Subject:
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Re: Should AFOL websites keep to themselves?
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Thu, 12 Apr 2007 12:23:08 GMT
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Viewed:
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3262 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Richie Dulin wrote:
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While murfling may not equate to cancelling or deleting a post, I find it
hard to comprehend that anyone would not consider it a form of censorship.
Though it has not been used widely on LUGNET, and as a result there are few
examples of actual murfling to examine, I feel that it is distinctly a form
of censorship, albeit a superficially subtle one.
While murfling does not remove posts, it sets them apart, makes them
‘special’ in some way and highlights their unacceptability to some prevailing
(or assumed) standard. To claim that this is not censorship, but mere
cautioning, or setting aside, is, I find, patronising at best.
To my mind, murfling is an insidious Orwellian alternative to ‘cancel’ or
‘delete’ button of the traditional censor. Deleting or cancelling removes the
evidence (or most of it) of the offending post, murfling labels it forever
with something like this post is bad, nice people wouldn’t read it.
But then, I guess euphemisms often help people feel better about things.
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In the case of a cancelled or deleted post, one can often still see the subject
line and the author, but the content is gone forever. The reader can only
imagine what horrible nastiness warranted such a scrubbing, and each reader will
mentally fill in their own worst imagining.
In the case of murfling (at least as practiced here on LUGNET) the original
words are still available for all to see. While this may qualify as a sort of
editorial comment by the admins, I wouldn’t quite call it “Orwellian.” Orwell
would’ve had the admins re-writing history (or posts) to make it appear that the
past was always a happy, shiny place.
If a post gets murfled, the author still has the option of whether or not to
request cancellation. This additional degree of freedom absolutely proves that
murfling is not as heavy-handed as true censorship. I see murfling more like
highlighting posts - an editorial statement which categorizes the content.
While you may debate whether this meets the strict definition of “censorship”,
it seems kind of silly to characterize murfling as some sort of Big Brother
activity.
The fact that some government drone in a dark cubicle underneath Virginia is
reading this post to screen for some fuzzy definition of “unpatriotic
activities” is Big Brother. Admins flagging the most extreme violations of the
TOS on a web site doesn’t even come close.
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Message has 1 Reply:
Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Should AFOL websites keep to themselves?
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| (...) While murfling may not equate to cancelling or deleting a post, I find it hard to comprehend that anyone would not consider it a form of censorship. Though it has not been used widely on LUGNET, and as a result there are few examples of actual (...) (17 years ago, 12-Apr-07, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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