Not Surprised At All

At the dishonest comment deletion tactics allegedly in use at the San Francisco Chronicle(H/T Glenn Reynolds) and Think Progress(H/T Charles Johnson). However, browser caches can be unruly beasts, so I'm not yet ready to call foul.

If true, it just follows a pattern on the left of squelching any speech that does not agree with their own. This is no different than shouting down a speaker giving a speech, and belching "freedom of speech!" in the attempt to deprive the speaker of his. What makes it particularly nasty is that the commenter at SFC or TP don't know they've been shouted down.

Of course, no one at SFC or TP is compelled to publish any comment they find objectionable for whatever reason. They also have the right to ban commenters at will for any reason they like. What's repugnant about this tactic (again, if true) is the dishonesty in allowing someone to believe they're being heard when they aren't.

I does occur to me that this would be fairly easy to implement, though, through multiple methods. Expect to see a lot of site administrators (and bloggers, too) try this now that the idea is floating around.

Update: Apparently very easy to implement - Charles duplicates the effect by altering 6 lines of code.