I told you there’s no such thing as 100% Free Speech

Now don’t get me wrong. I am NOT against free speech per se. I am against those who go round purporting to propagate Free Speech, only to censor others when the very free speech they purport to propagate crosses the propagators’ own line.

Read the article in the link below to see what I mean.

PAP’s Draconian Rules against Free Speech

The Online Citizen reserves the right to moderate, edit, disallow, remove or delete comments or postings posted on this website which, in TOC’s sole discretion, are deemed to be inappropriate or are of the following nature:

- Vulgarities – in any language, whether colloquial or slang.

- Personal attacks, threats, insults, degrading or derogatory remarks about the author or fellow commenters or others.

- Racially offensive remarks or language.

- Religiously insensitive or provocative remarks or language.

- Handles, nicknames which contain vulgarity – in whatever form, in whatever language, slang or colloquial.

- Comments which have nothing to do with the issue/s or the articles under which the comments are posted.

- Comments which contain inappropriate hyperlinks or are deemed distasteful, according to TOC’s discretion.

- Lengthy comments which exceed a reasonable length. Comments should not exceed 500 words. Anything more will be subject to this site’s discretion.
- Self-promotion of products or services or websites, including promotion of religions or religious organizations, unless links are related to article under which it is posted. (If you’d like TOC to help promote your website, products or services, please send us an email.)
- Defamatory or libelous comments.

Comments which are deemed to have infringed any of the above will be disallowed in its entirety. That is, should a comment contain any of the above, the entire comment will be disallowed.

TOC will no longer edit comments, or particular words or sentences.
Our hope is that a civil, meaningful and respectful discourse can be had by all for discussion and debate. We will not be a platform for anyone who wishes to use it for any other purpose/s.

TOC reserves the right to disallow any comment at its sole discretion, and we also reserve the right to permanently ban commenters who continually indulge in any of the above-stated prohibitions.

If you should find any content on this website undesirable or offensive or which may have infringed any of the above, send us an email and we will look into them.
We can be reached at: theonlinecitizen@gmail.com .
We ask for your understanding.

Got the drift? Those of you who still didn’t get it, CLICK THE LINK ABOVE and you will get the point I am putting through. Isn’t PAPpy, …er I mean TOC very draconian putting up so much rules for censorship against Free Speech?

Again, don’t get me wrong. I am NOT against free speech or censorship. Every site, every medium of media or what not, will have some form of censorship. What varies is the degree of censorship.

My beef with TOC (or any other site for that matter) is the hypocritical and self-righteous stance of some parties who purport to propagate free speech, condemning others for censorship, yet proceed to behave like the very parties they so condemn – ie censor free speech.

Let’s not forget PAPpy’s, …er I mean TOC’s wholesale deletion of one of their past contributor’s articles, “Citizen Woon“. Don’t bother to click that link because TOC deleted it. I put the hyperlink there to prove that TOC removed that article wholesale. In fact, every single article contributed by Farquhar was deleted wholesale!

To prove that such an article did exist (before its deletion), here is a screenshot of the cached webpage of the original page that was deleted.

Note that till today, TOC has NEVER even told readers about the wholesale deletion, let alone explained those deletions.

Those who do want to read the well written article above can click on this link. I saved a cached copy of it. Note that the article had 170 responses, proving it was a hotly debated item. Yet TOC deleted it?

Say…..which part of the article (from one of their own contributors!) violated the terms such that it deserves an unceremonious boot from the hypocritical site that purports to propagate Free Speech?

>TOC’s Hypocrisy

>The Online (Gay) Citizen goes into full swing, controlling the damage Temasek Review (TR)has handed them.

Here is TR’s article on TOC’s censorship – TOC: The Overkill Censor?

Here is TOC’s damage control – TOC – selective censorship?

The issue here is not censorship itself. There is no such thing as a free for all discussion with no censorhsip. Every admin will have some degree of censorship. Even the most liberal sites would ban hate, porn and such from their discussion boards.

The issue is that TOC purports to be a platform for free speech for ALL Singaporeans, yet skew the discussion towards pro-gay. If gay sites were to do that, it is understandable. But for TOC to disguise itself as a promoter of free speech, yet skew to a sectarian view?

