The social network says in the "Warning" dialog (below) that it was simply responding to complaints from users who reported the content to be objectionable. Hmm, we're curious who those users would be, and who they work for.

In any case, the ban, to whatever extent there was one, seems to have been lifted, at least judging from our own ad-hoc test just now.



In the meantime, we've just updated the original post with an important new privacy tip and some clarifications on two of our existing ones. Enjoy, and feel free to share — while you still can (cue ominous music).

UPDATE: Another tipster informs us that one or more of our Facebook articles were temporarily blocked from being posted within this Facebook group on the privacy changes.

(Top pic by pshab on Flickr)

Here's how The Twitter World Works, according to Kaus: Twitter needs celebrities on its service to attract millions of new users every month or quarter or whatever. Celebrities, in turn need adoring fans, but (key point) have very fragile egos. So Kaus suspects Twitter of keeping a secret team of interns in a back room somewhere, poring over the massive stream of tweets directed at celebrities, and deleting the mean nasty tweets from search.twitter.com. The offending tweets still appear on Twitter, but won't show up in search results.

Kaus knows this because he tweeted something mean about CNN president Jon Klein, and it never showed up in Twitter search. Plus, in Kaus' experience, searches on celebrity names "almost invariably turn up... pleasant comments." Pretty ironclad. Ahem.

But you know what? The conspiracy might just be real. (Cue sinister music.) Here's a chummy little conversation between Twitter CEO/co-founder Ev Williams (pictured above, left, with celebrity tweeter Michael Stipe) and known celebrity Alyssa Milano talking about Kaus' conspiracy theory. She called it "interesting," followed by Ev's slick — too slick! — non-denial denial of Kaus' allegations.

Williams could have knocked down Kaus' conspiracy allegations by simply saying "that's absurd" or somesuch. But he didn't. Now we're actually kind of intrigued, at Kaus' seemingly crackpot ideas. Tell us it ain't so, Twitter people. Or better yet confirm, preferably with a picture of your secret cabal of celebrity gladhanders.

(Top pic: via Ev Williams)

Kai-Fu Lee joined the company back in 2004, when Google was beginning its adventure in earnest and became the giant's President of Google Greater China and vice president for engineering. Unfortunately, mean old Microsoft reared its head and sued Google, for Lee was bound by a pesky "no competition" contract clause. The companies eventually settled, and Google hoped to go full speed ahead into uncharted territories. China's government, however, had other plans, and soon lured the company into its controversial web of censorship and, to add insult to injury, favored competitor, Baidu.

Despite the uphill battle, Google has made a few strides in recent months and gained 6 percent on Baidu. But that means little, because Baidu still controls about 62% of search traffic, while Google has a scant 21%.

Now Lee has abandoned his post to pursue some hush-hush "new venture" in Beijing, and Google's attempting trying desperately to refocus its energies by splitting his duties between two executives while simultaneously double its sales force. After five years struggling to be the big wig, you would think Google would give up on imposing its capitalist ideals amidst an aggressive communist state. But that's the magic of the internet: it's a field of ambitious dreams rife with international and political barriers.

The blog's explanation for pulling the post:

Basically, we believe that parties who are the subjects of an extensive and sensitive post like yesterday's should know they are being written about. This is both the neighborhood-y, Local thing to do and simple journalistic ethics.

In this case, the author of the piece identified himself to several climbers but not to the people who run the space. We were unaware of this lapse. We had concluded, based on the author's initial pitch, that he planned to be upfront with everyone, and we neglected - our bad - to confirm this after the piece was filed.

Well that's all well and good and friendly, but it's really the type of thing to decide before you publish the extremely extensive post about "this bizarre hybrid of subterranean climbing gym and hippie speakeasy" in Fort Greene. Because the entire thing is, of course, cached by Google. All anyone has to do is click here to read the whole thing, or visit AnimalNY, where they put up a screen shot of it. Now, Jed Lipinski's post on "one of the best kept secrets in Brooklyn" is going to get far more readers than it would have had you simply left it up.

