaps Violet has weapons of mass destruction?) boingboing has changed my perception of their blog for the immediate future.
The only positive to come out of this decision (to acknowledge the deletion of the posts) was the comments: now readers who share a common experience can engage in a conversation about the legitimacy of the action of those who run the forum in which they share this experience. Thanks for that.
Before anyone else makes the same error: Violet Blue never posted anything on Boing Boing. She was never a blogger here. The entries in question mentioned her, but they were written by the Boingers.
No comments of hers were ever removed because she never made any. Boing Boing didn't have comments at the time.
What part of, "They have the right to do so" are people not getting?
=======
Exactly. People should remember this the next time they get cavity-searched at airport security, the next time they get pulled over for driving while black or the next time they get detained at Best Buy for not showing a receipt upon exit. When that happens to you, just tell yourself, "They have the right to do so." That makes it all good.
Mh.
BB hs bn gng dwnhll fr whl. BB Gdgts s th svng grc, nd t Xn's crdt BBTV s msng frm tm t tm. thrws t's jst th sm ld Cry-Xn lktmbymysht shw.
Prhps shld jst sv my tm spnt w/ BB nd th vr grwng Cry-Xn crpfld nd... *plnk*
I'm reminded of the courtroom scene from THX 1138.
Flame On, my brethren.
@Satan: there is a difference between a newspaper and a blog. A newspaper operates on the premise of objectivity and offering a service to the public, and is an institution with obligations to the public. A newspaper also sells copies on the basis of its reputation. Boing Boing is no such institution; it's merely a forum for its contributors to post links to things they consider interesting. There is no process by which blogs become institutions subject to an obligation of public service once their readership hits a certain level.
I have decided that Boing Boing is, in fact, a government run food safety program. With that in mind, I am horrified at the way this place is being run. When was the last time you folks inspected a chicken slaughterhouse? How are we supposed to know that the tomatoes we buy in the store are safe? OH MY GOD!!1 The tomato contaminations -- all Boing Boing's fault! These people should be sued! What a disgracefully run food safety program. Surely just another indication of the Bush administration's incompetence.
For shame, Boing Boing. You are not living up to the high standards that I set for the type of organization that I imagine you are.
@98: Teresa, the LAT post on this indicates that one story deleted was written by VB. Is that wrong?
Link.
As someone who hosts a few blogs, I totally dig Xeni's analogy of a house. BoingBoing is clearly not a journalism site (how could it be with so few mentions of Paris Hilton), BoingBoing is the personal perspective of four (or so) folks and what they find neato. I dig that, and that's why I read it and recommend it to others. If they don't find a certain post neato anymore, I think it's completely reasonable and logical that they would remove it. I mean, if they published a link to a neato dance thing on YouTube, and then, weeks later, discovered that the video was posted by a known (insert bad person behavior here), they would remove it, just as any of us would. Comparing BoingBoing's relationship with Violet Blue to The New York Times' relationship with Jayson Blair is like comparing Sonny & Cher with George & Dick.
But Boingboing is my only source of news. This is the window through which I experience the world!
Seriously, the real reason everyone is in a tizzy has nothing to do with censorship, and *everything* to do with sex. When something having to do with sex occurred, it is the closest blogger's *responsibility* to the rest of the blogosphere to share it. I mean, that's what the Internet was built for in the first place, right?
If you *really* want to know what happened, log onto Second Life, and find a hidden island called VelvetSchnapps. Ask for Pete.
Okay, I really don't care about the Violet Blue thing. I think complaining about the injustice of it all is kind of like complaining that a new edition of a book has come out, and it's NOT EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE LAST EDITION.
But I don't really mind the upset.
I do, however, mind the protracted beating of Boxer's corpse--can we stop with the Orwell references? Please? Because Orwell is exciting, and endlessly comparing anything one considers unfortunate to 1984 is not exciting. It's very, very, very tired.
We get it. Unperson. Doubleplus. War is peace. OH GOD STOP PLEASE.
I think many posters are forgetting that this is a BLOG, not a public news site. It's not CNN, or Fox News, or MSBNC. It a blog for crying out loud. If you guys thought something was offensive and decided to remove it, fine by me.
Perhaps those that disagree with your decision should create their own blog. Then they can feel free to post anything they want.
(Although it probably wouldn't be as popular as this site, which is probably why they're pissed off in the first place.)
Klenow said: I have a vague recollection of someone called Violet Blue, but that's it. I don't know who or what she is, and have no idea what kind of controversy or drama you're talking about.
Same here... the whole subject must have fallen into the category of "Things on Boing Boing I'm Glad They Write About, But Which I Completely Ignore," like Klenow & steampunk.
But I like the steampunk :)
@98: Teresa, here's the post written by VB that was deleted, according to the LAT post: link.
If the NYT decided to "unpublish" ...I doubt BoingBoing would cut them much slack.
If you approach a fun website and the NYT with the same expectations, the problem is already yours. Do you truly hold the editors here to the same standards as at the NYT? Really really?
But if BoingBoing believes that blogs are not real journalism, then it should make that position clear so we as readers can set our expectations appropriately.
I think the lady with the jackhammer in the middle of the title should help you set your expectations. She isn't old. She isn't gray. I'm betting she isn't even that much of a lady.
Try not to throw dirt at people who fail to meet your own irrational expectations. You just lose ground.
constant reader, rare commenter.
Let me join the chorus of "it wasn't censorship." Censorship is when the government says you can't produce something or when huge corporations (e.g., msnbc), who shape the national discourse, blacklist people and points of view. Boingboing is a blog and can choose to publish what it does or doesn't feel like and it can take stuff offline too. Anybody who mistakes this for censorship needs to go offline and speak to people in the meatspace.
p.s. I really enjoyed the interview in the onion recently. I told people about it in my office and thought that a bunch of really good points were made (especially about the people complaining about what flavor of free ice cream is being given out that day). I was really surprised after finishing it to discover that other people were writing nasty crap.
"The bottom line is that not every word one writes is worthy of permanent preservation."
Although this is true, the posts were not removed because they didn't stnad the test of time. They didn't just atrophy out of existence. Something (and we can speculate many nasty things because, at least according to this post, they aren't saying what) transpired that was unrelated to the content of the posts, and they decided to remove her.
The thing is, it is absolutely their right to do so, and I can even see the reasoning. But how dimwitted do you have to be to think that it would not be a potential black eye, ESPECIALLY for a site like BoingBoing? Pointing out the hypocrisies and secret machinations of the world is part of their meat and potatoes, and part of why I have been a gleeful daily reader for years and years.
I don't think BB.net is evil for this, I don't persoanlly care that the posts are gone, and I'll continue to visit every day. I am, however, bewildered by what seems like a clumsy, clumsy sequence of moves by people who I tend to think of as much smarter than this.
#105
"If you *really* want to know what happened, log onto Second Life, and find a hidden island called VelvetSchnapps. Ask for Pete."