Hypocrite TOC’s consistent inconsistency -

What I find interesting is TOC’s explanation on the point of scriptures quoted by posters in their comment section.

We have taken pains to ensure that anyone’s religion is not derided simply because the person opposes LGBT rights. We have also made sure that no religious scriptures are referred to, as we feel that discussions on theology and intepretations of scriptures should best be discussed separately elsewhere. As such we have moderated references to scriptures, be it from people who are for, or against LGBT rights.

Hello, Hypocrite TOC.

- Whenever LGBT issues are discussed, won’t LGBTs use the excuse that it is because of Christian doctrine, that society has become homophobes?

- Don’t LGBTs keep harping and repeating that Christianity is living in the “dark age” and hence, out of touch with today’s world?

- Don’t LGBTs keep insinuating that Christianity is all about outdated doctrines, and because of that, they cannot accept homo ideals?

Well, if LGBTs keep mentioning Christian ideals and doctrine as the main reason for their woes, isn’t it only natural that Christians would respond and explain why such doctrines exist in the first place?

Won’t that entail citing scriptures?

So if TOC allows LGBTs to level accusations against Christians for LGBTs’ self-inflicted woes, won’t TOC’s censoring of Christian scriptures actually mean that Christians are locked out from defending their position?

Hello, Hypocrite TOC. Let’s see some consistency here.

It is either you allow Christians to defend themselves, including citing scriptures because you have allowed LGBTs to attack their doctrine which is based on their scriptures, OR you don’t even allow LGBTs to breathe a single word against Christian doctrine in the first place.

Saying Christians should not cite scriptures after attacking their doctrine which takes its source from scriptures, is akin to saying LGBTs should not cite LGBT ideals to defend their rights which takes its roots from their ideals, after LGBT ideals have been attacked!

In other words Hypocrite TOC, let’s see some consistency.

Hypocrite TOC’s sneaky lies -

TOC says that it has put up moderation because of odious comments. But actually TOC has a database of posters that they have put on the moderation or banned list. It doesn’t matter what you post. By default, if you are in that database, you are moderated and/or banned.

I tried to make a test post in TOC’s link above. It did not go through. Tried twice more to be sure. They didn’t go through either.

TOC has now made it such that your post doesn’t even appear on your screen at all, unlike formerly, where you are told that your comment is under moderation. I take that as TOC is preventing you from taking screenshots as evidence. What a sneaky trick.

However, in spite of their sneaky tricks and lies, here is a piece of evidence that they cannot erase. I have captured screenshots and cached links which proves that TOC deletes WHOLESALE articles from their past contributors.

Here is the original link on TOC’s website, to the article by Farquhar titled Citizen Woon. Take note of the url, “http://theonlinecitizen.com/2008/06/citizen-woon/”. The webapage no longer exists.

Here is a screenshot of the article which TOC deleted wholesale, found on Google’s cache.

Again, take note of the url “http://theonlinecitizen.com/2008/06/citizen-woon/”. That link had to exist on TOC’s website for Google to be able to cache it.

So why has TOC deleted Farquhar’s article wholesale?

In fact, if you try to do a search on the rest of Farquhar’s articles in their site, they have all been deleted!

The article “Citizen Woon” by Farquhar had 382 views (as can be seen from the above image), and 170 comments (as can be seen from the image below) before it was deleted by TOC.

TOC has in fact deleted an article wholesale, in spite of readers’ interest in the issue Farquhar brought up!
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The article was well written, which received a good response from readers. So what warranted Hypocrite TOC to delete it wholesale, not to mention that all of Farquhar’s past articles were also deleted?

Fortunately, I managed to save Google’s cache on the article. The link below is not from TOC’s original website, but a saved webpage of Google’s cache. I managed to save the whole article plus the 170 comments that come after that.

See for yourselves if there is anything in the article and/or comments that warranted a wholesale deletion.

