CBS and its (new?) Matrix trick
Many of our readers will be familiar by now with the common practice of our mainstream media – the Guardian has become notorious for it — of censoring political comments which challenge the US/NATO approved narrative on international affairs. As Off-Guardian has learned from Shawn Irwin, a social media contact who’s shared his screenshots with us, the CBS has come up with a new twist on this.
If your comments on the CBS news site happen to displease the resident censor, a.k.a. moderator, they will be silently removed from the stream of readers’ comments while still appearing on your own computer screen. In other words, your post shows up on your screen, but if someone else tries to view it either as a visitor to the site or as a reader who’s logged in under his or her name, it’s not there. Thus, unless you actually log out and then log in under another name, what you see on your screen will give you the impression that your comment is still there, for all other readers to see and respond to if they so wish. In reality, the politically unwelcome comment will have been removed; a discovery one can make only by chance, as Mr Irwin did a few weeks ago. Nor is his experience unique. Jesse Marioneaux has also shared with us screenshots of his comments appearing on his screen, yet invisible to other readers of the same thread.
How this is done, what the technical means used may be, whether other news outlets are also using this method of “perception management” I leave to others to speculate upon. But, here’s what it looks like in practice.
The first screenshot below shows Mr Irwin’s post (under the moniker LucifersShadow) sandwiched between a post by Catapologisttx and one by Olyboy. The text of the vanishing post reads:
“Building walls won’t change that.” But dropping bombs will? This raving &*^% also said that – I’ve Restored the US as the ‘Most Respected Country in the World – I am not sure what drugs he has been doing lately, but nations all over hate the USA because of its repressive, imperialistic policies and preference of using violence, that is bombing, drones, etc, rather than diplomacy. Obama: “We have to twist arms when countries don’t do what we need them to.” Arrogance. . . Obama, along with George Bush, and Hillary Clinton are both war criminals. You do not need to choose between twiddle-dee-dee and twiddle-dee-dumn.
Do a search on you tube for Green Party debate and Libertarian Party debate, and you will find some decent candidates for once.
Here’s what it looks like when Irwin views the page, logged in under his alias.
If you go to the relevant CBS page and search for that comment, what you will see is this:
Note how the censored comment has completely vanished, with not trace of it, no alert that it’s been deleted, while the site lets us see the record of two deleted comments which had, to all appearances, at some point taken the place of the disappeared one.
To make sure that what had happened was not merely a glitch or a fluke, Irwin then posted the same comment as Archeus-Lore, a second alias he uses, and with the same result. In both cases, what a CBS moderator took umbrage at was the description of US policies as repressive and imperialistic, the observation that the US is the most hated country in the world, and his characterization of Obama, George Bush, and Hillary Clinton as war criminals.
As Jesse Marioneaux’s screenshots of his vanishing comment show, however, our MSM moderators seem to have a very broad set of criteria on what is to be allowed and what censored from the readers’ comments. In this case, merely quipping “This country’s looking like a joke”, was deemed worthy a Matrix-effect bit of censorship. The first screenshot below shows the page as it appears when Mr Marioneaux accesses it, logged in under his name.
Here is what the same page looks like when you or I access it:
So, if you happen to look for a comment you made on one of American (or British?) news sites and can’t find it because you’ve logged out (but do see it when you log in), it’s neither your eyes nor your mind that are playing tricks on you. It’s the new censorship state and its collaborator “free press” using their latest techno-wizzardry to keep the public docile and unaware of the degree of control they now exercise over our over freedom of speech.
The idea is, clearly, to manage our perceptions, regulate which opinions are allowed to circulate in the public sphere and which are not, and to conceal the extent of the censorship-culture that continues to erode whatever’s left of democracy in the West.
We are making this available for public scrutiny in the hope that organizations which advocate and protect the freedom of speech, such as the American Civil Liberties Union in the USA, for instance, will look into this and other censorship and perception-management techniques used by the corporate media, investigate whether they might be acting in co-ordination with government agencies, and determine if these practices are constitutional and at all compatible with the requirements of democracy.