I SMELL A BLOCKBUSTER
Wow. You here at Boingboing really have handled this badly. Sure it's your blog, etc. etc. but that's still not a good reason for the actions that were taken. It has the quality of being in someone's home and noticing a college year book on the coffee table and when perusing through it seeing regular holes where a face had been removed from some pictures and a name removed from some text. Of course in the digital world we have to be told of the erasures but now that we have it has all the qualities of the Swiss cheese yearbook. Expecting that people looking at the holes wouldn't have second thoughts about the people that did the cutting is living in a dream world. That's your doing. Not someone else's.
I get the impression that the cause of this editing was something personal ("piles of shit lying around") and that's fine. I have no desire to get into what someone feels is private. My guess is that nothing at the site was the cause, just the result. The problem is that the sense of "free spirit" that I think is the big attraction about Boingboing has taken a hit.
You're still in my RSS feed and you're still one of my favorite Internet stop overs. We've all had our freak out moments but it's important to keep them to rare moments.
What's the big deal? Unpublishing happens all the time. In fact, there was a recent story right here on BoingBoing about how the CIA unpublished documentation relating to torture. get used to it people, it's a part of life.
http://www.boingboing.net/2008/05/28/redacted-cia-documen.html
@#103Grobstein, I'll answer that.
There were multiple factual errors in the blog post by Sarno at the LA Times blog.
This person never "posted" items to BB, they were not an author or a guest blogger.
#91:"If the NYT decided to "unpublish" material from a person who had fallen out of favor with its editors, I doubt BoingBoing would cut them much slack."
Yep, I can just imagine. -_-'
Sure, in the end the editors can do whatever they want. Their blog, their site, whatever.
But this was still handled in just about the worst way possible. First posting nothing and then posting vaguely and without actually explaining anything is NOT the right to way stop people from making baseless assumptions and treading the rumormill.
The easiest and fastest way this could have been avoided would have been stating the reasons clearly and as fast as possible. this way, people might still have disagreed, but things would have been more managable.
If people don't know something, they get curious and start asking questions. I would have expected the BBers to anticipate that...
@81 mindpowered:
Thanks for the link and that info. Sounds pretty harsh, but it would have made more sense to let her continue to make a fool out of herself.
I think both sides of the spectrum have done two completely different actions.
BB's- being kind, responsible and not overly offensive towards anyone. Yet they decided to cover it up.
Xeni-you have been in contact with Tibetan protesters, talking to them through their struggles with China, fighting for the censorship to be overthrown. It confuses me that you would agree to take that down. Little bit hypocritical.
I know they are not one and the same. They are two very different circumstances but any/all online hinderance will not help this site with its message.
VioletBlue- Acted cowardly, no excuse for that- but her work does not deserve to be swept under a rug..
The difference between the institutions "big blog (with fanzine background), operated by a small company, earning (part of) the living" and "mass media" is not sharply drawn, I guess.
When I read about this, it literally was George Orwell's 1984.
AW can no longer link to her AWing. ohnoes
If Ms. Blue did something wrong, that may warrant her present and future removal as a contributor, but why remove her past work? What piece of news came out that invalidates the merit of her past published work?
In 1938, Time Magazine named Adolf Hitler "Man of the year". Well we all know what happened next but Time Magazine did not go back and recant or unpublish that issue. Even if it could have it wouldn't. Instead, the news evolved and we came to understand and judge the world more fully each day with the accruing facts.
For BB to go back and remove Ms. Blue's past work is to me an act that goes beyond what I would expect any organization to engage in. You fire an employee or no longer welcome someone's contribution and that is fine - their future work will no longer be hosted. But their past work? There is something nefarious about that. What is it about the past work that carried the seeds of evil that warrants you to remove them from my view? I would like to exercise my judgment on my own in the fullest exposure of the facts... and I cannot do that now that you're removed those articles.
Also the fact you acknowledge that the articles can be found in internet archiving sites shows me that there's something petty or personal in the way you're doing this. Right now, Ms. Blue sounds like she is a much more interesting personality for having pissed off some bloggers to the point of making them act in such a bitchy manner to her.
Channeling my inner Unicorn Chaser, it behooves me to note that 'Papercraft Dildo Cozies' (#54) would be a deucedly smashing name for a steampunk themed Emo band.
Teresa,
Longtime reader, first-time poster as the old saw goes. Thanks for the explanation. The reasons and backstory for "unpublishing" (an unfortunate and Orwellian term) these posts don't matter much to me -- it's your site. If you want to toss a regular out of the bar for being obnoxious, it's your call.
However, as someone who's worked both in traditional as well as Internet media in managerial and technical and editorial roles, I would add a few suggestions regarding your evolving SOP (or lack thereof):
1. Deliberately serving up 404s is simply bad Webmastering practise. I'd strongly suggest putting up a simple notice on each replaced page that the post has been "unpublished" per your Policies. A bit more work, but it would have saved you guys a lot of trouble.
2. As comment #6 above notes, it's bad journalistic practise to unpublish articles from the record (and like it or not, your site serves a prominent reportorial role that adds to the general record). Strike-outs, addendums stating something is no longer wonderful, corrections, retractions, apologies, removal of hyperlinks to external sites, even "disem-vowel-ing" etc. are all good practise. But when you unpublish editorial content to which you've also provided permalinks, you're destroying your own credibility and inconveniencing those audience members who think well enough of BB to link to its articles, and drive traffic your way.
3. There seemed to be some thin-skinned censorship (outright removal, not just "disem-vowel-ing") of admittedly off-topic but certainly not hateful comments regarding this incident in other threads. You would have saved yourselves the trouble of playing that game of "whack-a-mole" by making a statement such as this before or upon unpublishing the posts.
This is more than a random group blog; it's a professional site, with all the trapping thereof (an LLC, a revenue stream, a massive and loyal audience, etc.). You've made an effort to put in enlightened policies, but clearly they need refining.
Your site's (really your brand's) core values, at least from several years of reading, include zealous advocacy for Free Speech, organisational transparency, good Web design practise, journalistic integrity, the importance of archives, and respect for your audience. Core values should always be incorporated as much as possible into your site policies, especially when you traffic in the business of ideas.
I hope this incident will serve as a lesson learned so you folks'll be able to handle the inevitable future incidents without causing the sort of drama, speculation, and needless damage to your brand that we've seen here.
As for me, I'll take it as growing pains and keep reading. Thanks for the wonderful stuff.
I must admit, I'm not entirely comfortable with the "unpublishing" of previously public content.
It doesn't seem to jibe with BB's normal ethics. Were any other blog to do a similar thing, I'd treat it with suspicion from then on, I think.
I don't want to get into this argument, I'm not sure where I stand. But I do have one question.
I remember seeing a video in post where Violet Blue was at some big techno-fest. She was trying to interview Steve Jobs or some other Apple bigwig. And she was rebuffed rather humorously.
Now, I feel really sure I saw this on BB (maybe it was BBTV), much less than a year ago. Am I wrong?
Where to start?
Since when is it the public's right to know every thought that went into Boing Boing's decision to remove VB's posts? BB isn't a publicly traded company. We don't own a word of it. We don't pay a cent to read BB. It's theirs to edit as they please. Additionally, they fully understand that to keep and attract readers, they need to be responsive to their needs; that the content flows in all directions here.
