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Coup: STLIMC taken over by neoliberal censors |
Current rating: 0 |
by STL Copwatcher
(No verified email address) |
06 Jul 2005
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The new St. Louis Indymedia site seems to have been overtaken in a coup by neoliberals who censor anything with which they disagree. |
The old St. Louis Indymedia site was good in that its editorial policy was not to censor anything. For months in early 2005, stlimc was down as they said they were converting to a new format. Some posters posted here on the Urbana-Champaign site white stlimc was down.
When the new format finally got up, it was a copy of a West Coast IMC (San Francisco?) In addition to looking like a Frisco IMC, it also got the ugly habit of censorship. The stlimc staff, possibly named "Betsey", hides anything that gets her knickers in a twist.
A long thread about CAPCR (Coalition against Police Crimes) got hidden. When an impostor posted a pro-police neocon misinformation article that doubled as an advertisement for the Backstoppers (and the imposter posted _2_ copies of the spam!), stlimc left in both pro-police articles. However, I made a comment to each article. In one, I pointed out that the author was using my user name. Within a few minutes, each of my comments got hidden. About a month ago, an stlimc staffer angrily attacked someone who disagreed with her about police cameras. Notice they censored anti-police posts but left in two duplicate posts by a pro-police neocon!
In addition to police, other topics that get hidden are animal rights and animal abuse. Someone posted about abuse of dogs and cats in Korea. That article got hidden. Some wacko posted an article praising PETA for murdering dozens of dogs in Virginia. When someone refuted the pro-PETA claims in a comment, the comment got hidden.
If you contribute to stlimc, create your post in a text editor, then save to a hard drive because stlimc censors might remove your post and you might want to post it elsewhere such as KC if it's pertinent to Missouri as a whole.
R.I.P. STLIMC
Ideally Betsey and her fellow neocons who infiltrated stlimc will be thrown out, and the site can be run by sane, non-dictators.
In the meantime, I suggest that IMCs remove their links to stlimc until sanity is restored at that site and it returns to its status as a true IMC site. |
This work is in the public domain |
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Not necessarily a coup |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Jul 2005
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Neither of the San Francisco IMC sites -- make that, neither the San Francisco site nor the historical asterisk IMC -- uses dada IMC, as STL and UC-IMC do.
Dada software includes the option to accumulate reader rankings, and to hide articles ranked below a certain threshhold. This seems to be what's happened to your post. It doesn't mean there's been an editorial intervention.
@%< |
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As We Well Know Here |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Jul 2005
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If you can provide links to the hidden posts, I'd be glad to take a look and give you an opinion. However, if STL IMC is using the Dada rating system, that may be where your problem is.
If your stuff was rated down and put out of view, I would suspect someone other than the STL IMC editors. We turned the system off here after the local neocon troll started abusing it to rate up his trolling comments and rate down legitimate posts.
STL IMC may want to re-evaluate using the rating system, if that is what is happneing, but that is up to them. I'd suggest dropping a note to them if you haven't tried that yet.
It always helps to not start off by accusing people of censorship, when the problem may be a simple misunderstanding -- your complaint will sound more credible if you describe the problem and ask for their help.
You've said nothing about attempting to communicate with them directly though, other than leaving messages on the website itself. Given the abuse that IMCs suffer at times, IMC editors generally take an email much more seriously than some anonymous complaint posted at STL IMC or other IMCs.
You mentioned someone stealing your screen name. Become a registered user and that will solve that problem, otherwise there's not a lot that can be done about that. Welcome to the web. |
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Re: Coup: STLIMC taken over by neoliberal censors |
by STL copwatcher
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Jul 2005
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Yes, the neocons are apparently doing the rating system strategy. The person who posed as my screen name made two copies of his post, and apparently gave himself a +3 for each of his two posts.
My post got a -1, and I admit it could be considered emotional and crappy, so the person who gave it a -1 could have been a regular user, also my post was quite radical. However, the neocon posted with my user name shortly after my post disappeared, so I believe it's likely he voted it the -1.
I made a comment to each of the neocon's posts, explaining that if STLIMC deleted my comments, whey didn't they delete one of the duplicate posts? I also pointed out the flaw in hiding posts with a negative rating.
Since making the original post, I've noticed that comments themselves can have ratings. If the neocon was the one who hid my comments through a negative rating, I'll definitely post a retraction about STLIMC staff here and in the one other IMC where I complained about "censorship". Because various IMCs are trigger-happy on censoring (NY, Boston, etc), and because staffers in STL had snapped at some posters, I figured censorship.
As to registering, does that require personal info that Feds might seize if they raid a site? |
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aside |
by gehrig
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Jul 2005
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I'm not convinced, based on a quick look through their hidden responses, that either NYC nor Boston are "trigger-happy" when it comes to editorial policy.
@%< |
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Here's the Link to Register |
by ML
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
06 Jul 2005
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Here's the link to register as a user at STL IMC:
http://www.stlimc.org/mod/accounts/index.php?function=new
Most of the info is optional and it all can be shaped by you according to your own security/paranoia requirements. It doesn't look too threatening, IMHO. |
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by insipid plumber
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
10 Jul 2005
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Re: Coup: STLIMC taken over by neoliberal censors |
by benjamin w
(No verified email address) |
Current rating: 0
13 Mar 2006
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i realize this thread is stale, but might as well follow up.
the stlimc editors did have a lot of difficulties with the transistion from the old (and extraordinarily buggy) active website to (marginally less buggy) dadaimc.
one problem in particular was that dadaimc would, by default after installation, hide newswire posts and comments with rating -1. i.e. just one person rating down a newswire post or comment would make it invisible. it took a while for stlimc editors to discover this was going on, but they eventually disabled the auto-hiding function and un-hid all posts that were automatically hidden. so many of the posts you probably thought were hidden by intention, were not. ignorance of the dadaimc software, and not neo-liberalism.
that said, a recent spate of abuse on the stlimc newswire forum has prompted the editors to adopting a new posting policy, which does allow the editors to hide posts which they believe are disruptive to open discussion.
http://www.stlimc.org/newswire/display/1313/index.php
folks are welcome to browse thru the new posting policy and add their own comments. |
