Presidential Blogging 2.0: Block Everything You Don’t Want to Read

Lately the topic of various government officials joining the blogosphere with their own personal or official blogs has been a popular one with many politicians realizing internet may be just the right place to openly talk to the population and hear what people are really concerned about. The latest news we covered was about Kazakhstan Prime Minister coming up with the idea of turning every minister in his government into a blogger - and a blogger willing to listen to comments from readers as well.

Here in Russia we now have a president who is famous for his warm feelings towards internet - and often referring to the world wide web as “our favorite internet”. Of course this attitude is visible everywhere, including his decision to have a video blog to openly speak to the viewers online. And while we in the country were pretty enthusiastic about this presidential vlogging idea, people can never be happy enough and we soon heard complaints from visitors who were not content about only hearing what the President had to say but wanted to be heard as well.

But unfortunately comments were disabled on all the posts from the presidential video blog and people continued to discuss the latest entries everywhere. This situation has changed this week with the enabled comments giving people the freedom to speak in addition to the freedoms to watch and listen.

But it quickly turned out that this freedom was very limited as well: in addition to having to register with the site, the users will also have to wait for their comments to pull through a complicated moderation process. And of course it is no surprise that we hear new complaints already - this time about censorship as people notice their comments are not approved if they mention some topics that the blog moderators are not comfortable with.

The statistics available shows that about a quarter of all the submitted comments never make it to the blog with some users actually banned by the site moderators’ from further appearances in the comments section. The problems mainly began when commentators began to demand the President’s opinion on a very recent tragedy that happened in the country - a fatal crash of a helicopter that took lives of 7 people, including the President’s envoy to the Russian parliament, who were on a hunting trip to the Altay Mountains in the South of Siberia. Visitors to the President’s blog began to question if the accident could be related to the aircraft descending to the lowest permissible altitude for the hunters to take better aim at rare mountain sheep that people suspect the passengers of the helicopter were shooting from the air - this suspicion is very popular among people in the country who are indignant about this mortal pastime.

There were multiple commentators who wanted to share their feelings about the accident with the president (hopefully) and other readers about this topic but such comments did not appear on the blog and were all kept unpublished - while safe comments were all approved relatively fast even despite of the moderators complaining about huge numbers of comments they can’t seem to be able to keep up with.

Eventually when asked by press the moderators of the blog explained that they had decided the helicopter crash was a very delicate ground. Of course the situation is still too fresh and while all the publications and blogs are full of various reports about the accident, it may not be appropriate to let people pose questions that could make the president himself uncomfortable on his own blog. And making this official blog a place to discuss this topic is definitely not what the authorities want - so it is now wonder this is not happening.

But unfortunately while the moderators promised they would only sort out comments that are inappropriate and are not related to the subject of the video entries on the blog, this all looks too much like censorship to me - and not to me only. And while I know that Russian users tend to use too many obscene words in blog comments, this does not look like the case here with everyone complaining about very polite questions on this difficult topic never making it to the list of published comments. So the question is: what’s the point in allowing the comments at all if you are going to have them moderated heavily? Would not it be wiser to stick to talking without promising to listen - and choosing what to listen to carefully?

Via (in Russian), photo of the Russian President Dmitry Medvedev via World Economic Forum on Flickr