Discussion deleted? - Cross-border Amazon workers meeting

Wow. There were comments and they seem to be deleted. Among the comments was an important correction to the article, with falsely claims that the project is made by the only union functioning in Amazon in this country, which simply isn't true. l cannot see any legitimate reason to delete such information and leave stuff that is blatantly false. So please return the comments which were made.

Hi guys, this is news to us as it wasn't any of the libcom admins who deleted the comments. We are currently investigating what happened.

Ed, are only admins able to delete comments?

ln any case, since l managed to recover the comments, l am putting them back.

Put back.

Hi Akai, thanks for that.. in the next few days I or one of the other admins will put the comments back properly..

Just out of interest, where did you find the comments?

Right well firstly thanks for flagging this up MT. We have sorted out what happened here. Unfortunately these comments were deleted by a user who was given editor permissions. These permissions have now been revoked, and the user will be given a final warning, because that is completely unacceptable.

There was interesting stuff in that discussion, so thanks to Akai for preserving it and posting it back up. However the tone of some of the comments was very unhelpful, including some by Akai which were abusive and unnecessarily aggressive, so consider this a warning about that: libcom is a no flaming site. And if a comrade says something which you believe is incorrect, instead of calling them a "liar" just correct the error (of course if you can evidence someone is deliberately lying then that is a different matter, but that was not the case here).

We should have moderated that discussion more proactively at an early stage to prevent it degenerating but unfortunately we didn't notice it until much later so apologies on the front, but we are very overworked and appreciate any help from users.

OK, sorry about that bit if the author really did not know, However the truth is that the comrades are constantly being dissed over here and there are lots of lies going around about them - about not existing, about existing but "being illegal". So sorry - l was rather pissed at this and just jumped to the conclusion that this is another one of those people. Now there was deliberate censorship of the comments by a user. What can l think about this? That everything in it was so rude that it should be censored? (That's also not true and the writer was also rude.) That it was the ruddest thing ever seen on Libcom? (l've read a lot worse,) Or maybe that this was a sectarian act of censorship by someone who wants to promote something and disappear something else? ln any case, thanks for dealing with it.

But one last question - was the person who deleted it the person who wrote it?

Sorry if that is an uncomfortable question. lf not, just say NO.

Ok, just letting people know that the comments on the blog post mentioned in the OP have now been reopened with admin edits for comments which infringe the posting guidelines. I also repost my warning here:

It took quite a while to go through and edit so as to remove offending aspects while not taking away from the general argument being made. Please refrain from breaking the posting guidelines. Any new posts which do so will be unpublished and the thread locked.

Dear Ed,

lt might seem that, since it took you a while to edit this all, you might expect a „thank you” or some other show of appreciation on my part. (l assume that l am the offender who you feel broke a posting guideline.) While l do appreciate the fact that being an editor of forums like this is not easy, (and l have done this job myself elsewhere), l am not really happy with what has gone one and will comment on it to perhaps offer another way of handling situations like this.

This is „lib” com and we assume the word „lib” here means something. Libertarian society – right? So, at least from my point of view, there are better and worse ways to deal with some incidents. If there has been a breach of some guidelines, you know, somebody can take the trouble to inform the person of the breach and why it is a breach and not just censor. This is where l really disagree with what was done and how it was done.

As it stands, l honestly do not know what the breach really was and l remind that one of the Libcom admins, on another thread said that there was a reason, but they couldn't say it.

Had anybody written to me and said that l shouldn't have said something concrete, l could have actually editted it myself and/or apologized for being rude, if that was the case. And only one thing was pointed out to me – that l called the author a liar. I'm not gonna make an excuse for that. Folks in Poland lie about this stuff but it is true that l had no knowledge whether or not the author had knowledge of incorrect stuff and, taking this into account, l wrote a small apology.

In my opinion, it is simply more productive to allow people to know what is wrong and correct themselves. Also more libertarian. As l said, nobody wrote to me and told me where l supposedly breached the guidelines.

I don't come here to breach your guidelines and generally l can agree with them. I don't troll anybody, l write under my name, l am not a racist and don't put politically objectionable crap – but like many of your users, l am a human being and one that has strong opinions and sometimes can get a bit excited and express myself incorrectly.

This is where we all can honestly be confused about the borders of behaviour, especially since the behaviour on this site is, to say the least, unevenly managed.

For an example which l hope you will find abundantly clear, somebody from Libcom claimed that my objectionable remark was that l called the author a liar. As l already said, l apologized for it. I could delete any remark like that if you pointed it out. On the other hand, there is a thread on Libcom with a user called „Lucien lies too”. Not that l am suggesting anything about that, but from what l see, l got a scolding for saying somebody lied and that user... well, l think nothing happened or was said. So, from my point of view, this is an unexplained double-standard. Somewhere else l pointed out a number of double-standards. For example, that nutcases can go on Libcom, accuse people of embezzlement and say that we should all be shot and – that is still up on Libcom. Whatever it is l have said can get censored but accusing people who cannot defend themselves of crimes and threatening people apparently is not worth removing.

Somehow, you have got to realize that shit like this means that you are not clear as to your editting/censorship criteria. If that happens, you have also got to realize that people will suspect there was bias involved.

So Lucien – yeah, l don't like this whole affair and l don't like that he was online under a pseudonym, but he explained and apologized for that and there is no proof that he is lying about anything. I might not agree with him but...

Why was it again that people can call him a liar on Libcom?

Not that l am suggesting you censor anything. You know, people also can discuss even when others are insulting or unpleasant and don't have to run to you all to censor. Yeah, OK, there are times when people are really bad and cross the line. Why l crossed the line for you while there are hundreds of abusive, dickhead comments on the service … it's just a mystery.

You can PM me and give me a hint. I don't know why you just didn't do it and save us all some worry.

Finally, l realize you guys are also just humans and maybe used bad judgment on how to deal with this. Fair enough. But after it came up, you still didn't let me know what the offending comments were. So l will just give some ideas that we were using here regarding non-publication or deletion of texts and comments. Besides a good description of what is not allowed, we had a policy as such: that if somebody sent something that was in general within our policy, but which had some element that broke it (we are assuming some minor infringement), we could write to the author with information concerning the controversial or infringing content. Then the author could decide if s/he wanted to change it so that it could confrom to our policies, or resign from its publication.
Then, we also had the policy that people could appeal decisions if they sent something in good faith and believed it was within the policy.

Of course, over the many years we editted this service, we had more than one controversial post
and had to discuss some things but we all understood that one key thing was that we needed to show some consistency. If not, the readers would be (rightfully) angry.

A final note, l don't think you have been very transparent with me as to the reasons and people have refused to identify the person who originally deleted the comments. Again, maybe it would have been much better to have started a PM thread with yourselves, the deleter and me to discuss this in maybe a normal matter. I am not sure whether there is a lack of good faith there or what, but maybe things could have been handled differently.

I realize we are all just people and we can have not the greatest judgment, l include myself in this category, but if we are libertarians, we have to practice correcting things in a better way and maybe just resorting to the delete button is not always the answer. Also, it certainly doesn't help if you do not use this power in a consistent way.

Hey, sorry only have time to respond to a couple of things:
akai

On the other hand, there is a thread on Libcom with a user called „Lucien lies too”

This user has now left, and just to clarify we would not have tolerated this being a long-term situation.

For example, that nutcases can go on Libcom, accuse people of embezzlement and say that we should all be shot and – that is still up on Libcom.

where is that? I thought we banned that guy and removed all of his posts as soon as we saw them. If any are still up please let us know so we can get rid of the rest (as if we missed any this was because we didn't see them, not that we chose to leave them up)