San Francisco Chronicle deceives online readers with sneaky and invisible comment deletion


Hiding the fact that your comment has been deleted

Here's one that is just incredibly sneaky. Emphasis in original.

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

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

Why would SFGate do such a thing? Because ever since public input was first allowed at SFGate, many commenters who had their comments deleted would come back onto the comment thread and point out that they had been silenced for ideological reasons -- i.e. they weren't sufficiently "progressive" -- or because they had pointed out ethical lapses at SFGate and the Chronicle. Or any number of other reasons that the Chronicle did not want known. So, to pacify these problematic commenters, the SFGate moderators came up with a very clever and underhanded coding trick to prevent deleted commenters from ever finding out that they had been silenced.

Stars above, it's like I have been saying for years. Outside of a government context, it's the progressives who want to quash dissent.

I wish I was wrong. Gods, I can't tell you how much I wish I was wrong. But it happens again and again and again. It's everything from global warming to the "evils of the free market" to public schools.

Why are modern liberals so afraid of debate?

— NeoWayland

Posted: Mon - November 26, 2007 at 07:29 AM  Tag


 ◊  ◊   ◊  ◊ 

Random selections from NeoWayland's library



Pagan Vigil "Because LIBERTY demands more than just black or white"
© 2005 - 2009 All Rights Reserved