bobquasit | I joust with Yahoo

A while ago I wrote about the Pledge of Allegience on a Yahoo forum. Yesterday I took a look back at that forum, only to find that it was completely empty. Somewhere along the line Yahoo removed all posts.

So I made a comment on the newly-empty forum asking (in effect) what had happened. This morning I went back to find that that post, too, had been deleted. Which makes me wonder why Yahoo is maintaining the forum at all, if they do not allow comments in it.

Being the irritating fellow that I am, I followed up with this post today:

What's going on here?

Why is Yahoo leaving this forum up? All the posts were deleted a while ago, and when I put up a new message yesterday it was deleted today.

This is very confusing! Please explain. My last post was neither unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, nor racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable. So I'm completely mystified.

This action by Yahoo an interesting example of what speech is worth when it's under corporate control.

As public speech is moved out of common, public spaces (such as usenet) and into areas which are owned and controlled by big business, "free" speech becomes less and less free. Libertarians and Republicans will doubtless point out that the Yahoo forum is private property, and as such Yahoo is entirely within their rights to do whatever they want; the First Amendment doesn't apply.

This is true, but disingenuous. Corporate fora are crowding out public ones, and many in the public have no real access to public areas of speech. For example, many ISPs no longer provide access to usenet, or do not include it in their standard setups. Google does provide limited access to usenet, but they, too, are a private corporation with the liberty to censor at will. And in any case, many internet users are entirely unaware of the existence of usenet, or of the difference between a private corporate forum and a newsgroup.

And it's not as if usenet is such a great forum for public speech anyway, since only a small part of the world population is online, and most of those are ignorant of it!

The fact is that if private forums succeed in crowding out public areas of free speech, than effectively corporations have succeeded in destroying the First Amendment. Which should be of concern to everyone, of course.

As for the Pledge: the issue seems to have momentarily subsided. I suspect that it will pick up again when/if the Supremes do something.

Okay. Let's see what happens.