See: The Streisand Effect.
[The Local's 'Why We Unpublished" statement and the original post, via Animal NY

This whole argument is premised on the assumption that we must save newspapers. At the cost of making the internet into an inefficient mess! So Richard Posner, professional smart man and US Appeals Court judge who writes 23,000 words per day, floated the idea of banning links (and more!), so internet cannibals don't keep stealing newspaper content for nothing:

Expanding copyright law to bar online access to copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, or to bar linking to or paraphrasing copyrighted materials without the copyright holder's consent, might be necessary to keep free riding on content financed by online newspapers from so impairing the incentive to create costly news-gathering operations that news services like Reuters and the Associated Press would become the only professional, nongovernmental sources of news and opinion.

Periods, Richard Posner. Try them. To break up text. What you may notice here is that Posner proposes banning linking or paraphrasing copyrighted materials. The problem: this is America dude, we say what we fucking want, amirite?

You can copyright a news story, but you can't copyright the news. "The news" just means "things that happen in the world." What would it mean, in practice, to make it illegal to paraphrase a copyrighted news story? Summing up, for example, political events, or a sports controversy, or even a fashion trend, could be interpreted as paraphrasing copyrighted material. So let's ban talking about anything. And banning links will help us make our references even more obscure, by making it impossible for anyone to refer to source materials! Good idea, Posner. This gross oversimplification makes you look none too freedom-loving!

We all know journalism happens only at newspapers. Better to protect them at all costs than to invest in the murky "future."

This idea is supported by a newspaper columnist! Connie Schultz, a columnist for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer (who's married to a senator, btw, nothing to see here), also touts the idea of giving newspapers a 24-hour injunction on news they post, during which time it's all theirs, and can't be aggregated by others online.

Fine. You can have your injunction. But you can't stop anyone from discussing, and writing about, current events. As they happen. Go read all those "Twitter Generation" stories you guys are always writing! The idea that it's worth crippling the entire free flow of information on the internet in order to add to the bottom line of newspaper companies is prima facie idiotic. I guess you could also help save newspapers by passing a law that everyone has to buy one every day, or by making it illegal for TV news to exist. That doesn't make those things good ideas.

If Bill Gates pledged to make it so computers could not be operated properly until the user could prove they had read today's Cleveland Plain-Dealer that might save a reporter and he is a monster for not doing so, QED.
[Pic: Chronicling America]

How did breaking the rules finally net Wales some good press? The Times disclosed Sunday that Wikipedia helped actively suppress news that a Times journalist had been captured in Afghanistan. If the capture was widely publicized, the paper worried, the reporter would be more valuable to his captors.

Wikipedia editors actively froze out edits reporting the capture, and allowed Timesmen to do the same. The reporter eventually escaped. The ethics of the censorship are debatable. The benefits to Wales are not: The Times depicts him leading the suppression effort, even though a woman named Sue Gardner actually runs Wikipedia. Wales thus re-cements his image as the face of Wikipedia and gets another round of lucrative speaking engagements (he has historically pocketed the fees).

Better still for Wales, he can point his critics to the Times situation as an example of how Wikipedia rules should not be absolute. When you're busy saving journalists, who cares if you bend the rules for some nice young ladies while you're at it?

UPDATE: Wales wrote in to dispute an earlier version of this article, which stated he "nearly lost his job," citing a January Valleywag report that his Wikipedia board seat was renewed just three days before it expired. Wales said "I was never 'almost out of a job' last December" and that there was never "a board struggle and a struggle between me and Sue Gardner."

(Pic by Re: Publica)

An unrepentant Yahoo won't say what, exactly, Johnson did wrong. His comments were about Barack Obama's support of a bill allowing the government to suppress torture photos. They were attached to seemingly relevant images from the president's recent trip to Cairo to ring in a new era of U.S.-Middle Eastern relations.

"I thought, this is an opportunity I can use to let the administration know how I feel about some of its policies," Johnson told us in a phone interview.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.The Virginia man's initial 10 or so comments, which went up Wednesday night, were deleted without explanation by Friday. That night, Johnson posted roughly ten more to different White House photos, this time linking in another Flickr user's Abu Ghraib picture, as allowed by Flickr's comment formatting (see Johnson's reproduction of his comment, left, taken from his post to freedom-of-information hub Cryptome).