If you owned a blog and someone showed up and started a flame war, what would you do? Would you find a way to end it and move on, or would you log on and get baited day after day?
I've managed online communities for several large corporations, and let me tell you -- blogs are proprietary. They're not communes. It's business. And when someone comes into your place of business and breaks the rules or distracts other users from enjoying your content (or distracts you from providing the best content you can), you don't let them set up camp. Why would you?
M
You know, every time from here on out that Boing Boing criticizes other blogs or private agencies for not being transparent, for removing things in the dead of night, you'll most likely see a comment from me saying, "Gv m fckng brk. Y'v gt t b fckng kddng m, y fckng hypcrts."
What's troubling isn't the "unpublishing" per se, it's that the action seems quite inconsistent with the overall reputation of the site - a reputation built over several years and thousands of posts.
You've every right to edit and revise the content of BoingBoing, but you don't have the right to tell your readers how to interpret those actions (couching the activity in terms like "keeping house" and "cleaning up" doesn't make it better).
In the eyes of many, you've acted hypocritically, damaged your reputation and are splitting hairs in an effort to recover. It's unbecoming.
wow. Everybody thinking way too hard about this.
Well, Rushkoff, what *did* you do with Pete?
I've been trying to leave this whole topic alone but jeeze louise!
Personal qualms are PERSONAL. and (as said before #18) this AIN'T BBC. Leave it alone.
BUT NONE OF THE ABOVE ANSWER THE TEN MILLION POUND ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM:
WHY were the posts deemed removable and hence unpublished?
Why O Why? I do not ask for clarification/justification/any-fication, all I ask is WHY?
I applaud Gracchus.
During the American Civil war there were a group of politicians in the south known as the "Impossibilists".
Their specialty was ignoring the reality of the situation and adhering to a rigid set of principles which were ultimately only posturing.
Boing Boing is one of the most prominent blogs on the internet and as such has to make real world choices as to their content. Most of us are not exposed to that pressure and never will be. Now, like everyone else I'm a little mystified as to why but I'm not about to jump on the train of righteous indignation and toast the editors on the coals of hypocrite hell for unpublishing a few posts of a sex blog.
What makes boing boing different is the fact of editorial control of content (otherwise I'd go to google and type in keywords and see what came up)
and as such shifts in what is deemed appropriate are expected over time.
The tone of most of there posts makes me believe the authors exist in a world where they have zero real world accountability.
For all the deadheads, I present:
the Violet (lee) Blue(s)
The mods decreed it, Violet wrote it.
Violet wrote it down indeed-e
Mods decreed it, then they took it down
They unpublished, didn't just pull it down
Some say six posts, some say one hundred
Some one hundred, yes indeed-e
Some say six posts some say one hundred.
But me and my buddies think unpublishing's fair
I wrote a response I posted 0n the blog, posted it on the blog indeed-e
I wrote a response I posteded on the blog.
You may know by that you've got a friend somewhere
Oh, for crying out loud. If my blog had lots of posts about how wonderful someone was, and then I discovered that they weren't so wonderful, I'd probably do the same thing. I would either remove or update my old posts, and for boingboing to go back and add "Never mind. She sucks" to all the old posts would have been snarky and passive-aggressive in the extreme. The only real remaining solution is to delete the old posts.
Whatever Violet Blue did, I'm sure it warranted some response if the generally chill boingboing crew as a whole took issue with her behavior.
In summary: Whatever.
I certainly wouldn't argue against the statement that BoingBoing has every right to remove the articles they don't want posted. They do have that right. They are perfectly free to remove any article they want to.
It just doesn't seem like a terribly smart move, to me, to remove every article about a person on a vague rationale that they refuse to elaborate. You're public figures, she's a public figure, there's no reason to try to hush it up. All you would need to do is say something like, "We felt that Violet Blue's decision to sue a porn star using the same nom de plume for trademark violation in the use of that name was an insupportable affront to the principles of intellectual property that we espouse, and we no longer wish to have any association whatsoever with her." It's cogent, forthright, and addresses the issue.
Of course, people would still be upset, because that's just how people are, but I don't think it would be quite this bad.
For the folks who are taking issue with the tagline (and concept) of "A Directory Of Wonderful Things" - One, they get to call it what they want - Two, I, for one, happen to think that awful things that have already happened, and therefore can't be undone, are wonderful. I'm as much a fan of stories about penis-shaped gummy lighthouses as I am a fan of stories about 20th century fascists who slaughtered their own people. I read comic books *and* I read the transcripts of Richard Nixon's Oval Office tapes. To borrow a phrase from Hunter Thompson, BoingBoing is all about having "...the right kind of eyes..."
BoingBoingers, I love you to pieces. As was said previously, "Don't take any guff from these swine."
@Jake0748, I can assure you, your memory is quite incorrect. BB or BBtv never published that material.
I have to agree with Satan and emayoh's eloquent views. No one would argue that BoingBoing does not have the right to go back and delete posts; they even have the right to go back and write new posts, alter posts, etc. Formally, even the most prestigious news organization has the right to do so. However they will lose the trust and respect of their readers by their actions.
An analogy, suppose a political blogger spent years opposing issue A, but then wishes to endorse a candidate who favors issue A. If the blogger goes back and deletes all of their previous references to opposing issue A, then endorses the candidate, there might be a bit of legitimate distrust of the blog. This is not to say a blogger does not have the right to do so, of course, it is just a questionable thing to do (blog or no blog).
If Violet Blue did something so reprehensible that you think she should be publicly condemned, do so. If not, ignore it.
This incident makes Boing Boing look pretty bad. Scrubbing the archives because you are pissed at someone is pretty immature.
Just because an action isn't legally censorship doesn't mean it isn't a bad idea. It wouldn't legally be censorship for the New York Times to scrub their archives; it would still be a problem though.
Boing Boing is pretty popular and a certain level of responsibility comes from that popularity.
This is a test, right? To see if your followers follow you or your ideals? I stand with the ideals. "Unpublishing" is my new dirty word. Sorry kids, Old Yeller jus' had to be unpublished. He was in pain.
In all seriousness, unless this is some giant July Fools Day joke or a test or whatever, this is extremely disappointing. No to mention, you probably increased VB's traffic just by making news of this.
#133 - did you even READ the explanation? The posts were not removed for their content. They were removed because Boing Boing did not wish to lend credibility to Violet Blue.
Let's suppose Joe R. Blogger writes a wonderful post. It gets linked to. Later on, it's discovered that that Joe is a major-league douche in matters completely unrelated to the subject matter of the wonderful post.
On the one hand, one can argue that one does not want to support Joe because he's a douche. Linking is a form of support and therefore, the link should be removed.
On the other hand, the post is still wonderful... this blog is about wonderful things, so, regardless of Joe's douchiness, the readers of the blog want to read this stuff. For all that Dante was an asshole, we still care about the wonderful things he wrote...
Why?
Thank Xeni. Oof, early senility setting in. :)
I think much of the s*** storm is over people who have no clue what they are talking about
freedom of speech doesn't go everywhere the way people think it does. If you have a private venue where people are allowed to speak as an open invitation but can be yanked the moment you start spouting unworderfulness stuff that's perfectly ok.
