Appeal to censorship

Someone is wrong on The Internet

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Not to be confused with a Galileo gambit, where people claim they're being censored and that their being censored makes them correct.

An appeal to censorship occurs when dissenting ideas are removed or silenced in order to make a statement appear unanswered, and thus more probably true. The idea comes down to "I'm correct because nobody else disagrees (because I removed all dissent)". Whether or not this is an acceptable practice depends entirely on the mission of the website in question and the way in which the comments are presented. The deletion of constructive and on-topic comments is particularly disingenuous when the site in question claims to value freedom of speech.

Deletion of dissenting views may give the original article a false sense of validity, in that to the casual user, it appears that no one has been able to offer valid criticism. It's a bit like a Congress voting on a bill and locking the doors to prevent dissenters from voting against it, or Pride's Purge in which dissidents were arrested by soldiers if they attempted to enter the House of Commons.

Form

1. I made statement P!
   P is wrong because it's an appeal to authority.
2. Nobody has disagreed!
   Hey! Stop deleting my posts!
3. P is true!

Wikis

Wikis provide paper trails (also known as "histories", or here on RationalWiki, the "fossil record") through which edits and deletions are recorded and visible to users, with the possibility of restoring previously deleted content. Most wiki packages allow a comment to be written to explain the reasoning behind a deletion, but use of this is governed by policies decided on a site-by-site basis. Also, on conservative wikis such as Conservapedia, even when an edit summary box is offered, editors often ignore its presence rather than admit to editing out wrong thought. Techniques can be used to make users and their comments vanish from the history of the wiki. This practice is known as deep burning. This revisionism is particularly useful when the simple deletion of a comment would leave behind the impression that a comment was deleted for being inconveniently correct.

Forums and blogs

Forums and blogs do not normally provide the detailed history visible in wikis and there are too many software packages to describe them all. Blogs and forums are governed by a mixture of technical features and site-by-site policy. In most cases, editing of user-posted comments would be flagged as having been modified by an administrator, the original content being hidden from view. Blog/forum software packages tend to allow for the deletion of entire posts, with some leaving behind a note stating that the post was removed by an administrator. In some blogs, the posting of comments must be vetted by an administrator before being allowed to appear on the site, the refusal of which may effectively be disagreement by deletion. In other cases a blog owner may simply block comments from being made, either by default, or if they feel that their views are going to be challenged. This is not inherently dishonest, since the blog owner may not wish to discuss their work, and it might actually be a good idea to do this if one anticipates that the majority of comments are likely to be inane, profane, or otherwise not worth anybody's time to read; for example, atheism-oriented sites could forbid proselytizing and arguments consisting entirely of random quotes from scripture.

Deleted comments on such websites may be retrieved from internet archiving services (such as https://web.archive.org/), provided they were previously published at some point and crawled into the archive.

See also

• Burning the evidence
• Don't feed the Troll
• Edit war
• Wandalism