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Not quite of the same stature as CBS, but RawStory will routinely censor non-lberal commenters, with no reason given, even when the comments are in line with the website’s policies. They will also allow personal attacks on commenters who do not toe the liberal line, but if the attacked commenter responds in kind, he/she will be banned. Such policies act to denigrate the website. I view it as a mark of failure.
Deceit is pervasive and able to mimic or adopt the forms of what seems acceptable or desirable or true to you. The idea of the deceiver is not new but has been known of an warned vigilance against since our first split into mask and deceit. Note that the deceiver can also masquerade as the protector or warning voice against deceit. It should become immediately clear that you cannot trust your own thoughts – unless you have discerned and found them as representative and aligned with the true of you. Deceits provoke reaction that does not allow time to pause and listen or feel within and so they are triggers that operate through the weaknesses through which you are most vulnerable – hence deceit works to nurture and magnify your weaknesses by presenting them as strengths so that hate can seem self righteous and fear can seem wise. I cant… Read more »
Reblogged this on Eurasia News Online.
Wow, that’s quite a stinker of a tactic!
WSWS.org, the ‘world socialist website’ is another news website which is quite heavy-handed in their censorship of comments below articles. I don’t think they use the ‘only you see your comment but nobody else’ app described in this article, but nonetheless it reflects poorly on them that they won’t allow comments which question or critique some point the author was making–especially when politely worded and within their own comment guidelines. With WSWS.org, my impression is that they carefully edit and vet comments below articles to promote their agenda, to make them look good, to attract the ‘right’ kind of people to their website. Comments which don’t serve this agenda or question it will promptly be deleted. It’s really clever marketing. The comments section is no longer just for discussion and banter. It has been transformed into a marketing tool. This is really bad because healthy discussion and debate is shut… Read more »
Hmmm, that would explain a couple of experiences I’ve had.
I believe it was Winston Churchill who once said “The price of freedom is eternal vigilance”. There is a cyber war taking place on the internet or world wide web. I believe that Netantyahu’s office in Tel Aviv has a permanent detachment of young, technologically-trained young people who are allocated to act on behalf of the zionist state as part of their compulsory military service by constantly trolling around the internet seeking-out non- and anti-zionist views – to rebut them. They also have paid trolls located around the world who carry out similar functions. Among other “tricks”, they are involved in hasbara or propaganda work, which entails them roaming the internet and finding views with which the zionist state disagrees, then rebutting those views and possibly diverting them when they find they cannot get the non- and anti-zionist posters, commentators or bloggers to back down. Several years ago, while using… Read more »
The vigilance of ego-centricity or exclusive identification in self concept is ITS survival as an ongoing sense of continuity and is a deeply embedded and largely automatic or subconscious sensing for threat, reinforcement, alliance or ammunition. The vigilance AGAINST being triggered and replaced by such conditioned reaction is that of an honesty of true presence in which the dissonance of misalignment is discerned as a sense of conflict. The great temptation that conflicted self meets is that of BLAME. Blame is associated with the attempt to deny or get rid of the unwanted, hated or feared self-conflict. The willingness to recognize and own what is truly ours is also the automatic release of what we are not. Fear of pain and loss means a tendency to choose the ‘devil we know’ which is an attempt to (persist in) limiting and control ling outcomes, narratives and perception. If those sharing an… Read more »
Reblogged this on TheFlippinTruth.
CBC censorship must be seen to believed, once they deleted a comment I made where I said that Bernie Sanders was jewish, when I was only correcting someone who thought he was an evangelical.
Makes you wonder how many other ‘Controlled’ mainstream media sites also apply this method of ‘Filtering’….
HuffPost does the same thing. If you want your comment to appear it is best to reply to someone else’s.
