[Imc-tech] Re: [Imc-web] Deleted posts

[Mike Lehman]

Hi Clint,
I was the one who deleted the comment, which was made by "Jack Ryan" or 
whoever he was calling himself on that one. Actually, I deleted it quite 
a bit before your post (the day before, as I recall), but more on that 
issue in a moment...

There has been quite a bit of notice of the way we are dealing with Jack 
over the last six months as his posts steadily went downhill to no 
purpose except harassment of other posters, assertions that his posts 
that were hidden were only due to "censorship" when he simply had no 
intention of observing our normally very flexibly enforced web use 
policies, took up multiple, highly tranparent identities in seeking to 
avoid a situation he brought onto himself, and intentionally attempted 
to foment conflicts amongst what Jack perceives to be the "progressive" 
community, but which has so far only managed to stir up Anna E..

All of these are classic "protest warrior" tactics (yes, he has made a 
few under that nymn, so I think we're pretty sure about his real 
motivations now) that have been growing against all open forums on the 
left in the last couple of years and which have virtually made useless 
certain IMC sites, in particular. It is clear that the goal is, not 
simply using postings on IMCs to promote their conservative ideology, 
but to actively destroy the utility of IMCs to the progressive community 
by discouraging legitimate readers, users, and posters.

The Ricky versus "Mr. Roberts" thing -- as Jack calls him, in his 
predictably ambiguous way which is just one more tactical twist to his 
dismissive view of anyone to the left of Bush -- that Jack's nymns have 
been promoting has actually been going on for several months now. And 
it's been going right down the memory hole, where such insubstantive 
crap should be. It's tiresome bullshit intended for one purpose only -- 
to use COINTELPRO-like tactis to get progressives at each other's 
throats, instead of going after the right

Recently, Steering authorized completely removing his postings from 
public view, since his sole remaining purpose here was to get his crap 
hidden and then bitch some more about "censorship." Due to technical 
issues with Dada, hidden from the public in Dada does not always act 
promptly or assuredly with all browsers, leaving stuff that is 
justifiably hidden visible. So stuff of his tends to get deleted when 
there is certainty that it is his. There has been discussion of this on 
Web, also, and it is hopefully something that will be addressed in 
future Dada updates.

Another technical issue is, now that Jack no longer has his usual venue 
in the Hidden Files, is that his sole objective in continuing to post 
what he knows will be hidden seems to be to create vast discrepancies 
between the comment post count that is publicly visible on the mainpage 
with the article headline and what readers see because of the crap of 
his that was hidden underneath the article on its page. Again, if Dada 
reflected an accurate count of legitimate posts, he would not have this 
remaining incentive to crap on things here.

Other crap that is getting totally deleted are the recent surges of spam 
advertising -- the hundreds of which make using the editors page 
virtually untenable by diluting real content to the point of having to 
search through pages of the spam to see the genuine posts. A total 
delete of this spam makes using the editor screen viable again. Purged 
as well is our old friend DAN Disinfo, who like Jack, seems perfectly 
happy to create the appearance of a political issue by taking over the 
Hidden section of this site as their own personal anti-IMC.

In reading this far, it is also important to point out that we have 
ironclad proof from past incidents that Jack Ryan is reading this list, 
so I won't go into the extensive list of correlative data that I use to 
sort him out from legitimate posters here -- I would be glad to have an 
F2F meeting of Web to review our policy, how I am applying it, and any 
changes needed -- much of the stuff that might lead to questions, I have 
printed out and kept notes on in order to explain exactly how I am 
identifying him for just these sort of questions. Needless to say, he is 
predictably clumsy and it is pretty much like shooting fish in a barrel 
-- like all trolls, it's more about the game of a certain ego crapping 
on people than about really being so totally stealthy as to actually not 
be indentifiable.

We haven't heard a chorus of new posters complaining about being hidden 
or deleted, so I think my accuracy has been close to 100% -- with the 
failures being in stuff that very well might be his, but on which I 
haven't collected enough data on yet to justify hiding yet. But this has 
also meant that some of the discussions between those of us interested 
in dealing with Jack has been F2F and that notes from the relevant 
Steering meetings have been cryptic in order not to give Jack any of the 
exploits of our openness that he has used in the past. Thus, you are 
probably not aware of the extensive discussion this has generated and my 
frequent contacts with people and Steering so that they are informed of 
how this is being addressed.

I think your post actually stands very well on its own, even without the 
context of the original troll that prompted it. People should hear 
explanations of why candidates get news coverage on IMC -- because 
someone like you was interested enough to do it. Any legitimate 
complaints about this are likely to be prompted by a misunderstanding of 
how Indymedia operates...we certainly don't have a newsroom with 
reporters sitting at desks covering beats and just waiting to spring 
into action. People need to be gently reminded -- like your post does 
well -- that Indymedia does not operate on the dominant media model -- 
it's DIY media.

Again, I would be glad to revisit this in a public, but offline meeting. 
But everyone that I have spoken with about this has been really happy 
that Jack has been reduced to nothing more than a sporadic nuisance -- 
which is the best we can probably do while maintaining Open Publishing. 
I really don't want to hand him back even a one inch tall soapbox for 
him to abuse again by slacking off on the crackdown -- but I'm open to 
ideas.
Mike Lehman

Clint Popetz wrote:

> Ok, so someone posted a comment to this story about the latest IMC
> Radio News:
> 
> 	http://www.ucimc.org/newswire/display/24925/index.php
> 
> and in it they asked why Ricky Baldwin's opponent (Dennis Roberts)
> hadn't been interviewed while Ricky had.  That's a valid question, and
> one that has to be explored in a public forum in order for the public
> to understand how independent mediap works.  I wrote up a detailed
> response about how stories make it onto IMC Radio News.  Shortly after
> posting, the original comment disappeared, although it violated no
> rules that I could see, and asked a legitimate question.  So now my
> response looks strange, because it is responding to a post that didn't
> exist.  What's more, the original post isn't hidden, it's deleted.
> 
> This isn't the first time it's happened to me.  The same thing
> happened to me in the followups to the "CD Review that Isn't" article.  
> 
> I think editors are being way too hasty.  What's more, I don't know
> why we started deleting instead of hiding, but it's way too final and
> non-trackable for me.
> 
> I am adamantly opposed to deleting or hiding articles just because
> they come from people we don't like, or who are frequent trolls, or
> even worse, that we think are pseudonyms for frequent trolls.  Each
> article should, in my opinion, be evaluated on its own merit.  I'm
> beginning to think we should start using the features built in to dada
> that make it so that editors have to rate things down to be hidden,
> which means two (or more, it's configurable) have to agree on an
> article needing to be hidden before it gets hidden.
> 
> Thoughts?	
> 
> 			-Clint