As many of you may know, the GOP convention website was rather laughable: instead of live streams to the speeches, they instead added a video to Youtube and embedded it into the website afterwards. As they failed at making the full-screen option work in the website, I went to the Youtube videos themselves.
So, I had heard some incredible things from my Republican friends here on campus about the Palin speech. They seemed to think that her speaking ability rivaled even Obama. Personally, I wasn't that impressed: she could read a speech she didn't write from a teleprompter. Big whoop. I was rather infuriated at some of the blatant lies that came out of her mouth, but that's neither here nor there.
Anyhow, after watching the full video, I went to view the comments, and was astonished to see that every single comment was filled with glowing praise for Palin and the GOP.
Attempting to fix this, I typed up a comment of my own, and was greeted with "Comment Pending Approval."
Upon further investigation, I discovered that of all the 155 videos that gopconvention2008 uploaded to Youtube, there is not a single negative comment, despite the fact that many of the videos had ratings ranging from 3.5 to 2 stars.
Link and more below the fold.
The link to gopconvention2008's Youtube profile is here.
Wondering if this was a common practice, I looked for the Youtube Democrat equivalent, I found Barackobamadotcom's profile. I tried to post a comment, and was greeted by the same "Comment Pending Approval."
The thing is, I looked at some of the comments that HAD been approved, and found that many of them were specifically attacking Obama.
In other words, the approval option is intended to simply block spam. What the GOP is using it as is a tool to censor and screen comments to prevent all negative discussion.
This scares me.
This scares me a lot.
--Keille