A recent blog post seems to be sniffing around the difficulty that is the ongoing development of internet communities such as this one.  Personalities clash.  Typical societal constraints of having to actually look at the object of your wrath in the eye as you utter whatever it is that comes out of your mouth do not apply as you sit in your basement listening to the hum of the fluorescent lights as you pound at the keyboard, amusing yourself at the pithiness of your snotty rejoinder.

 So we become ruder.

 As news sources blogs have imbued a sense of lawlessness to “journalism.”  Anything goes.  Any opinion or alleged story can be told and then sent out into the ether where, with a few choice Diggs and Reddits, it becomes gospel to the tens of thousands of viewers who stumble upon it.

 Newspapers had editors who checked the work to make sure it was accurate before it went out the door.  Some argue this squashed stories.  In fact it squashed libel cases.  

 So our news sources have become less professional.

 The Drudge Report gained notoriety for this.  One can argue Matt was the first powerful blogger out there.  Now there’s literally thousands, and they are not all from the right, either, as anyone who has read the musings of that brilliant, self described GayNewYawkJoowishLawyah, Glenn Greenwald can attest.

So telling someone to leave an internet community or taking down the writings of someone on an internet community would not be censorship at all, it would be a private enterprise seeking to coerce its patrons to behave in a manner that coincides with their desired marketing image. 

 But if an internet community does that, the knee jerk response happens to be to decry the censorship and injustice of it all. 

 Perhaps I have a simplistic view, but for me there has to be government involvement for there to be censorship.  OpenSalon taking down a post or comment would not be censorship.  It might piss a lot of people off for it being biased and a lot of lemmings would race to the cliff bleating about the first amendment and censorship, but they would be wrong.  Government drives censorship.  Not private enterprise.

 Enter a restaurant, get loud, and go off on a little Tourette’s spree yelling cunt or nigger or worse (is there worse?) at the top of your lungs and see how long it takes for you to be thrown out on your rear.  Well, hanging around OpenSalon or an equivalent doing the same thing merits the same response by the owners: Leave the premises.  Private enterprises can do that for cause, Equal Protection under the 14^th amendment not withstanding.

 And that is not censorship.  It does not take huge amounts of courage to bitch and moan about the way in which the OS managers do things.  It gets put up daily as various folks decry the Editor’s Pick selection process or the quality of some of the ones selected or omitted.  There definitely is a “Mom Likes You Best” channel around here.

 Doing that does not put your life in jeopardy of that of your family members.  Doing that does not put you in jail.  It really does not take a lot of courage to come up with that.  All it takes is an emotional reaction and an inability to sit with whatever it was that ticked you off before applying fingers to keyboard.

 Compare and contrast that to one of my heroes, the college student in Tiananmen Square, who stood before the tanks on June 5, 1989 to stop them.

 That took balls. 

Huge.  Balls.

 And understand what the government did after the fact as written up by that shakiest of sources, Wikipedia, from whence the above picture was downloaded:

 Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events in the PRC press. Members of the Party who had publicly sympathized with the protesters were purged, with several high-ranking members placed under house arrest, such as General Secretary Zhao Ziyang. The violent suppression of the Tiananmen Square protest caused widespread international condemnation of the PRC government.[2]

 None of the nonsense that gets people wrapped around the axle on this joint will result in this kind of true censorship.

So the real issue becomes one of what kind of private establishment is desired.  Management typically does not want to have to get into the middle of personality disputes about who did what to whom.  Hence any kind of content monitoring opens up a Pandora’s Box of grievances and flouncings not unlike the white noise that is the whine fest over front cover content.

 I am unaware of provocative content being expunged.  I am unaware of people banned from participation.  All either of those actions will do is increase exponentially complaints to management about the unfairness of it all.

 And it is not unfair.  No one is threatening to crush us with tanks should we err from their playbook.

 We have the right to say pretty much whatever we want in this country with a tip of the hat to the “fire in a crowded theatre” concept.  Similarly we have the right to associate  or not associate with people expressing whatever thought it is they happen to hold.  Our rejecting collectively certain thoughts within the confines of a privately owned entity does not constitute censorship.  

 It’s the simple concept of freedom of assembly.  Truly dangerous and insidious censorship requires government action.  

 So bitch and moan about the tenor and tone of the place.  Lament the content.  Rip the editors for playing favorites or for being too liberal or too conservative.  But for the love of God, remember you are free to leave, just as they are free to ask you to leave, and neither you nor the editors have to fear being jailed by the government for undertaking the actions.