In an article on the murder of Satender Singh at Lake Natoma, the Bee allowed someone to make this comment:
Send both groups home.
Fiji Islanders? Russians? The US doesn't need any more ethnic groups moving here. This nation has become a garbage dump for the rest of the world and the days of needing or wanting more immigrants is long gone.
5 out of 15 people rated this comment helpful. the bee comments board is serving as a haven for racists to air their views in a legitimizing (if that's a word) forum. This isn't about free speech, this asshole is free to write these things but as I've said a bunch of times before, the Bee DOES MODERATE these comments, and does not allow obscenity or off-topic comments (no matter how innocuous). Someone approved this comment, and also this one from this same guy:
Dozens flee scene of major cockfighting raid
DNWyatt at 4:11 PM PST Thursday, July 5, 2007 wrote:
DNWyatt
Legal or illegal, this is part of the Hispanic culture they are so proud of. Isn't diversity great? This country is now like a jammed sewer line that needs to be flushed out and emptied right back to Mexico. Let the organizers and fans of cockfights take knives and fight each other and show that famous machismo bravery. The survivors could then graduate to become gang leaders
I decided to conduct an experiment. I have posted a few comments on this article. to try to see what the bee's criteria are (is?). i of course shudder to write anything racist, but i got as close as i could get. i think probably none will get in because i submitted them all under the same name, but i encourage you to submit some and tell me what they were. here are mine:
What a great article.
Thanks for this useful story! The Bee is the best fucking paper around!
nice picture
man, that guy in the picture is sexy. i'd really like to show him a thing or two about a thing or two, if you get my drift.
This article is great except for the fact that it was written by someone with a foreign sounding name. That makes me feel angry and fearful.
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17 comments:
I found the last one really helpful.
ps. I got a kick out of your mention of me in the Midtown Monthly. Still never seen a sunrise...
What I really wish right now is that I had a cool nickname to sign with. I never get to have cool nicknames. I've been working on using my initials lately, since they spell a word.
jam.
i always assumed that there was no moderation whatsoever on the bee's website, since most of the comments are pretty moronic.
I've disagreed with you before about whether the Bee should remove these ugly comments. I'd let them stand myself. They are good evidence to have around when some smug white person says racism is in the past.
Moreover, I think you are getting too exercised about them. This is exactly the response this joker wants you to have.
Nevertheless, I like your experiment. The Bee isn't very open about its criteria for filtering.
omg! omg! they printed only the comment about the foreign sounding name! it's as if the bee's policy is to ONLY print racist material. fyi, they have printed their actual policy above the comments now, but they're not adhering to it, imo, judge for yourself:
Your comment will be posted after it is cleared by sacbee.com. A comment must not contain more than 1000 characters. A comment cannot contain potentially libelous language, foul words, hate words, personal attacks or web links, among other things. A comment that includes any of these will be trashed. Do not include your name or other personally identifiable information. We reserve the right to withhold any comment from publication. See our terms of use.
jam-you and gballs should send some updates from the land of blarney.
and dingle peninsula, of course
I didn't see the fine print policy until you pointed it out. I don't leave sacbee comments often.
Very interesting results of your experiment.
Are you sure the filtering isn't computerized, though?
They call it a moderator but I guess the could mean modbot3000. I'll test that, assuming that the modbot3000 excluded the first one because it had the word fuck and the second one because it had the word sexy?
the plot thickens, they've now deleted my pseudo-racist comment! why would they go to the trouble to delete that and yet the really hateful one remain up forever?!?!
I just tried to post this one:
greetings, comment-moderator person. I'm am perplexed about why you deleted my silly, pseudo-racist test comment and yet you clear overtly racist comments for publishing over and over. if my comment was really racist rather than psuedo-racist I assume it would be cleared.
I just tried another one on an article about holiday travel tips.
Thank you for this wonderful article about holiday travel. My sister Maude sent it to me. She clipped it out and sent it to me via snail mail. That's what they call it now, can you imagine that? Back in my day they just called it mail. This will come in handy because for Thanksgiving I will be flying to visit Maude in Boca Raton. You should see Maude! She is as tan as a roasted turkey. So I says to Maude I says, "If you don't watch out with the tanning, you are going to get cancer like our dear Uncle Peanut passed away from, G-d forbid!"
this is a little off topic but when i googled sac wiki i found this:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0a/Flag_of_Sacramento_CA.svg
did anyone else know that this is our city flag?
ok, so they're not posting the maude comment. obviously, they can tell that's a hoax, but we can narrow down what they pick and choose about, i guess: openly racist ranting, yes, any type of silly comment or joke, no
maybe the bee bitches that stalk your blog make sure to have all your comments deleted?
ok, so they never posted that maude comment. So, to sum up, contrary to their written policy they WILL post "hate words" such as calling certain ethnic groups "human garbage" but they will not publish comments that are mildly sexual (calling someone "sexy") or just intended to be funny. so they actually police their comments quite closely and they are totally ok with racist comments. they are completely giving their stamp of approval to racist comments and they need to own up to that and not pretend they have a policy against it. in short: once again it is proven the bee fucking sucks!
To play devil's advocate, i think the Bee's caution against 'Hate words' is phrased quite carefully to be different than 'hate speech'.
Hate words are the classic single-word terms we all know for african american people, gay people, mexican people, arabs, and pretty much all other minority folks. 'Hate speech' is language that denigrates those same folks without necessarily using any 'inappropriate' terminology.
So, the Bee approves racist and other hate speech in the comments, but does not allow hateful terminology.
An interesting distinction they're making. I suppose that the concept is that hate words are simply insulting but that 'hate speech' could, in theory, include reasoned opinion. the actual posted comments don't really bear out the theory since it seems like only borderline retards (oops, hate word!) post in the comments.
omf
Ooohh... this article is a good one.
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