Thomas
United States of America#2Consumer Comment
Mon, August 15, 2011
Eleven years after this report was first published, Portland Indymedia still censors. My experience is that what they censor has little to do with whether they disagree with you, but whether they dislike you. I posted an article to which others posted comments, and I responded to their comments only to discover that the entire article was pulled. I looked in their "compost bin" and did not find the article there. They just pulled it, for no reason. Neither the article nor my responses violated any of their terms.
One major problem with Portland Indymedia is that its operators shroud themselves in secrecy. They have no open process, they don't identify who they are, and they don't respond personally to any inquiries about why they pull articles and comments and ban users. So it all comes off as extremely autocratic, arbitrary, petty, and compulsive rather than following any policies of openness, democracy, fairness, consensus, or any of the other qualities that make up a truly progressive organization.
The sooner that Portland Indymedia dies from lack of audience, the better for free speech.
IMC
Portland,#3UPDATE Employee
Sun, January 11, 2004
We are not a company nor are we officially a registered non-profit nor do we ask the community for money unless needed for tools to better the media source. We are individuals not employees participating in several collectives that make up Portland Indymedia. This person is simply upset because he was blocked for verbally attacking people who posted to the site and he was engaged in spamming the website on a regular basis(disrupting by filling up the site with the same posts, etc.). We put up with him for a while but he got out of hand. We are not a free speech site. We do not claim to be. For example, there are things like n**i posts, propaganda/astroturf posts, and posts that encourage criminal activity(especially with specific details) that we will not tolerate. Anything that is disruptive and nasty is subject to deletion. Repeated spamming gets you blocked for a while. It's all in our editorial policy. No one has threatened this person or taken any action against him.