In the midst of this second round of commenting, Johnson found his account was gone. There had been no warning of any sort from Yahoo, he said. Johnson would later work his way up Flickr's customer service tree, eventually leaving a message for the vice president of customer service and other bigwigs. He even left a message for Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz — a noted fan of frank discourse — on Bartz's home answering machine.

Johnson, who lives outside Richmond, still has no answers. More crucially, he also doesn't have access to any of the 1,200 pictures he uploaded to Flickr under his paid "Pro" membership. Many of the pics, he said, were "completely irretrievable — I didn't back them up on any disks, I just spur-of-the-moment loaded it up and deleted the flash" memory originals.

Asked about all this, Yahoo issued us a statement (see below) saying its policies prevented it from discussing Johnson's account and pointing us to Flickr's community guidelines.

The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.But if the company expects people to move their data to its servers, via sites like Flickr and Yahoo Mail, it's going to have to do better than that. Users won't feel safe moving their data into Yahoo's "cloud" if it can vanish without a trace with no warning.

Similarly, Flickr's user base of photographers is notoriously sensitive to any hint of censorship, so the company would be well-advised to come up with a coherent explanation for why the most powerful man in the world needs to be so ruthlessly protected against a slightly aggressive internet commenter. Where's Carol Bartz's straight talk when you need it?

[via Cryptome] [top image by vanson on Flickr]

Flickr statement:

In accordance with Flickr's policy, we cannot disclose information to third parties concerning a member's account. However, in joining Flickr, all of our members agree to abide by our Community Guidelines. These guidelines require that all of our members be respectful of the community and flag content that may not be suitable for "safe" viewing. Our members have always done a great job of identifying inappropriate and offensive content on Flickr and bringing it to our attention. We encourage all members to continue to make Flickr a safe place to share photos and videos.


Flickr is a very large community made up of many types of members from all over the world, and we respect the viewpoints and expressions of all of our members. In crafting the Community Guidelines, Flickr weighed the rights of the individual vs. the rights of the overall community, and built a system that would enable members to choose what they want to view. As with any community, online or off, there are members who may disregard the Community Guidelines. When this happens, Flickr may have to take action accordingly towards building a respectful community. For more information: http://www.flickr.com/guidelines.gne

As Evgeny Morozov wrote on the Foreign Affairs website, the ban marked the first time an entire social group was banned from contributing to Wikipedia. As such, the cult can now credibly argue it has been censored and repressed

We'll see a dozen anti-Wikipedia web-sites set up by Scientology to promote its own version of "censored truth". Unfortunately, Wikipedia's decision would only make their claims of unjust persecution easier to believe; after all, how else to explain that they were banned from a web-site that "anyone can edit"?

...The Wikipedia admins definitely need a primer on the Streisand effect.

A Columbia law professor, Tim Wu, told the Associated Press Wikipedia's decision should be closely examined.

"Wikipedia has more power over speech than many governments," he said. "We have to make sure that they're being reasonable."

Of course, things look quite different for those up against what one ex-Scientologist described as the group's "machine" of Web warriors, each creating a host of virtual identities from which to launch online campaigns. Wikipedia's arbitration committee voted in its ban unanimously, 10-0. Winning the war with determined Scientologists was presumably more important to Wikipedia than losing any one PR battle.

(Pic via)

Sharon Adams uploaded a picture of her post-mastectomy chest to the social network as part of an effort to encourage women to get regular breast exams. Facebook removed it within a day as "sexual and abusive."

After 900 people joined a Facebook protest group, the company backed down and reinstated the picture (the graphic image is attached to this Daily Mail story).

The site even went so far as to say it was sorry:

Our user operations team reviews thousands of reported photos a day and may occasionally remove something-that doesn't actually violate our policies. This is what happened here. We apologise.

Better than an apology would be for Facebook to finally fix its long-abused content-flagging system, perhaps by hiring enough staff to keep up with the growth in its user base. Or maybe the company just needs a seminar to get its moderators more comfortable with the sight of the female chest.

