The Huffington Post started its life out with an extreme focus on comment moderation. They invested in technology from Adaptive Semantics, a comment-killing AI bot system lovingly named “JuLia”. In addition, they hired 40-50 full time moderators. Then they allowed pundits and bloggers to moderate comments. On top of that, they ‘deputized’ almost anyone that wanted to be a “community moderator”. By now they had such a stifling moderating system, that the biggest complaint HP community members had, centered around the crazy, inexplicable reasons their comments were being deleted. The moderation was so bad, people were putting out blogs about how bad it was. HP responded by upping their game. They added a “FLAG” button, which allowed you to stick the offensive comment directly into the moderators eyes. You’d think this merry-go-round of moderation would finally come full stop when a “MUTE” button was added. If you read something you didn’t like, this feature gave power to everyone to make someone’s comments “sleep with the fishes”.

After all this, The Huffington Post now had the most censored, moderated discussion community of any news blog this side of red China. But Arianna still was not pleased. (So the story goes…). So even though there were a dozen things they could have done to put the power of deleting or hiding offensive comments in the hands of the community, they used the imagined problem of “trolls” as a pre-text to invade the privacy of their members lives. But at the same time, they really did impose heretofore-never-seen censorship on a Western news blog. Whereas the moderation on Huffington was suffocating before, now it was positively fatal. About 25% of your posts could be killed instantly by “JuLia”, the auto-delete bot, if it contained a flagged word. Unfortunately, some of those words were in the article you were responding to. Other “JuLia” flagged words you might have found in the ‘Journal of American Sciences’. And suddenly, just about every article on the news site became an article of a “potentially sensitive nature”. Whether the article was about farting puppy dogs, or the most calorific mac and cheese recipes on the planet, it was now of a “potentially sensitive nature”. Another way of saying “Hang on, chump. We’re takin’ our sweet time with this, now. So if you’re eager to find out if your comment got wiped out or not, expect that to take a long time”.

Arianna Huffington said to an audience in Boston:

‘Freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they’re saying and not hiding behind anonymity,’ Huffington said.”

And people actually thought she meant it. But in fact, after Dec. 10, when everyone had to post under their real names and verify their identities, members were shocked to see an escalation of heavy-handed moderation tactics. Many reported comment-kill rates of 60-90% (mine were closer to 90). Ironically, you actually had more “freedom of expression” before the demand for cell phone numbers and Facebook accounts, then you did afterward on Huffington Post. After Dec. 10, no one could make out what the new guidelines were for commenting. Their comments certainly did not violate the published guidelines, nor any common understanding of civil behaviour. The comment kills were random, arbitrary, and sometimes appeared to be targeting certain individuals.

This page is about those comments. I will start by demonstrating what is going on behind the scenes of Huffington Post, by publishing a few examples of my own comments. All of the following were deleted by the team of 50 comment nazis (aka “modzis“). None violated HP rules and guidelines. Click on them to enlarge. Feel free to post your own here, if you have kept copies of them!

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