It is partially open with the understanding that you won't be an asshat. It makes sense, and it is pretty standard for free speech interpretations.
it's why hate groups can't start using our tax dollars to throw their beliefs in our face 24/7, they haven't been give the forum to spout these ideas. They can still spend their own resources on it, but they don't have to force us to back them to support their freedom of speech.
and more importantly. what else was the boing boing team supposed to do about this? they feel their association with a former poster might cause problems for them, or it doesn't fit in with what they are trying to build here so they are pulling them down for review. Do people really expect them to post every bit removed. Or would it have been better if they announced to everyone that they were doing this and further damage someones credibility. It wasn't going to be happy either way, but they decided to do it without any fanfare in case they did decided to put them back up, if they wanted them down without damaging the original poster.
so please can the big brother stuff, there is no comparison.
The comments on this one range from abusive and thoughtless to, supportive and equally thoughtless. In the end, what's done is done and in the nature of the internet all this is still out there.
Yes, it could have been handled better initially, but it was handled and now, instead of doing any sort of cover-up and being defensive about it we're getting a dialogue.
That is a fantastic tack for such a large node of the internet media, and I, for one, appreciate the mods and bbgods forthrightness.
As someone who's recently had his first disemvowelling, I've been thinking about this sort of thing lately.
BB is a privately held media property operating in the public square. So is the New York Times. So is, in fact, every media outlet, with the exception of public radio & television. Those who own the outlets can, in point of fact, do whatever they wish with their property. I'm fine with that, and have no real beef with the bias that led to the suppression of my comment because it didn't fit in with the accepted standards of discourse here. Not my house, not my rules.
However, it does seem to me that there is an odor of conflict between the continued and proper assertion of private ownership of the materials published here as a defense against charges of censorship, and certain other positions that are taken here regarding intellectual property.
It seems to me that information does indeed want to be free, except when such freedom conflicts with the interests of the owners, at which point absolute rights of ownership are justly claimed.
I say "odor of conflict" because it's a nebulous area. BB is operated by a collective, not an individual, and the members of that collective obviously have different ideas and passions. Yes, the missing materials are now available in archives elsewhere. But there is no denying that deleting all posts that mention a particular individual is reminiscent of the memory hole, suppression of information, and a host of other practices that are antithetical to the general philosophical slant that is clearly and regularly apparent on BB. When I had my first blog, my only real rule was that no matter how stupid, embarrassing, or wrong something I had posted turned out to be, nothing was ever removed. But: my house, my rules.
What really interests me in all of this is the spectacle of watching BB grow from "personal blog" into "something bigger." That's the essence of the issue. To the owners, this is clearly their property. To the readership, BB has morphed into something of an institution, with accompanying expectations of a certain responsibility or even impartiality.
What I think this exposes is the illusion of impartiality and "matters of record" at all media institutions. Folks jump on Fox for its much vaunted and explicit "Fair and balanced" slogan, but that slogan has been implicitly declared by most, if not all, media outlets for decades now. It's not true of any outlet. Never has been. Whatever impartiality or responsibility such outlets display is offered solely at the discretion of their owners.
So what's the lesson here, if any? I'm not entirely sure, but I think it has something to do with recognizing the foundational importance of the private ownership of creative output, and thus gaining a better understanding of what "free ice cream" really means.
A word on "unpublishing." This isn't a new term, at least for those of us who have been blogging for several years. It simply means to remove the posts from the public archive. To the outside web, that's the same as deleting, but internally it means the content still lives in the database.
I'll grant that using the term in this context does have unfortunate overtones of doublespeak, but there is a real, if subtle distinction between the two terms.
#144- "Boing Boing did not wish to lend credibility to Violet Blue."
And how does that answer the question I posed?
boing boing rocks. do whatever you want. to me, this is a non-issue. it's yr blog, and i'm happy to read whatever is on it. always entertaining and sometimes even enlightening.
@satan: i'd say just the opposite. the fact that the archives are still available indicates that while the current real-time identity of boingboing is something they care to upgrade, the past is the past and who cares. what's all the fuss about ? i assume past work was removed for liability issues. what's the mystery ? anyone concerned about their own hosting liability would do the same.
folks should just get over this. come to boingboing for boingboing and go directly to v blue for v blue.
Here is a way of looking at this, which I haven't seen above.
There seems to be a mostly-consensus that regardless of any other validity, the unpublishing should not have been done silently.
Let's follow this and posit a world wherein this is corrected. Thus, a post would appear one day reading, essentially, "Violet Blue is being unpublished today, all posts concerning her removed. Here is why: ..."
Now, I cannot imagine a positive reaction to this WHATEVER the merits of the unpublishing. This is in fact quite significant, as it cuts away extraneous details and goes to boingboing's behavior and policies. Further, I claim that it is the counterfactual which is most strongly supported by the group consensus, and it is still unpalatable. In fact, for all of the controversy rising now, I can't imagine boingboing would have been in a better position had it done the "right" thing as suggested by consensus.
boingboing may very well be in the "best of all possible worlds" assuming that they were 1) unpublishing VB in the first place; and 2) someone in the public was going to, eventually, find out about it.
"If you owned a blog and someone showed up and started a flame war, what would you do? Would you find a way to end it and move on, or would you log on and get baited day after day?"
There is no evidence to suggest that Violet Blue engaged in a flame war or flame baiting on this blog. She, herself was not even aware of the deletion of the posts about her/her blog until months after it happened.
Since the Boing-Boing posters & moderators refuse to explain their reasons all we can assume is that this is the result of a petty personal disagreement unrelated to the posts, and that they were deleted as a form of juvenile retribution.
Hello. I'm the person who has actually been holding the line in the comment threads for the last day or so. I unpublished a number of waggish comments cleverly suggesting that one third of the visible spectrum had suddenly gone missing. I have neither knowledge of, nor interest in, whatever infractions Ms. Blue may or may not have committed.
Aware that a statement was forthcoming, I did exactly what I do every other day of the year. I unpublished a dozen or so off-topic comments, some hostile, some laced with obscenities, some merely childish. When BoingBoing is mentioned on other websites, we commonly receive comment barrages from furious politicos or foul-mouthed teenagers. As comment storms go, this was a light wind. It was treated the same as any other.
I love this community. Lets give them hell even if it is a personal matter and they are exercising their own rights over their own property and own writing. I am not even being sarcastic. WHY? WHY DID YOU DO IT YOU WORSE THAN NAUGHTY CENSOR-FIENDS!?!?
It is weird when BoingBoing removes information. I had the same reaction about the Cory and Ursula Le Guin kerfuffle (in that case, Cory chose also to not allow comments on his apology to Le Guin).
But that said, this is their blog. This is not a public forum in the classic sense. This is a personal blog written by five people with help from others. (Disclosure: That includes me--I wrote up something Xeni posted about in-flight broadband a few days ago--but also everyone who has ever submitted a long or short item or explanation to BB.)
There's this incredible confusion on the Net about personal space and personal control. BoingBoing is not the government. BB didn't delete Violet Blue's Web site. They didn't incite people to hate her. They didn't even comment on the matter. They had some kind of personal or professional disagreement or made a decision about her for personal or professional reasons and chose not to share it.