A story about Homo erectus, the evolutionary predecessor to modern man, crossing the open ocean, had the word "homo" — rather necessary to understanding the story — replaced by a series of asterisks. Here's a screenshot from Digg's RSS feed:

Understandable on Digg's part: Their audience probably has commenters who use "homo erectus" in the Urbandictionary.com sense. The site's human editors — wait, I thought they weren't supposed to have those! — have restored the word to the site manually. Too bad their algorithm has to be on guard for its use as an epithet.

(Photo of L'Homo Erectus via Belgiumgayclubs.com)

The hacker, known as Weev, with whom we've had dealings before the "amazonfail" episode, is saying that the whole escapade was the result of his exploitation of a vulnerability in Amazon's product-rating tools.

What to make of people who don't want to believe this was a prank? They're left with the notion of Amazon.com pursuing homophobic censorship, which must be pleasing to people who see evil behind every "Inc." Pick your conspiracy theory: Someone's playing someone.

A recap: On Friday, two gay-themed romance novels disappeared from Amazon's sales rankings — they were still listed on the site, but could not appear on best-seller lists. On Saturday, hundreds more vanished. Writer Mark Probst asked Amazon.com customer service what happened, and got this answer from an "Ashlyn D." in customer service:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Twitter users started decrying the move en masse, tagging their posts "#amazonfail" and accusing the online retailer of homophobia. Amazon.com PR didn't help matters by calling the problem a "glitch." Even though the sales ranks of most gay and lesbian titles had been restored, Twitterers taunted Amazon.com by posting messages with the tag "#glitchmyass."

Glitch my ass, indeed. One LiveJournal user speculated that the mass flagging of gay books on Amazon.com might be the work of organized antigay groups — or troublemaking hackers:

Now, let's just put ourselves in Amazon's shoes. Keep in mind that Amazon is a smug, fairly liberal company headquartered in fucking Seattle of all places and, last I checked, Jeff Bezos is not exactly a Christian fundamentalist.

Why on earth would they suddenly censor only a specific group of content that deals with a marginalized and politically active community? Why would this policy change not take the form of a specific policy, but rather of very discriminately flagging only certain titles as "adult" content? Why would this happen over a weekend?

Our hacker has an explanation: Amazon.com has long had a mechanism that allowed customers to flag a product as "inappropriate." Only a small number of these votes were needed to get a book off of Amazon's sales rankings.

What Weev says he figured out was a way to trick Internet users into automatically flagging products without their knowledge, with the help of friends who run high-profile websites. He also says he hired "third-worlders" to register fake Amazon accounts and flag books. (His full explanation of the stunt is below.) He hasn't yet offered proof that he carried off the prank as described, but one part checks out: Amazon.com has apparently removed the feature that lets users flag books as "inappropriate." And the scheme he details seems far more likely than Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos deciding to become a censor.

The hacker's confession, which he also posted on LiveJournal:

Hay dude. Amazon removed its customer-based reporting of adult books yesterday. I guess my game is up! Here's a nice piece I like to call "how to cause moral outrage from the entire Internet in ten lines of code".

I really hate reputation systems based on user input. This started a while back on Craigslist, when I was trying to score chicks to do heroin with. My listings like "looking to get tarred and pleasured" and "Searching for a heroine to do the paronym of this sentence's lexical subject" kept getting flagged. The audacity of the San Francisco gay community disgusted me. They would flag my ads down but searching craigslist for "pnp" or "tina" reveals tons of hairy dudes searching for other hairy dudes to do meth with. So I decided to get them back, and cause a few hundred thousand queers some outrage.

I'm logged into Amazon at the time and see it has a "report as inappropriate" feature at the bottom of a page. I do a quick test on a few sets of gay books. I see that I can get them removed from search rankings with an insignificant number of votes.

I do this for a while, but never really get off my ass to scale it until recently.

So I script some quick bash.
#!/bin/bash
let count = 1
while true; do
links -dump 'http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=0/?ie=ASCII&rs=1000&keywords=Gay_and_Lesbian&rh=n%3A!1000%2Ci%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AHomosexuality&page='`echo $count`|grep \/dp\/ >> /tmp/amazon
((count++))
done

There's some quick code to grab all the Gay and Lesbian metadata-tagged books on amazon. Then I pull out all the IDs of the given books from those URLs:

cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//

and I have a neat little list of the internal product ID of every fag book on Amazon.

