Over the past week Imagethief has been involved in a long debate with a couple of readers about the labelling of Tiananmen Square and presence or absence of an open, national discourse about those events in China. You can read it here, so I do not wish to rekindle it in this post. What I want to address is that both the commenters involved in that debate thought at one point that I was censoring their comments or had banned them.

I have not. Imagethief has banned only one person in three years, nearly two years ago, and that was because the commenter made a comment that crudely referenced my wife and oral sex in the same sentence. I don't censor or ban people who argue with me as long as it doesn't become personal. That's not generally the way I operate, and I don't generally mind being argued with, even if the argument looks intractible. Readers will make their own judgments.

This is, however, a personal blog, and I do reserve the right to decide which comments appear on it. I believe in the right to free speech. That means you have a right to your own blog, not necessarily to mine. Freedom of speech does not equal anarchy or the suspension of editorial standards. I have seldom found it necessary to delete coments. Even when I get troll comments I am much more likely to poke fun at them then delete them, unless they are truly vulgar. I will generally point out that a comment has been deleted and say why. I don't moderate comments prior to publication, although spam outbreaks occasionally force me to do so temporarily.

I do, however, have a spam filter that is built into my blogging software. If I read my configuration correctly (it involves a scoring system and some math so it's a little cryptic), it won't accept any post with more than four links in it. Regrettably, it does not give a warning, and has no option to do so. It is configured this way because I get a lot of link spam; comments with shopping lists of links to gambling sites, online pharmacies, etc. No one has complained about this until now, so I assume that it has not generally been a problem.

Imagethief is not inclined to change this setting, and I certainly don't have the time to configure it for individual conversations. I am not going to criticize commenters for using two or even three posts to link to a variety of sites as long as they are relevant to the conversation. If you need more than eight or twelve links to make your point, I suggest summarizing.

I invite public comment from readers on whether my policy is needlessly restrictive. For the record, here is my published comment policy (scroll down). I reserve the right to change this as circumstances dictate, but I will notify readers when I do.

As a gesture of good faith, and because suggestions that I would censor comments simply because I disagree with them annoy me, here is the e-mail from Charles Liu with the list of links he wanted to post in last Sunday's thread:

Will, thanks for explination. I commented on your blog because I took you
seriousely. If your spam bot filters out relevant discussion and/or you are
too busy to dig my comment out from the grave (or even toss them) that's
fine.

But the fact remains my comment made in earnest has not appeared. Get better
spam bot or fetch it out from the spam grave. I can repost them, two at a
time, but that'll just catch flack some other ways.

Below are the links I've found from China, where people of all walks of life
(blog, bbs, academic, media, social/political groups) using the term
"massacre" (~{M@I1~}), in reference to 6/4 TAM. Again this sample of what's
on the net, many are not anonymous, only represent a tiny fraction of
China's national discourse on this issue (imagine the voices not digitized):

http://www.54tsinghua.cn/classic/people/4-2-12-21.htm
http://blog.cnetnews.com.cn/?feed=rss2&p=2451 (to CNet's credit)
http://bbs.tecn.cn/archiver/?tid-79482.html
http://old.fon.org.cn/forum/showthread.php?threadid=7788
http://www.54tsinghua.cn/classic/law/old/jural/M.915426604.A.htm
http://www.tor.cn/chinfootball/dw/article/0,2297,596752,00.html
http://lawfan.fyfz.cn/blog/lawfan/index.aspx?blogid=3896
http://www.siwei.org.cn/bbs/Topic.aspx?BoardID=25&TopicID=2036
http://ias.cass.cn/show/show_project_ls.asp?id=480
http://www.mingbai.com.cn/chuanmei_1jieshuo.htm
http://www.tecn.cn/data/detail.php?id=2496
http://bbs.crt.com.cn/bbs/simple/index.php?t203.html

Allow these on your blog or not is up to you. Keep insisting they only say
"tomato"; I really believe you give them too little credit. To me the facts
show the truth is somewhere in betwen.

Charles

Charles, your comment made in earnest has now appeared. I hope this puts to rest any suspicion of banning or censorship.