They did not: remove her words; deny her income; fire her; attempt to get others to fire her; attempt to get her hosting company to drop her site; attempt to disparage her.
The point missed in nearly all the comments to date is that BB has a very very long tail, no sexual innuendo intended. When they point to something, it's a firehose. Even years later, it can be a garden hose. In this ostensibly rare case, they decided that their bully pulpit of endorsing by referral and aiding traffic by referral no longer met their personal or editorial test.
Why would anyone reasonably argue with that? Is anyone maintaining, for instance, that every single business or personal issue that the editors and moderator and other staff experience should be hashed out in public? Please. I love these guys, but I think they expose just enough of themselves to be interesting, without becoming a reality TV show, Paris Hilton, or, god forbid, Gawker or Valleywag.
A few years ago, a prominent blogger who I will not name due to internal (in my head) policy called me up and screamed at me for an hour. I respected this blogger, and thus let him or her scream at me. My partner of several years at that point, listening in another room, said, "I have never heard you speak to another human being this way." And it's true: no one else could provoke like he or she could.
Part of the screaming was about something I had written on my not-very-visited personal blog. I made the decision to "unpublish" this blogger. I went through and removed the blogger's name from every single post that had mentioned him or her, which wasn't substantial, but it was enough. I deleted a post or two, too. I know that the Wayback Machine may have them, but I chose to no longer be engaged with this person. Since then, I have not interacted with them or written about them, and life is, in fact, better. (They tried to follow me on Twitter for unknown reasons recently, and I blocked them. Not from spite, but from a policy consideration of non-engagement.)
It seems to me that my position with a few hundred daily visitors to my own blog is the same as BB's with ostensibly millions of visitors a day. There's this expectation that BB is a site for record for interesting stuff (it is not), that it is inviolate (it is not), and that the folks who run it must bend to the will of the audience (they do not). Bully for them.
My final disclosure: I am somewhere between friend and acquaintance to most of the BBers, and have benefited many times from the traffic flow that BB brings to things they find of interest. But that doesn't mean I'm a toady. If the circumstances had been different -- if they'd engaged in a campaign against VB, if they had an agenda that this was part of -- I'd certainly be concerned and probably publicly critical.
Oddly, the BoingBoing stuff is something as close to what we need from political leaders: their agendas are not close to the vest; they're on their sleeve, and on their blog.
By now I've read through all the comments up to this writing. Those who don't mind the deletion have a couple of ways of framing the issue so that they are OK with it:
1.
I like BoingBoing so much that I don't care, just keep posting links to more material objects that I might find interesting; or,
2.
They have a right to do it because they own the site; or
3.
It's all on some internet archive somewhere so it can still be found and therefore doesn't matter.
Oh yeah, there was one mandarinish moonling who went to great lengths to explain that it was ok because precedent had already been set and there had been no outcry. Unfortunately, he did not site such precedent, and I, for one, was certainly not aware of any prior, wholesale deletions, and had I been, there certainly would have been an outcry from at least one person.
I see none of these as valid because they do not address the fundamental issue at stake here which has to do with integrity, honour and principle. These are the only things that really matter, and are the only things which, heretofore have made this a great site. It is the foundation upon which everything else rests.
To what standards, if any, does BoingBoing hold itself accountable? Why should we trust you, BoingBoing? When you call others out for doing such things, please explain how this is not hypocrisy of the lowest sort? For the love of god please explain this!
I plead with you one last time to restore your honour and republish the deleted posts. I really want to keep liking you. What is that Google expression? "Don't be corporate" or something to that affect? Please, please, please.
#51. If you're going to read one comment in this entire thread, make it that one.
Is there anything less interesting than a blog war? Perhaps after this we can all start worrying about that birthday card that Cory didn't send that one time, four years ago. Or the plant that was neglected by Xeni. It's dead now, I hear! And I remember the time Teresa didn't do the dishes, I mean, that was bad. She totally promised to! And don't get me started on those other guys.
But first let's all watch paint dry.
@149
"Yes, it could have been handled better initially, but it was handled and now, instead of doing any sort of cover-up and being defensive about it we're getting a dialogue. "
No, we aren't.
BB has, thus far, not explained what they mean when they say "Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her."
This whole uproar, by the way, reminds me of something in a Websnark post a couple of years ago. (Text-find on "Don't try to rewrite history" to get to the relevant bit.)
"Let's suppose Joe R. Blogger writes a wonderful post."
Why? Xeni said: "This person never "posted" items to BB, they were not an author or a guest blogger.
SO, aside from those who misunderstand the actions at hand, what's the big deal here? Someone here wanted to stop giving free publicity to someone else, for some reason.
Is that not their prerogative?
As one of the "unpublished" on this forum at the hands of TNH, for a post where I declared that, for the most part, the boing boing party was over, I can't say I'm surprised at all of this. Well, there's one aspect of the story that does surprise me: how ham-fisted the handling of the whole debacle has been, given the storied media-savviness the BB gang. Really, it's like brand suicide.
Forget Nuked the Fridge, Violet Blue is the new Jumped the Shark.
I am curious as to what boing boing may do in the future when a similar case might present itself. If say, Loren Coleman begins talking about aliens as a previously undiscovered species, and then joins the Raelians, will you guys follow the same modus operandi? Clearly trying to do it "quietly" didn't work in the end (although it appears to have worked for about a year), so will you contact the person in mind and tell them what you are about to do and why? Or is that just going to make the soon-to-be-unpublished party angrier?
"Damned if you do, damned if you don't."
--Randall Patrick MacMurphy (One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
You know, all the arguments about whose blog it is and editorial privilege really don't have a thing to do with the credibility problem.
Yeah, sometimes people don't behave the way you like, and yeah, sometimes you disagree with them so much that you have to distance yourself from them, but to do so in a secretive way, and to do so retroactively - especially when one of the key attributes of your blog is supposedly its openness - well that is going to raise a lot of eyebrows. Why are you acting so surprised by this?
Over on my Livejournal account I've had quite a few friendships dissolve, but not once would I have considered going back through all the old posts and removing anything that mentioned these people. The history of the blog is just that, a history, and changing that history, regardless of what term you choose for it, is going to call your credibility into question.
I just had a thought - This reminds me of Robert Rauschenberg's erasing of a drawing by Willem de Kooning. Art is Art, whether you like it or not. And BoingBoing is Art.
Yes this is a private site and there are owners who have full control about what goes into it, what gets taken out of it, and who gets to write for it. But there is a flipside to this. This private site is sending and transmitting its content to the public. As a member of this viewing public, I have the right to use the means made available by BB to question a decision and ask whether an explanation can be forthcoming about that decision. I am not making a constitutional play for free speech here. I am asking person to bloggers for a clarification that would remove the suspicious of malfeasance on BB's part for what looks to me like a bad move.
What was it about all the past work that lost merit?
How can you tease the public about "something happened" and then simply presume to not explain it? Do you believe that a complete absence of suspicion is the way we should live with each other? I believe a system works because there is a built in amount of distrust and that is why transparency is so helpful in keeping everyone on the same page.