Now from here it was a matter of getting a lot of people to vote for the books. The thing about the adult reporting function of Amazon was that it was vulnerable to something called "Cross-site request forgery'. This means if I referred someone to the URL of the successful complaint, it would register as a complaint if they were logged in. So now it is a numbers game.

I know some people who run some extremely high traffic (Alexa top 1000) websites. I show them my idea, and we all agree that it is pretty funny. They put an invisible iframe in their websites to refer people to the complaint URLs which caused huge numbers of visitors to report gay and lesbian items as inappropriate without their knowledge.

I also hired third worlders to register accounts for me en masse. If you ever need a service like that, you can find them in a post like this advertising in the comments:
http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20070427/solving-captchas-for-cash/

Then they would log into the accounts, save the cookies in a cookie file and send it to me.

Then I used the cookie files like so to automated-report all the books:

for i in `cat /tmp/amazon |sed s/.*dp\\/// |sed s/\\/ref.*//`; do lynx -cookie_file=/home/avex/cookie1 http://www.amazon.com/ri/product-listing/`echo $i`/;done

The combination of these two actions resulted in a mass delisting of queer books being delisted from the rankings at Amazon.

I guess my game is up, but 300+ hits on google news for amazon gay
and outrage across the blogosphere
ain't so bad.

Weev has attracted at least one doubter who had trouble following his instructions, saying the code doesn't work. We asked him to answer the critique. He says he believes they were using a different version of a software program called "elinks," and that Amazon has disabled the site feature in question.

In the meantime, you can follow this clusterfuck, 140 characters at a time.

And it's true! Tapper admitted on Twitter that he has blocked people because he got tired of reading their critiques — including Talking Points Memo, a political blog.

Tapper-loathing twits are trying to make this a scandal about "transparency." it would be, were Twitter's "block" function not so laughably ineffective. While a block prevents a user from "following" someone on Twitter, and thus get their tweets delivered to one's cell phone or posted on one's Twitter homepage, the blocked user can still see their tweets on their Twitter page. So anyone Tapper blocks can simply type in "twitter.com/jaketapper" and see whatever he has to say.

It does, however prevent Tapper himself from reading replies posted to him on Twitter — so it's the Internet equivalent of sticking one's fingers in one's ears and saying, "La la la, I can't hear you!" Even worse, those blocked by Tapper have now started banding together and labeling his block a "badge of honor." Tapper finally relented and unblocked TPM.

Childishly indecorous? Perhaps, but that sums up the whole Twitter experience, right? Tapper, alas, seems swept up with early-adopter enthusiasm for Twitter. In a statement to Think Progress, he writes:

I'm trying to use twitter as a way to communicate with all sorts of people from all over the political spectrum, as a place for feedback, polite argument, and dialogue. I learned that the AP was taking Coach K's quote out of context from a tweet; it ended up on Good Morning America this morning. I want this way to talk to people. I don't want it to turn into what the comment section of my blog has become. The only people who have been blocked are people who make ad hominem attacks. They're still fully able to read my tweets — I just don't care to read theirs.

"Feedback, polite argument, and dialogue"? One would think Tapper, who has surely learned not to expect such rarities in the beat he covers, would be jaded enough not to look for them on Twitter.

According to Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for the extreme-right-wing website, he is not "Jerusalem21," the Wikipedia user whose rejected edits to the Obama article formed the centerpiece of Klein's reporting. Wired and other publications raised questions about Jerusalem21's identity when a blogger noted that Jerusalem21's sole contributions to the free online compendium were edits to the Obama page and Klein's own Wikipedia article.

"I am not 'Jerusalem21,' but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story," Klein writes, adding that he "personally" oversaw "Jerusalem21"'s edits. In other words, Klein masterminded the creation of the supposed scandal he wrote about.

