Censorship on TCM Boards

[ken123]

I make a number of posts at both SSC & TCM, but today I have had three posts removed from the latter board. One was in resonpse to to post by a poster called " Lawson " who advocated hanging of Bush critics ( for treason ), all three of my posts were political. I can see the reason why my reply to " Lawson " was removed, because his/her's was also, but to me the removal of the other two was a little bit too much. Both were critical of Bush, the GOP, and Rightwing thought.

[Moraldo Rubini]

I loathe President Bush. I'm embarrassed about his time in office. It's all so much like a terrible, terrible dream. Yet I respectfully cannot imagine a reason to post anything about him on the TCM board. It's a board to discuss classic movies and the TCM channel. There are so many boards where it would be appropriate, but it doesn't seem that TCM is one of them. I was thankful to the Oasis conjurers for creating the forums "General Chat" and "General Media", thus giving us a space where discussions regarding our sad state of affairs are appropriate. But TCM never invited this line of conversation. Everything on the TCM Board is about movies, and that's fine; we have places like this and so many other sites to discuss "W". So come over here Ken, and tell us all about it...

[ken123]

The topic that I posted on was " Black List ", under the " Hot Topics " general thread on which rightwingers were dominant, calling for the lynching of " Reds " and other troublemakers.

[Hollis]

As a veteran, and as someone who has seen more than his share of needless death and suffering, I too am highly critical of Bush and the way he's sent American men and women to their deaths almost without regard for the value of human life. After all, he's not sending his own sons or daughters overseas, is he? So no matter how much he says he grieves for them, he and his family aren't directly affected by their loss. But you've got to bear one thing in mind - TCM's message boards aren't intended as a political arena and so your postings are far more likely to be censored and/or removed entirely there than they would be had you posted to Fox News or CNN. They might have been removed had they done nothing but praise and support him. My feeling is that they simply want to avoid controversy and not have the boards escalate into a free for all the way they had several months back when vulgarity and individual criticism were the order of the day at the hands of a small number of small minded people who had nothing better to do with their time. Your time will be far better spent posting here anyway. You might not always meet with total agreement, but at the very least you'll find that people will respect your right to have an opinion of your own.

Hollis

[pktrekgirl]

Ken, I wouldn't worry about the TCM boards. From what it sounds like, you were not singled out - they are just trying to keep the board on-topic and as politically neutral as possible.

And as someone who is involved in the running of two boards, I can appreciate their position. On this board we are all buds and I think everyone understands that we all fundamentally respect each other regardless of our differing political views. But when you have a board like the TCM board, that is very transient, you end up with alot of people who are barely known and not particularly mature posting stuff just to upset people....and if the mods over there don't nip it in the bud quickly, such situations can quickly spiral out of control.

And as we both know, the TCM board has enough troubles without major arguments about politics spiraling out of control!

I understand your annoyance with any individual who thinks you, or me, or anyone else who disagrees with Dubya's policies should be shot for treason. But by posting such nonsense, they are really saying more about themselves than they are about us, you know?