It is either a sign of the maturation of the internets or blunt testimony that human nature isn’t much changed by technology that the site Boing Boing is amidst a very Old Media controversy. It decided it didn’t like a writer to whom the site had linked many times in the past. Instead of just ignoring the writer henceforth, the editors went back and deleted the posts mentioning her from its archives. Isn’t that something William Randolph Hearst might have done?

The writer, Violet Blue, tripped a wire of some sort for the powers that be at the blog, which gets a lot of hits by posting about odd things on the web. She recently noticed that the site had deleted the entries linking to her.

That prompted this story at latimes.com:

Incongruously, the forward-thinking, free-culture-touting blog BoingBoing has apparently deleted from its giant archives more than 100 posts related to, written by or containing the name of Violet Blue, the San Francisco Chronicle sex columnist, contributor to Gawker’s Fleshbot, and otherwise prolific writer about the nasty.

No one, including Blue herself, has any idea what’s behind the scrubbing. BoingBoing has been conspicuously silent; despite considerable confusion in the blogopshere, the site has not posted about the issue or said they planned to.  Blogger and long-time BoingBoing contributer Xeni Jardin did not respond to an e-mail from me, and several other bloggers and writers reported non-answers too.

The folks at Boing Boing finally responded this a.m., and, like many stonewalling media moguls of the past, when they did they a) didn’t address the matter completely, b) raised a host of new questions and c) brought much more attention to the issue than it otherwise would have warranted.

Here’s part of the explanation:

Boing Boing has been caught in the middle of a real internet shitstorm and pile-on over the last few days. A blogger named Violet Blue noticed that we unpublished some posts related to her. Some people wanted to know why.

Bottom line is that those posts (not “more than 100 posts,” as erroneously claimed elsewhere) were removed from public view a year ago. Violet behaved in a way that made us reconsider whether we wanted to lend her any credibility or associate with her. It’s our blog and so we made an editorial decision, like we do every single day. We didn’t attempt to silence Violet. We unpublished our own work. There’s a big difference between that and censorship.

We hope you’ll respect our choice to keep the reasons behind this private. We do understand the confusion this caused for some, especially since we fight hard for openness and transparency. We were trying to do the right thing quietly and respectfully, without embarrassing the parties involved.

Those remarks just make the issue worse. 1) The main “party”involved that might be embarrassed was the site itself. 2) Boing Boing is a popular site, and on the internet, links are often the source of income, so stripping mentions of Blue has overtones of the punitive as well as the vindictive. 3) As the note mentioned, the site often comments on matters of openness; the word “censorship” is overused and not really applicable in this case, but the surreptitious deletions, use of the 1984-ish term “unpublished” and the mysterious references to someone’s “behavior” isn’t going to win the site any transparency awards, either. 4) The site didn’t address charges that comments left on the site regarding the 86-ing of Blue were deleted as well.

In the hours since the note was posted, comments (some 250 as I write) have collected, with additional missives from the site’s editors. One of them, Xeni Jardin, said this:

The “unpublishing” versus “deleting” issue is this: the posts were removed from public view while an evaluation of what to do took place. We didn’t want to pay to host them on our blog anymore. This is also why we remove hateful, ad hominem attack comments from public view, too: this is our home, we are proud of the home we built and the guests who visit here with us, and we like spending time here ourselves—so we don’t like to leave piles of shit lying around on the floor.

To me, this rachets up the rhetoric: Now Blue (whose work I don’t know anything about) is “shit.” The comments are worth reading, if for nothing else to watch an institution that has made an unwise decision dig itself in ever deeper with inadequate explanations and rationales.

I haven’t gotten through all of the comments, but it seems the matter may have been sparked by Blue’s having sued a porn star who was using the same name. If that’s the case, why couldn’t Boing Boing just write a post about it?