Klein doesn't see things quite that way. He claims our article was "defamatory." But the truth cannot defame. Klein himself freely admits that he was intimately involved in the creation of the supposed news event he wrote about. Here's Klein having his say:

Mr. Thomas —

I demand an immediate retraction of your Gawker article today, which is defamatory. (http://gawker.com/5167585/right+wing-writer-invents-his-own-obama-wikipedia-scandal)

Your headline states as fact, "Right-Wing Writer Invents His Own Obama Wikipedia Scandal." You then quote from Wired.com, which, you relate, stated that one Wikipedia user cited in my article is "almost certainly Klein himself." "Almost certainly" is not enough to justify your very certain, defamatory title.

First, I am not "Jerusalem21," but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama's page. I wanted to personally oversee whether indeed criticism of Obama was being deleted. For your information, often investigative journalists engage in exactly this kind of testing – like seeing if they can bypass mandatory disclosures while donating to a candidate (several newspapers did this prior to the November election), or if they can register a dog to vote in Illinois. Thus, even if I had personally edited Obama's page as a test to investigate allegations of scrubbing, this is entirely legitimate journalistic practice.

Second and more importantly, your article is entirely misleading; it paints a picture that my piece from yesterday was reliant simply upon "Jerusalem21" being barred from entering information on Wikipedia that is critical of Obama, suggesting the controversy was both "invented" and based on that one account.

But my article from yesterday notes that "multiple times, Wikipedia users who wrote about the eligibility issues had their entries deleted almost immediately."

The article further notes that WND monitored Obama's Wikipedia page for one month and observed as criticism on all kinds of issues (Ayers, Wright, etc) was scrubbed. This can easily be confirmed independently by simply going through the tens of thousands of attempted edits to Obama's Wikipedia page and seeing how a large number of critical edits are erased, including edits seemingly backed up with third-party media references.

Further, WND published a follow-up today noting many users were still being blocked from attempting to add key issues to Obama's Wikipedia page and other pages, quoting some users. See: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=91257. Indeed, WND has been flooded the past two days with e-mails from readers with their own "Wikipedia stories" of how they were barred from entering what they claim is legitimate, backed-up criticism on Obama's Wikipedia page.

My article from yesterday noted what is clearly a major trend at Wikipedia and is a very legitimate piece. I demand your Gawker article be immediately corrected. The title must be changed, the false accusations about "Jerusalem21" must be updated and the article should note the wider trend on Wikipedia outlined above, instead of wrongly claiming the controversy is limited to one user. Do not simply and misleadingly update your article just by stating that I know "Jerusalem21" and leaving in the defamatory portrayal that I somehow invented a controversy, when indeed there is indisputably a much wider, documented trend.

Sincerely,
Aaron Klein
Jerusalem bureau chief, WorldNetDaily.com

Aaron Klein, WorldNetDaily's Jerusalem bureau chief and a frequent Fox News interviewee, took a break from covering the Middle East to fixate on the question of why Wikipedia's volunteer editors were supposedly censoring edits to Obama's Wikipedia page. According to Klein, "one user" was rebuffed when he tried to add the following paragraph to the page:

There have been some doubts about whether Obama was born in the U.S. after the politician refused to release to the public a carbon copy of his birth certificate and amid claims from his relatives he may have been born in Kenya. Numerous lawsuits have been filed petitioning Obama to release his birth certificate, but most suits have been thrown out by the courts.

That same user, Klein added, was given a three-day suspension after trying to add other material to the page. (Wikipedia editors, who are longtime users given extra authority, often reverse edits that they deem "fringe theories.")

Fox News picked up the tale of supposed Obamaniac censorship yesterday. But they never bothered to ask questions about the identity of "Jerusalem21," the suppressed Wikipedian. Turns out it was almost certainly Klein himself someone working for Klein (see below) who made the offending edits, Wired notes:

Curiously, it turns out that Jerusalem21, whoever he or she might be, has only worked on one other Wikipedia entry since the account was created, notes ConWebWatch. That's Aaron Klein's entry, which Jerusalem21 created in 2006, and has edited 37 times.

Update: Klein emailed us to demand we retract this story (we're not) because he's not actually Jerusalem21—his researcher is. He writes:"I am not 'Jerusalem21,' but I do know the Wikipedia user (he works with me and does research for me), and I worked with him on this story, which focused on investigating allegations I had received from others of Wikipedia scrubbing Obama's page." You can read his whole letter over here.

