Thursday, April 15, 2010

Helsingin Sanomat forum moderators rather open-minded for once

"No Hitler oli hyvä mies ja oikealla asialla, kun pyrki hävittämään nämä tuholaiset maailmasta, mutta homma jäi vain hieman kesken. On vain ajan kysymys, milloin nouseva äärioikeisto hoitaa homman vihdoinkin loppuun!"

(Translation: "Well, Hitler was a good man and he was doing the right thing when he tried to remove this vermin [Jews] from the world, but he didn't quite get the job done. It's a question of time when the rising far right will finally get the job finished.")

That was one of the readers of Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest Finnish daily, commenting on an article about Israel asking its citizens to leave Sinai.

Now, I am all for the right of newspapers (and anyone else, for that matter) to have unmoderated forums, where anyone can write anything and where things get deleted only by a court order or not at all. This, however, is a pre-moderated forum that claims not to tolerate any racism or group hatred, and that has routinely removed messages that were even slightly offensive to some other groups. It's not the question of moderators not having noticed it yet, either - in order to be posted there the thing (signed with the nickname "Natsi" (nazi), although in my experience actual nazis for obvious reasons rarely compare Jews to nazis, as he/she does elsewhere in the posting) had to go through a moderator.

I would really like to know: what the hell was the moderator thinking?

Edit: Now they have removed that posting after more than 24 hours, but the question still stands.

4 comments:

pjt said...

BTW, I actually think that sometimes the moderators at HS deliberately keep the level of discussion on a ridiculous level. Rubbish like that is published, but if you write something that references to sources, does not go to the extremes but makes a point, and disagrees with the article... never published.

I don't know if you can call it a conspiracy, but it is anyway a waste of time to write anything of value to HS discussions, because you need to copy it out somewhere else to have it viewable.

Toukka said...

No Hitler oli hyvä mies ja oikealla asialla

Sounds like a troll to me, but you never know.

Vera said...

pjt: I also used to get a feeling that they deliberately keep the level of discussion on a ridiculous level, but they have gotten a bit better lately.

Toukka: I don't think he was a troll, but you never know. If he was, he was trolling to the choir, so to say.

Mikko said...

Joh, hesarin moderoinnista on turhan usein jäänyt mielikuva että niillä on Missio(tm) ja säännöistä viis, tiedä sitten tosin oliko siitä kyse tällä kerta...