If you recall, the aggregation site Boing Boing got on the wrong end of an internet kerfluffle last week when it was discovered that the site had gone back and deleted some number of posts (apparently more than 70 but less than 100) mentioning a San Francisco sex columnist named Violet Blue.

Boing Boing bills itself as “a directory of wonderful things”; why Blue was suddenly dewonderfulled was an interesting question. But the site refused to explain why. Among other things, Boing Boing (mostly through the writings of editor Cory Doctorow) is a big campaigner for openness and transparency on the web; the secrecy, the wholesale deletion of the posts referencing Blue (which the site, somewhat unfelicitously, called “unpublishing”), and then a few other vaguely less-than-straightforward moves all combined to dismay some of the site’s readers.

You can read the site’s response, and then about 1500 comments from readers, many of them less than complimentary to the site, here.

The Boing Boing editors are interviewed en masse by an LA Times blogger here. And there’s a (not very penetrating) NYT story on it here.

As I’ve noted before, I find the issue interesting because it shows how a seemingly hip internet operation can fall back into some of the same debilitating patterns of the old media so decisively. Indeed, it’s pretty well established that no one cares about Blue per se; but a lot of people care about not being leveled with. In this sense, it’s yet another object lesson that how an institution responds to controversy can be much more important than the subject of the controversy itself.

I like Boing Boing a lot; but I think it’s incontrovertible that many aspects of the site’s editors’ actions, both in taking down the posts and responding to the controversy, raise and continue to raise fairly serious ethical questions:

1) Once comments were raised about the deletions, the site didn’t respond right away. When it did, it had its comments moderator address the issue. That post was less than candid:

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 We unpublished our own work.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.

There’s also a big difference between that post and the truth. There was no “we” involved. It turned out later that Xeni Jardin, one of the site’s editors, and apparently the source of all of the Blue posts in the past, decided on her own to go back and delete them all, for reasons she insists are personal*.

Why didn’t the site say that straightforwardly? I think this goes to the heart of the matter. When it had the opportunity, did the site communicate with its readers openly and honestly? Here the answer is no.

2) The post continued:

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.

Isn’t this a pretty rank example of passive-aggressiveness? Boing Boing trumpets that it no longer wants to “associate” with someone for unspecified matters of “behavior,” but then tries to say it’s doing so “quietly and respectfully.”

Some hours later, as comments collected beneath the post, Jardin chimed in with this explanation:

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.

Having just announced it was trying to be “quiet and respectful,” isn’t it slightly sleazy to liken Blue to a “pile of shit”?

3) Speaking of which, in the days after the deletions, it came out what Blue and Jardin had been friends; Blue said they’d had a casual sexual relationship in the past. It’s embarrassing to talk about one’s personal life, of course, but it was probably incumbent upon Jardin to mention this at some point. Blue, incidentally, says that the relationship had ended some years before and that she has no idea what prompted the deletions. She could be being less than forthcoming herself, but it seems a bit unlikely; it would be easy to demonstrate she was being dishonest if that weren’t the case.

Jardin talks about the issue with an LA Times blog here, but doesn’t get into the personal stuff:

I just wanted to take this material down for a host of reasons that I don’t want to talk about in public because I don’t think it would do this person any good. We don’t blog in detail about every minute decision we make about what to publish and what not to.

 …There wasn’t an attempt to hide it. And I didn’t bring it up again in part because it involved some personal, private stuff that I don’t tend to get into. Like whether someone’s character is this or that, or whatever kind of personal dirty laundry was involved.

4) Hits are currency on the web; Boing Boing is a major site, and the traffic and celebrity the posts lent Blue were tangible; in a way, the roots of this problem came when Jardin funneled traffic to someone she was at least friends with and was probably sleeping with as well. If the pair had had an arm’s length relationship none of this would have happened.

Back in the traditional newspaper world, if a columnist, say, was sleeping with someone who had a local business and regularly promoted the person in his or her column without disclosing it to readers, a scandal would probably result when it came to light. Particularly if the columnist tried to suddenly go back and delete all the old columns!

5) And finally, the accretion of little things. Deleting the posts without saying anything has a certain eerie overtone, like photoshopping a person out of a picture. The phrase “unpublished” has an unfortunate Orwellian cast. (The Boing Boingers defend it as a term from their blogging program, but at the least it is a convenient piece of jargon that allows them to avoid the more common term “deleted.”) According to commenters on the site who were not contradicted by Boing Boingers, the site’s copyright policy was changed to make reference to “unpublishing” after the controversy started.  Jardin herself went back and altered her own postings on the comments page, like the “piles of shit” remark, which was quietly “unpublished” as well. Any one of these could justifiably be considered minor; together, along with everything else I’ve mentioned above, they suggest the editors of the site have behaved in ways plainly at odds with the values they profess.

* Jardin is a sometime contributor to an NPR show, but I had no dealings with her when I worked there.

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Previously in Hitsville:

Boing Boing continues to self-boink

The self-boinking of Boing Boing