Poor Karp! The founder of the ultracutesy blogging platform, favored by Internet microcelebrity Julia Allison and the bored hipsters of Brooklyn and San Francisco, just got done cleaning up one censorship mess.

The latest accuser: The anonymous blogger behind Out of Print, a Tumblr devoted to criticizing Tumblr. He says that his blog posts have stopped displaying comments — a critical feature on Tumblr, which is built around users' "reblogs," an automated way of quoting a blog entry one likes, and other comments. The more popular a Tumblr it is, the more reblogs it generally gathers — so the Out of Print blogger claims that the disappearance of his comments is proof that he's being silenced by Karp's censorious regime. He thinks it has something to do with an incident where he hacked part of Karp's personal blog to include a taunting message about Tumblr's lack of security.

The charge only carries weight because Karp recently confessed to deleting a set of Tumblr blogs which included critics of Allison, an acquaintance of Karp's who often appeared at his side at parties over the last year. Not very credibly, Karp denied that any personal relationships were at play in his decision.

But the microscope on Karp's missteps is largely his own fault, since he's gone to such lengths to tout Tumblr as a kinder, gentler place to blog, free of the anonymous attacks and general snideness that pervade the Internet. Since Tumblr is, itself, actually on the Internet, that's proven impossible. Karp's quixotic niceness campaign has only made him and Tumblr bigger targets.

No one's calling Karp stupid. Everyone generally agrees he's scary-smart. So instead of malice or stupidity, couldn't we put down Karp's seeming censoriousness to youth, naïveté, and general scatterbrainedness? Otherwise, we'd have to believe Karp is carrying out absurdly petty yet nearly undetectible campaigns against his online critics. Why would he bother to subtly delete comments instead of an entire blog, as he's done in the past?

Far more likely: This is another bug in Tumblr's rickety technological infrastructure. If only Karp could squelch those.

Allison, the archetype of internet fameballdom, spends her time "lifestreaming" her every move for NonSociety, the Web startup she formed with friends Meghan Asha and Mary Rambin. Cable network Bravo has a longstanding option, valid through the end of this month, to launch a reality show involving the trio, thus exposing their lives even more completely. (NonSociety had a deal for a pilot, presumably now complete. Pilots are only sometimes made into full series.)

Given her aggressive self-exposure, one might think Allison would anticipate and tolerate critics, even those as uncommonly prolific in criticizing her life as she herself is in broadcasting it. But no; she sees the attacks as dehumanizing, and is glad her ex-boyfriend's pretend boyfriend, Tumblr founder David Karp, was man enough to stand up for her, and all other victims of internet critics. As she told us in an email:

I haven't asked David to take down any sites in a long time, so I don't know where the impetus for this particular purge came from, but I'm thrilled that he has. I am absolutely in favor of ridding the Tumblr community - and the internet in general - of what one of my readers once called "mind cancer." That sort of nastiness is insidious and it will rot communities unless someone says, "This simply isn't an acceptable way to treat other human beings."


There is no reason the internet should remain in its current Hobbesian state of nature. Someone needs to begin the long process of setting basic standards of decency online, and I'm proud of David - as a businessman, but also as a friend - that he and his company have the balls to do so."

Of course, if the internet were less wild and "Hobbesian," and if people and companies got to set the standards by which their critics were judged, the likes of Bill O'Reilly or Scientology and even Time might have shut down blogs like Gawker long ago. And it's hard to imagine Allison — or another Allison — rocketing to fame in such a tame environment. (We'll let you know when we figure out if that's a good or a bad thing.)

(Picture via NonSociety)

David Karp, the 22-year-old founder and CEO of Tumblr, has explained his company's deletion Monday of Reblogging Julia and other Tumblr blogs devoted to critiquing Allison. The rationale: "internal discussions" about a change to Tumblr's policies, which he only made public today, to include "harassment" as a reason to delete a blog.

In other words, Karp decided to implement selectively a policy before it was announced, rendering his policies laughable. Should users go by what's actually published on Tumblr, or should they try to read Karp's mind? The latter seems like quite a challenge, since the young man running Tumblr seems quite mixed up himself. He finishes the explanation:

I'm really sorry for the confusion. Your content and freedom of expression are the reasons we're building Tumblr.