The longer you hide, the worse this is going to get.
To what standards, if any, does BoingBoing hold itself accountable?
FIRST, READ THE POST. Then, follow this link from within the post.
http://www.boingboing.net/policies.html
Why do people with "Moderator" after their name often come across so negatively? It is the moderator's role to be "the cop" but, especially on a site like Boing Boing, can't this cop be one of the cool ones? The sort that can maintain order but still hold your respect? They are a rare breed but they do exist.
I say this because of the tone of things like "...you haven't been a very careful reader. Go back and try again." and "It was a group decision. Why do you think it took so long?" and "I expect she'll survive it." I realize some of you will disagree with me on this but I read that and my mental hackles start to go up (even though I have nothing to do with the commenters they are directed at). It comes across as... ack, what's the best way to put this... chippy, maybe? There's just a touch of "in your face" to it and I don't like it. Boing Boing is "us" to me and I don't want the folks I hang with to be jerks.
Now for the constructive element of my comment. Perhaps saying "It was a group decision, thus the delay" or to express your annoyance "It was a group decision. Have some patience." would have sounded better? Rather than "...you haven't been a very careful reader. Go back and try again." try "You missed our point. Read the previous comments again." I have no clue as to why you all are unhappy with the individual whose articles are at the heart of this issue but rather than the snide "she'll survive it" maybe just leave that out? Since I don't know what the issue is YOU are the one that comes across negatively when you make statements like that.
I'm just sayin'.
@ill lich, yeah I think we probably won't do this again, even if the reasons were as strong and unusual as they were in this case. This was too much of a pain in the ass. We are living and learning.
I was unaware of this until TNH's post this afternoon. I was curious enough to spend 10 minutes Googling the issue. All I found out in the Blogosphere was a lot of people speculating about what transpired between some other people to make them stop relating to one another in a certain way. That was 10 minutes wasted.
I do have a contribution to this comments thread, though:
IDCSESU
The crux of this problem is people seem to be confusing editorial work with fact-based journalism.
BoingBoing removed editorial content. The same facts available in those posts are still available at various places online.
Comparing BoingBoing to the government's concealment of data available nowhere else is not only stupid but silly: nowhere have facts been destroyed or claimed to have never existed.
Editorial positions change. Internet publishing allows those changes to be made in real time rather than having to post "Letter from our President"-esque aplogies that many of you think should have been made here.
Many say that as a personal blog, no such apology is necessary. To wit: if you disagree with editorial content, you may go elswhere to find "wonderful things." But when an editorial decision is made without notice of any kind? Well, then it becomes obvious why people are frustrated, as their ability to make an informed choice about the media they consume has been taken from them.
I do not think a changelog for the website is the answer to this problem. I do not even know if it can be classified as a "problem" per se. What I do know is that this discussion, when properly framed and stripped of attacks and defenses based on the "personal" nature of the issue, is more important than most seem to realize.
#163 Really, it's like brand suicide.
As someone with no dog in the fight, I'll listen to your words very closely and then refer to my comment #83 above: "Don't give an anklebiter the ladder they need to reach your knees."
Welcome to BoingBoing Gossip Central. You never should have explained that there is a secret reason why you "unpublished" her. You should either come clean with it, or "unpublish" this article and never mention it again.
BTW - I've been reading this blog for a while and have NO IDEA who this Violet Blue character is. If you had never brought it up, I still would never have know. I suspect by tomorrow, I will have forgotten.
This private site is sending and transmitting its content to the public
No, this is a website you REQUEST using http.
While I ultimately agree with BB's arguments from ownership, this whole thing stinks:
* The refusal to even write VB's name, referring to her as "this person"...
* Failure to acknowledge the changes without being "forced" to by the shitstorm...
* the use of "unpublishing" to keep from saying anything was deleted or censored...
I know BB doesn't need to meet journalistic standards, but this whole affair really points to the fact that BB is really just a promotion machine... cross us, and you can't participate in the publicity.
Who is Violet Blue and why should I care?
This is not a government site and whoever pays the hosting bills and/or owns the site can remove whatever material they see fit -- without owing anybody an explanation.
One time, before the War/Occupation/Shock and Awe broke out, I saw a commercial for the "Dr. Phil Show" in which the "psychologist" was saying that we should support the war. I went on the Dr. Phil message board and wrote a long rant about how bad Dr. Phil's reasoning was. I actually signed my real name.
That was many years ago but now anyone who Googles me probably gets the impression that I am some kind of Dr. Phil fan as my name comes up in relation to the message board. I am sure this will hurt my career opportunities as well as my street cred.
Oh well. Sometimes we just have to live with the lame things we do online in the public eye.
At least I have proof that I have always been against this stupid War in Iraq.
I am dumbfounded at the outrage and shouts of censorship. Seriously? It's a blog, people. If Violet Blue wants to say something, she has her own blog. And a newspaper column.
On the other hand, I'd expect the BBers of all people to know that removing stuff is an act that gets noticed. I share your distaste for needless drama, but I hope you folks have learned that making content disappear doesn't get you there. And also that being open and forthright is harder than it looks from a distance.
#160 - Sums it up rather nicely !!
BB has, thus far, not explained what they mean when they say "Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her."
Oh BB fer chrissakes!! I never noticed this VB issue until you posted it!! Now, if you have brought it to the fore at least have the friggin b*lls to deal with it!! Show some SPINE.
@pyros: speak for yourself, do not speak for me. from my perspective there has been no breach of integrity. you can disagree but that does not invalidate my perspective. the "three reasons" you cite from "us" are perfectly valid. i understand that you disagree, but i don't read boingboing for violet blue, i read it for boingboing, and you have not been denied access to violet blue, as the waybackmachine and her own blog are uncompromised. what is the big deal ? it's what they want it to be, not what you want it to be. start yr own blog, mate. i'll read it eagerly if it's as entertaining as boingboing. save the drama for obama!
none of the protesters have yet addresses the issue (and probability) that there may have been liability issues.
Reminds me of when ESPN disappeared Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday morning Quarterback column in 2003 for making anti-semitic remarks (involving corporate parent company CEO Michael Eisner) in a blog on another site. Nearly instantly, they not only dropped the column, but completely erased it from the archives. For a short time, some dangling links were left on the site, but they were soon excised. As far as I know, there was no public acknowledgment on espn.com of what had happened - there was no way to discern from their site that TMQ had ever existed. Easterbrook went and wrote his column on NFL.com for a couple of years, and then came back to ESPN, and now his archives are back again, even including those before he had disappeared. What was weird about the whole thing was that you find find the news on lots of other sites, and blogs were discussing the controversy (though they weren't as widespread five whole years ago), but ESPN wouldn't touch it.
It's the lack of transparency, and the attempt at changing history, that's disturbing. ESPN had the "right" to do this on their site as well; that doesn't make it right.
BB jumped the shark.
As several other people have pointed out, "unpublishing" something (because you don't want to pay to host it any more) breaks all the inbound links to that content. Doing so, and defending the behavior, reveals a philosophy of the internet that is sharply at odds with Boing Boing's public values.
Is the internet just a series of documents, owned by the people who host them? Or is it something more? Is there "value added" to be found in the construct as a whole, consisting of the documents and the links that link them together?
