Friday, May 8, 2009

Social Network:Does Newsvine Practice Political Censorship?

There is a myriad of social network sites out on the web dedicated to a countless range of topics. As a blogger, I am on quite a few: Twitter, Reddit, Facebook and of course Digg.

I used to be on Newsvine, and I was quite active on it. A few weeks ago, I wrote two hard hitting articles critical of Obama. One was titled: " The candidate for change has become the President of more of the same".

Newsvine, in appearance, seems to be a very open minded community. It is good for news & politics, a lot of journalists & bloggers go there and write original content. They claim to be regulated by their own users community. One of the good thing about Newsvine is that you get paid ( a very small amount that is) for the content you post or aggregate. This is based on the amount of hits you get on your respective page.

In my case, this is what happened. I basically got shut down without any notice or explanation for that matter. It literally happened out of the blue. I contacted the site 5 times and never got an answer from them on why my account was cancelled.

The fact that they never had the guts or the courtesy to let me know if I broke any of the user's agreement rules lead me to think that I was shut down for expressing my political opinions. I am just guessing that other users filled a complain against me. It amounts to nothing less than political censorship, and has to be denounced as such.

As far as social networks specializing in news & politics; I don't think anybody in their right mind can contest the leading role of Digg. Reddit, Newsvine, Twitter or Facebook are just not on par with Digg.

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