Actually, given that Tumblr has recently raised a second round of financing, making his venture capitalists slightly richer should be the reason why Karp is building Tumblr. And that's where Allison fits in! Her NonSociety blog is meant to be a testbed for a new kind of group Tumblr, for which Karp's company will charge money.

There seems to be a hitch in development, though. Karp had previously hinted that Tumblr would announce a new revenue-generating feature on Monday. Monday came and went with no announcement, unless Karp had in mind a one-off send-a-valentine tool Tumblr debuted for Valentine's Day, which hardly seems like a sustainable revenue stream. For now, Allison is the best advertisement Karp has for the revenue potential of his service. And that just makes Tumblr's situation seem all the sadder.

(Photo by Julia Allison)

Last March, at the SXSW Interactive Web conference, Zuckerberg spoke at length about how the connections Middle Eastern youth make on Facebook could lead them away from religious extremism. It's a theme he's returned to time and again. But how Zuckerberg thinks they're going to connect when his site's not even letting them talk isn't clear. Users report that posts are getting deleted apparently for even mentioning words like "Gaza" or "Palestine."

What's curious about the claims of censorship is that censors are supposed to have an agenda. If Facebook has one, it seems to be against anything vaguely controversial: Both pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian forces are outraged by mysterious deletions of Facebook content mentioning the current crisis.

What's really going on? The site's self-policing mechanisms, which allow users to report "inappropriate content," seem to be to blame. The flagging system, meant to prevent the posting of porn where minors can see it, is easily abused by people with a political agenda. And with only 800 employees overseeing 140 million users, it's impossible for Facebook customer service to keep up with all the disputes.

It's a perfect illustration of Zuckerberg's twisted-up ambitions. On the one hand, he wants Facebook to be a reflection of the real world, as it is: a reflection of our real social relationships, and perhaps our very emotions. And yet he also wants to make it a better place. Giving people on Facebook a free hand to censor each others' words serves neither end.

Of course, everyone's against censorship until they're for it. Here's something that will likely offend the true believers on both sides of the conflict — the tales of Saar Netanel, a gay Israeli Jerusalem city council member, and Bodi, a Palestinian drag performer who claims Hamas is hounding him out of the country:

(Photo by AP/Eyad Baba)

Black isn't sure why Facebook disabled his account, but he's mad as hell:

How am I supposed to maintain my vast terrorist network without this social networking site?

While it’s true that I never poke, nor poke back, I think I’ve been a loyal and true Facebook friend. I always accept friendship requests, right up to the bullshit 5,000 friend limit. Facebook, is it my fault that more than 5,000 people want to feel my love? No, it is not. It is the fault of my genetically superior brain and startling good looks. If you’re going to start discriminating against gorgeous geniuses, then I don’t even know what.

How am I supposed to receive invitations to events to which I have no interest in attending? How am I supposed to keep up with what various high school students I have never met are doing? How am I supposed to install and then uninstall various applications because they are annoying? Facebook, don’t you realize that these activities take up most of my waking hours?

But maybe this unlikely pair should kiss and make up. Black, a clever sort, has been stuck doing basic-cable schlock like VH1's "I Love the '70s/'80s/'90s" series and Comedy Central's Reality Bites Back. Pets.com folded after figuring out that spending millions of dollars on TV advertisements and paying for express shipping on bags of cat food did not make business sense. We're not saying Facebook's economic model is quite that bad. But Black would make a better spokesman than Mark Zuckerberg, the social network's hopelessly tongue-tied CEO.

(Photo by Del Far)

During the beta of Mahalo Answers, a service where users pay others to conduct Google searches for them using a faked-up currency, one tester asked, "Is Jason Calacanis cool?" An accurate answer: "Despite the bulldogs and the Brentwood mansion, no, not particularly." But instead, an ex-employee unloaded all the rage she'd stored up since getting laid off from her job at Mahalo this summer. Calacanis has his minions delete the entry, but we've obtained screenshots of the uncensored page. It's a soon-to-be-legendary rant.