To delete (or "unpublish") stuff on a popular site is to break inbound links. It does damage to the broader internet, damage to the part that you don't own. Everybody who loves the web because of its links and connections is going to question that sort of behavior.
I love the web. I imagine and believe that the Boingers love the web. And I'm really really surprised and disappointed to be hearing this "we don't want to pay to host it" justification for breaking bits of it.
Hosting a document on a server (a document one owns and has the power to remove) supports the creation of a larger and more fragile construct of links in connection with that document. One does not own that larger construct, but one has the power to destroy it at any time. It's reasonable, I think, for people who love the internet to refrain from such acts of destruction whenever they can. If they cannot refrain, it's reasonable for other people to wonder why not, and to ask, and to criticize if answers are not forthcoming. Which is what I see happening here.
I really really really did not expect to find Boing Boing breaking inbound links and then pretending that such acts of destruction are of no consequence.
We didn't attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work.
"In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible. Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of the political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. [emph. added] Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements. Such phraseology is needed if one wants to name things without calling up mental pictures of them."
- G. Orwell, Politics and the English Language
Now, granted, we're not dealing with a Stalinist purge here. But on some level, all actions are political: the imposition of the will of the group upon an individual. Your choice of language used to describe the removal of Violet's work and of any comments referring to her seems oddly hypocritical for a site with an editorial bent that rails so strongly against censorship. The way this was handled definitely seems to have left your site with a self-inflicted, and perhaps even deserved black eye.
I think this thread simply proves that what BoingBoing did was irrelavant, and that pyromaniacs with gas cans and tinfoil hats will find a conspiracy anywhere and throw fuel on it.
The only difference is that probably few other places other than BoingBoing would actually put up with this level of complete bullshit from it's own commenters.
So, every post by one of you nutjobs in a tinfoil hat, every post by some pyro trying to find anything at all that will burn, all your comments are doing is proving how insane you really are.
If half of what you said about BoingBoing was true, this thread wouldn't exist at all.
I'm hoping it has something to do with Little Brother, cause seriously, i can't get enough Little Brother.
Reminds me of when ESPN disappeared Gregg Easterbrook's Tuesday morning Quarterback column in 2003 for making anti-semitic remarks (involving corporate parent company CEO Michael Eisner) in a blog on another site.
Except of course it's entirely unlike that. GE was a poster there, or had posted, or was supposed to.
That does not appear to be accurate in the VB instance.
NEXT!
Boingboing, thanks for taking the high road and not spewing the private reason out in defense. Stay classy.
bngbng scks!
... prmptvly dsmvlld t sv y gys th trbl.
Where I lose the plot is that these posts (and comments referencing them?) disappeared a year ago and only now does anyone notice. And in that time, no one thought of a way to communicate that to the teeming millions? Or that it needed to be presented in a favorable way? Does that seem believable?
And who will be embarrassed by the facts of the matter coming out? Violet Blue? One of the BB crew? It looks to me like the only ones to feel embarrassed are the boingers, for doing something that seems counter to their public personae and for failing to defend their decision convincingly. Like it or not, you have an audience and they have some expectations. As noted elsewhere, it will be hard to take you all seriously on issues of transparency after this, trivial as it may seem now. I realize BB is not the anyone's government of public utility and has no legal obligations to be open, but I suspect a lot of BB's readers have expectations beyond the merely legal.
Add me to the list of the perplexed, and also the list of those who feel it's somehow... unseemly.
Yes, BB is a private blog. No it's not the NYT. No they haven't formally subscribed to a code of conduct. Yes, the hyperbole of "first amendment" "1984" and "unpersons" is way over the top.
But still it just seems ... skeevy, distasteful and incongruous for BB to do something like this.
Pedant @#186 - Your choice of language used to describe the removal of Violet's work and of any comments referring to her seems oddly hypocritical for a site with an editorial bent that rails so strongly against censorship.
They removed their own work.
No work of VB was removed as far as I can tell, just some free publicity for VB, the privilege of which they no longer wanted to extend.
@186: we're not dealing with a Stalinist purge here. But
But? Are you fricken kidding me? We're not dealing with a Stalinist purge here but??????
You talk about "choice of language" after a little gem like that?
The "paying to host it" doesn't hold, you are making money on advertisements on all of these articles.
I can understand that you may have 'personal' and 'private' reasons for doing these things, but have you told Violet why you've done this? She still claims to be in the dark.
I think she's a B anyhow.
To the commenters who belabor comparisons of this matter with Nineteen Eighty-Four, or insist that they need need need to know what VB did, may I suggest that you strive to get over yourselves. The former displays a stunning lack of reading comprehension, and the latter is mere gossip-trolling.
Come on, admit it, you are finally victims of your own success !!
Tomorrow is another day. See ya!
#198 for the win.
I have had my mentiond on BB deleted as well. Not over a disagreement or web-(bum)-fight or anything. I think our project just got stale after a while (and we had our own drama). http://www.WiFiMaps.com
Am I upset? No. I miss the linkage, though. I still visit BB and jump into the fray wit ch'all.
What to do? I've experienced similar situations, where providing links to someone is a good idea at first, and then some drama occurs where doing someone a favor (like linkage, article, etc) is no longer a good idea. What to do?
Just my tiny opinion:
I'm glad to finally hear something from BoingBoing's side but now I'm just more confused than ever. And sad. I love BoingBoing. I really like Violet Blue. I respect both. To see these two entities taking a stance that's any less than cooperative really boggles my mind. Why must two sites I really like be against each other? What could Violet have done to get deleted by BoingBoing? I didn't know that anyone could do anything (besides incessant spamming and trolling) to get totally deleted like that. I totally respect BB's right to do what they choose on their own blog and I can understand the urge to keep certain things quiet, but now there are even more questions and the silence seems suspicious. Was the issue that original caused her posts to be taken down really worth all this bad publicity and animosity now? I've previously agreed with all of BoingBoing's policies, but now I'm not so sure. In the past few days I've seen several different blogs comment on this situation and they all make BoingBoing out to be the bad guy. I really don't want to believe that, but without more information what am I to believe? Maybe there are issues you don't want to reveal, but if you have a valid reason and don't reveal it, it appears as if you have no reason at all.
I still love BoingBoing and I'm not trying to be over critical. I'm just really confused and hurt. It's like two good friends are fighting and I can't hang out with both of them because they refuse to be in the same room together. I know that's not literally true, but that's what it feels like. I don't know what's going on, I don't know who to side with, and I really just don't want to have to choose in the first place.
I can't wade through all the comments, but I figured I've been a BB fan since it was in print, so I might as well join the hoards trying to boil the ocean. IBTL!
1. Censorship it's not.
2. Yes, BBfolk can do whatever they want with the site.
3. Just because something is not censorship and because BBfolk can do whatever they want with the site doesn't mean an action should be shielded from criticism.
IMO, unpublishing blog posts, unless the posts presented unwarranted legal exposure, is antithetical to the Spirit of Blog. (If there is such a thing.)
Someone way up there in this thread said that having a link constituted endorsement and removing the link was a way to retract endorsement.