Salon also pulls this creepy trick and has been doing it to readers for more than three years now. Here’s something I wrote about it, on another site, in 2014. Idea suppression comes in many forms. While I recognize the difference between the Constitutional Right to Freedom of Speech and the right of blog sites to control their content, it is fair to state that some ostensibly “liberal” blog sites are arbitrarily applying these controls to suppress ideas that do not comport with their worldview. One of the worst of these is Salon.com and the method they use is both pernicious and cynical. The first time Salon suppressed my comments happened without my knowledge and continued for nearly a month. Although I was posting comments to numerous articles, over time I began to notice that none of my comments were receiving responses, positive or negative, which was extremely unusual. Eventually,… Read more »
Not a new trick at all, then. Thank you for letting us know.
I think it is done through the software that they use for their comments. They replaced their original software with a new product, whose name now escapes my memory. It took them almost a year to get it working, but when they did figure it out, people began disappearing. At the time, I remember that there were several other American “progressive” sites that were switching to this software, but I don’t know if they used it in the same way as Salon.
I’d be interested to know what CBS uses and if it’s the same as Salon’s. I’ll try to go back into my archives and find out what Salon was using, since I had complained out it during it’s initial implementation.
Vaska,
I checked my archive. Salon was using software called “Livefyre”. I’m guessing that any site that uses this software might be able to selectively censor people without them realizing it as happened to me on Salon and Shawn Irwin on CBS.
Whether pending comments will be shown to their authors is a feature of the forum software in use. Valid use cases include reducing people repeating themselves because they think their post was lost, or to reduce feedback to prolific vandals such as sliders and spammers (or, as we see, political dissidents). LiveFyre’s house interface may well provide a perma-mute button, in the spirit of the Bobs in Office Space “fixing the glitch”. Implementation of such a feature would take a staff day, at most.
For what it’s worth, I don’t see that likes are moderated.
Interesting that you should think removing (and without trace) comments that voice political dissent a valid use of a LiveFyre feature.
Livefyre include multiple levels of moderation management. Their paid for Comments (or Studio) software allows moderation to flag comments as ‘Disagree’ amongst other flags. Even their free WordPress comment plugin has similar features. From their website:
Multiple Moderation roles: Delegate moderation responsibilities among Site Owners, Admins, Moderators, and
Whitelists & Banned Users: Authors and trusted community members can bypass pre-moderation with Whitelists, while trolls are kept at bay with Ban lists and their comments are Bozo’ed so that they are only visible to the comment author and not your community.
Profanity Lists: Customize the settings for filtering comments for your community.
User Activity: See which community members are your top commenters and who you should reach out to invite them back to your site.
Moderation & Conversation Reports: Generate reports that give an overview of your moderation practices and see which posts are sparking the most conversations.
They’re almost open about it, then; I’m referring to the Whitelists and Banned Users section in your post. At first sight, that entry looks fairly innocuous. If you think about it for more than 3 seconds, though (I may be slow, and some might start figuring it out instantly), two questions and one conclusion arise: 1 Isn’t the Whitelists function conveniently handy for letting government-paid agents through without moderating their comments? [We do know that our governments operate cyber-psy-ops, and, to its credit, The Guardian itself had an article on this three years ago). 2 Isn’t the supposed anti-troll function mightily handy for censoring politically inconvenient comments, such as the ones by Irwin and Marioneaux? It’s obvious that neither of them is a troll; nor a banned commenter. Given the fact that a banned user is someone who by definition cannot post any comments, the “Banned Users” function in LiveFyre… Read more »
I agree with what you say. Note that the ‘trolls’ don’t necessarily know they’ve been banned – they can see their own comments so assume everyone can.
Also note the profanity list (a very common function on comment sites). These lists can easily be expanded to include non-profanities, such as hasbara or Putin or South Ossieta.
The flagging is interesting, too. Users and posts can be flagged – for moderation or deletion. Interestingly, your management reports will indicate how effective you are in doing this.
And this is just the FREE version. I’m sure the paid-for version has much more extensive functionality.
LIveFyre’s logical extension
commodification or monetization of your comments!
Adobe buys Livefyre to turn your awful Internet comments into money
link on C|net