Copy of Google’s cached webpage “Citizen Woon”

My Conclusion -

TOC is just a hypocrite and its hypocritical ways have been exposed. It has ignored many individual protests but it could no longer ignore when TR, the current New Media site that has the most hits in Singapore, highlights their hypocrisy.

Even after being caught with its pants down, it still denies that it has a blanket ban on some individuals.

Not to mention it deletes its own past contributors’ contributions wholesale.

In the end, TOC appears to be a proxy for Gay Rights, manned by Gays. Well and good that PM gazetted it a political site, tying its hands down on the amount of funds it can receive.

Nobody is against censorship per se. We are all against hypocrisy, purporting to champion the rights of Singaporeans, when in fact they are mainly interested in Gay Rights.

>TR following TOC’s footsteps – high handed arrogance

>TR takes over TOC as the new high and mighty New Media – That’s right. When TOC was dumped into the dustbin by the PAPpy’s gazette, virtually tying its hands down, you thought that at least there was Temasek Review who could go around freely dispensing all sort of news (and I really mean all sorts, from politics right down to slut news gossip) to the masses.

Boyoboyoboy. Are you wrong if you thought that!

It its own high handed ways, it justifies putting up a firewall and banning IP addresses, claiming there were “wholesale downloads”.

Temasek Review is not configured to be read offline

Dear readers,

Our in-house technical has been informed of an increase in the number of client’s requesting for our entire site. This means that our readers are using some software to connect to our servers to download our entire site which can be read offline or for some other reasons.

Due to the increase in the number of readers to our site recently, our server is already running at above 60% capacity and such downloading of our entire site will cause more strain and load on our servers unnecessary.

This will seriously affect the ability of our servers to serve its content if such “complete downloads” are allowed and many instances are doing it at the same time.

To ensure that our site remains available to all readers, we have configured our firewall to ban all such “complete downloads” attempts and ban the IP addresses “guilty” of such an act. The ban on such IPs will remain effective for a period of 2 weeks afterwhich it is automatically unbanned.

If your IP is unintentionally banned by our firewall, please contact our in-house tech with the online form, stating the IP address used when it was banned.

We would like to appeal to our readers to refrain from doing so as it would adversely affect other readers’ ability to access our site’s content.

To those organisation who have been trying to “complete download” our entire site for reason best known to yourselves, please stop doing so. We will not hesitate to ban an entire /24 or /16 and even /8 of your organisation’s IP blocks if we have to.

Thank you for your understanding.
Amanda

Most of the time, the news I get from TR (and many other news sites) are through RSS feeders. In other words, I hardly visit their main site, let alone make any posts in those sites. The last time I made any post at TR was weeks ago.

Come this morning (20 Jan 2011), I tried to visit TR’s site and this is what I got.
(Click on image to enlarge)

Now how did I get banned in the first place, when I hardly even visit the main site? Unless TR bans a whole string of range of IP addresses, which I shared with someone else, and somehow I got caught in the process.

I don’t see why anybody would want to download a whole site. Why is there a need to? Unless of course TR is now finding an excuse to ban certain IP addresses – and in the process, bans others who are totally innocent of any wrong doing.

I was able to access the site with another ISP btw.

This shows that when you get too big for your shoes, you will behave the very same way as the very big boys you target. TOC targeted the PAPpy boys and grew too big for its shoes when it got the support it wanted. When TOC fell, TR took over. Now it behaves the very same way too.

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Update – 1420h (Originally posted at 1104h)

Looks like they have lifted the ban on my ISP. Now that is strange. Either

1. They unblocked the whole string of range of IP addresses, which includes my address

or

2. Lifted my address only.

Most likely it is #1 – meaning they have lifted the ban on the string addresses, which includes the IP addresses of those they wanted banned in the first place.

The moral of the story is….

TR, TOC and what not can claim that other sites censor and that is undemocratic. But TR and TOC do it too.

You can argue that TOC and TR have their reasons. But it can be argued that the other sites have their reasons too.

In the end, “free speech” is just a matter of opinion. It really means “freedom of MY speech” – and the Admin of the site decides what is allowed and what is not.

Er…isn’t that is what TOC, TR purport they are against in the first place?