unraveled

TechCrunch is censoring dissenting comments

Yesterday I noticed a recent post from TechCrunch, OLPC Brings Porn to the Third World. The story was a report on the One Laptop Per Child project, and how a lack of any filtering mechanism was allowing children to freely download porn. TechCrunch could have made a critical review of the incident and discussed the background of the OLPC project, the pervasiveness of porn on the internet or the implications of using filtering to block porn sites. Instead, they decided to poke fun at the story right from the start:

The One Laptop Per Child initiative has reached new heights by delivering internet porn to third world children.

The ridicule continued a paragraph later:

It’s heart warming to know that the efforts of the well meaning folks behind the OLPC project are delivering real results on the ground; providing the same opportunities for teenage boys to access internet porn no matter how impoverished they are or where they live.

My immediate thought was how did Michael Arrington ever let this story get published? Then I started reading the comments and was relieved to find someone else had the same perspective. I responded in a similar vein:

I agree with the Digital Doctor that this is one of TechCrunch’s all time lows. Since TechCrunch is one of the most read blogs on forward thinking web applications, I would expect the writers to be more forward thinking themselves instead of writing such a sleazy tabloid style story about a real issue.

Hasn’t freedom of press taught us anything? Filtering (read: censorship) is always the easy answer. The real answer to these problems will always be education.

Thanks to coComment, I was alerted today of new comments to the post, so I was curious to see what others had to say since my response. My comment had been deleted (read: censored), which I found not only extremely disappointing but unbelievably ironic. (You can see my comment in its original context on coComment.) I may have at least understood their reasoning for deleting the comment if they had a comment policy describing which comments can be edited or deleted, but TechCrunch has no such policy.

Needless to say, I’ve lost a huge amount of respect for TechCrunch since they’ve ran this story and deleted my dissenting comment. The web is way too big to allow myself be exposed to this low level of journalism and seemingly random discrimination. I’ll be unsubscribing from their feed immediately. If you value quality journalism and freedom of opinion then you might want to do the same. Your comment might be next to go.

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