That's akin to the fundies who think that if the government legalizes something, they're endorsing it.
But here's what this reveals, and why the Spirit of Blog is B.S.:
1. Everyone's petty.
2. Everyone's out to create and maintain their reputations, if not make a buck.
3. No one is immune to this.
4. Everyone's shocked when these truths are revealed.
No, BB is not a wonderful happy place of idealism and extended virtual family.
It's run by people promoting themselves and their ideas, and if they believe those ends are best suited by deleting old posts, they'll delete them.
Nothing hating in what I said -- I do think that the reaction here does indicate that maybe the BBfolk should ask -- are we a business that generates traffic and ad revenue? Are we a community forum? How are we different from other nifty-cool sites? How do we want to interact with our readers? Are our readers our customers or our product?
-W-
Anytime anybody says anything and takes it back, or recalls a memory with a bit of fluff, or withholds facts about what they did with their girlfriend last night, I'm gonna call them a First Amendment Hater, a lover of Censorship, and make those all so creative references to BigBrother.
@ Boingboing: Handled poorly, but right.
Has anyone here ever read a book that wasn't written by George Orwell? You know there are other books, right?
Like "Everybody Poops"
Thanks for the update, it's appreciated.
@196: I can understand that you may have 'personal' and 'private' reasons for doing these things, but have you told Violet why you've done this? She still claims to be in the dark.
Do you honestly care? Or are you looking for something flammable to keep this bonfire going?
To say BB "removed their own work" when they "unpublished" Violet Blue's words is the kind of spin job of the highest caliber. I salute BB's resolve in keeping the peasants at bay. After all, a private entity run by very astute individuals owes no explanation to the masses. I admire the jackhammering logo of BB as a true symbol of strength as we continue to make this world wonderful by destroying and erasing away those who refuse to conform with our wonderful goals.
You talk about "choice of language" after a little gem like that?
If you can try to extrapolate from the larger point Orwell was making, then it's clear that using the terms "unpublishing" and "own work" as euphemisms for the censorship that appears to have taken place is troubling for a site that claims to be against censorship. Indeed, that such terms were used would seem to indicate a level of discomfort with the act of deleting material of VB and others who referred to her -- why use doublespeak, if there is nothing wrong with deleting the material in question?
Stay classy, Boing Boing!
Whatever it is she did to piss off the Boing Boing crew, Boing Boing is well within reason to remove references to her on their site. It's not even remotely censorship.
A link from Boing Boing is a big deal. It's a major site and it probably does wonders for your Google PageRank, which means your page is relevant, which in turn drives traffic and money to you.
If she did something so egregious as to piss off BB this badly, there's no reason she should continue to reap the (very real) benefits of links from this site.
That said, I'm really, really curious to know what went down.
I've followed this drama on MF, Fimoculous, Violet Blue's site, etc. In fact, it seems like the kind of story one might find on Boing Boing if the players were different.
I've always loved BB, been a faithful reader since 2000. I find it pretty disappointing that the site's overseerers have chosen the path that you have. I've just come to expect more.
No doubt there are other blogging colleagues that were once part of your world (and archives) but who are now, for some transgression or another, persona non grata. Which is fine, normal, human, etc. But we the readers didn't need to know about it, and life moves on for all concerned.
The way the Violet Blue association ended seems like needless character assassination, while long time readers are left with only an insinuation.
Weak sauce. It all seems very sneaky yet heavy handed, aloof yet exceedingly self righteous, and willfully obtuse in regards to your readers' rightful confusion when looking back at Boing Boing's long tradition of anti-censorship and free information.
I've quietly applauded as your collective work became more popular, more lucrative, more prominent. It feels now that your success has made you out of touch.
@185: AFAIK, the difference between unpublishing and deleting is that, when something is unpublished, inbound links are not broken. Unpublishing leaves the content intact, but merely removes it from public indices; external pages linking to it can still reach it.
Certainly it is within the moral rights of the happy mutants that publish this fine blog to retract things they no longer support.
Certainly it is in good taste to avoid embarrassing someone in parting ways with them.
Alas, these two have just now proven themselves somewhat mutually incompatible. Perhaps it might have been preferable to replace the "unpublished" posts with something like:
"We've unfortunately had some major disagreements lately with sex blogger Violet Blue and decided that it's best if we remove our old posts about her. Out of respect to her, we won't go into details about it."
bb staff have obviously made the decision to not share what happened because they don't want to feed the fire anymore. As they said: they didn't start the fire, but they did make it possible. Were they to go public with their reasons, they would be throwing gasoline on the flames and assume more of the liability for the fire.
Theoretically, this whole blogfight could give someone who has lost a large source of their income (by insulting on some level the person/people who are responsible for diverting traffic to that person's front door) a boost in traffic. Anything that fuels the fire would drive more traffic, so throwing another log on would be counter to the original move of removing all of VB's posts.
The sense of entitlement by some of those commenting is ghastly. It's been my experience that people like this are not creators or risk-takers, just self-involved windbags.
Hi folks,
Just curious whether this is the first time you've tried this trick. Are there are any other former community members you've tried "the silent treatment" on?
Is this generally a reliable way of removing someone from your community? It's very "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" -- one can almost imagine the BoingBoing editorial staff mentally ticking down Ms. Blue's Whuffie.
It looks like this is the first time that this approach has failed, by earning the target _more_ public exposure from prominent places like the LA Times blogs and Romenesko, in what another commenter mentioned is commonly called the "Streisand effect." But is it the first time that you've done this? Or just the first time you've been called out?
Just curious.
Trying to figure out what VB did a year ago that would cause BB to dump their association with her.
In October she sued a porn star using the same name. But that's not a year ago. (That same month she opened a DRM-free sex bookstore, seemingly a BB-pro thing.)
My GReader search finds that VB was last name-dropped on BB on 7-29-07, about N De Samim, a lingerie website. ('course, it ain't in the BB archive now.)
The snowball has started rolling, guys, all the disemvowellment and "unpublishing" in the world won't stop it.
Geeze, all this fuss over some censorship.
1. It is censorship, it's just not [i]Government[/i] censorship.
2. Of course it's BB's right to pull this stuff.
3. Yes, it does make them look hypocritical, and it harms their believability on future articles about censorship as well.
4. Of course we want to know why this happened, by making it all secret and stuff that just piques our curiousity. But we don't have the right to know, and it's probably impolite of BB to say, since it's pretty clearly a personal issue rather than a philosophical difference of opinion.
Sooooo . . .. I will hereby reveal the TRUTH behind why BB did this.
You see, a while back VB and Xeni had a thing going, but VB turned around and slept with Cory behind Xeni's back, which irked several people. Add to that the videotape that Mark and David made, and threatened to send to Teresa, and things started to get really hectic. VB decided she really didn't want to get involved a Quintangle, which doesn't sound much like her, but hey, and asked to have the video deleted. Unfortunately it had already been sent to Teresa, who discovered that the only way to not have the video get posted to teh intarwebz was to delete all references to VB's blog.
There, now does it all make sense?
-abs, thinks that sigs aren't nearly as offensive after hearing about this. So how 'bout letting me si