Yesterday I had an email from a UK government department asking me to remove or alter two comments on one of the entries on this blog. I’m not a big fan of censorship (my views on censorship having liberalised somewhat lately, in that I may not agree with what you say but I’ll defend your right to say it), but I did comply with the request.
Though I may be denying someone of their freedom of speech, the comments were also denying someone of their privacy – namely, they had posted the name, email address and telephone number of someone working for the government’s insolvency service. It was this person who contacted me, asking me to remove those details and also some other incorrect information.
I do believe freedom of speech is very important, but not when another person’s right to a private life is sacrificed as a result. Though this was a minor case, it does mean that anyone who posts details another person’s personal details may expect their comments to be deleted. As it happens, this has happened before but with less fanfare, since the information that was posted in a comment was protected by a court order and covers all media outlets in England and Wales, so I deleted it without much hesitation.
Censoring
March 29, 2006
This work, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.
March 29, 2006 at 12:15
Absolutely. As you may know, I’m not a fan of unrestrained freedom of speech anyway, but whatever; you did the right thing. Well done (hope that doesn’t sound patronising
).
March 30, 2006 at 01:03
Haven’t EU directive 95/46/EG been implemented in the UK? In Sweden it protects personal information such as names, addresses, phone numbers and other private stuff.
March 30, 2006 at 11:51
Eh, probably. No idea. Even if it hasn’t it’s still not very nice.
March 30, 2006 at 15:26
What was wanting edited?
March 31, 2006 at 10:18
It was a comment on one of the GetMeTickets articles.
April 3, 2006 at 17:44
I fully support your decision to remove the offending comments. In fact, I don’t see it as censorship at ALL. That information should not have been posted in the first place.
April 3, 2006 at 17:53
Well that’s odd, my Gravatar isn’t showing up.
April 8, 2006 at 16:53
You sure it wasn’t about the CIA employee’s identified online?
April 8, 2006 at 17:00
Yes, I’m sure. Though the person in question worked for the government it was not in any kind of intelligence role.
April 9, 2006 at 00:10
you did the right thing!! 100%