of the day anywhere and then sit back and watch the howls of rage.

They were deleting my posts that were the least bit negative towards Hillary...

Can't say that I've ever missed the celebrity side boob or pseudoscience articles either...

Friend, fascism is no new visitor to the US. It has been here a long time. This election has just made it more obvious.

Their was a quiet effort to shutdown conservative blogs from 2008 to 2012 or so, by the conservatives themselves, blogs like mydailyroast(libertarian blog), and pursuitofliberty(ultra con nutter blog), where shortly replaced by fake blogs that had randomly generated comment sections. Their are others as well, many a ex conservative blogger received offers on their domains they could not refuse. The strategy failed, as far as I can tell because the fake blogs where not left up very long, and many of those domains are now up for sale!. Someone was attempting to control what the casual passer by would see.

The Democrats always being continually 8years or so behind republican strategies, tried the same going into 2016, not with small time blogs, but rather the big ones, With the added twist of real comment sections, that where heavily policed and censored. The Democrats are still running this strategy, your Seattle times story is merely the tip of the ice berg, Their is most certainly an idea floating around that people wont notice if you don't tell them they are banned, a simple flag that toggles a comment invisible to everyone but the original poster.

When you notice this happening at a place, BE WARY OF POSTING THEIR. Their is a near 99.9999% chance they are running big data analytics on every post made, And with a combination of browser tracking cookies, and compliant companies such as google, amazon, and Microsoft..

They really really want people to be surrounded by the information they control, They internet has been wrecking alot of politicians long term plans, ownership of the old media empires was supposed to be enough, 30-40 years ago when they first started down this path, what the internet is and has become, was entirely and completely inconceivable. And even as they saw how the internet changed things, they where idle, as the internet gave them new tools as well, even as stories and information leaked like a sieve, they where idle, as they believed their own con, that they could control it.

We are in the post Clinton defeat, post NDAPL world now... They now know they can no more control the net, then they can control the tides. The Democrats in their infinite wisdom, will probably double down on their failed strategy, and the ruubs will try and destroy the net rather then compete with it. For now both will fail.

Be on the lookout for legislation that tears up net neutrality, kills muni networks, expands spying powers, and attacks encryption.

If the site nanny doesn't like your comment, they can Ghost Ban you. Your comments will be visible to you but not to others. It's insidious.

It was created to deal with spammers. But now sites routinely use it against commenters who don't support their narrative. On youtube individual channels can ghost ban ids they don't like.

I think you're just fine.

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it." - GBS

This is common and becoming more so every day. Reddit does it (shadow-banning), nad FB is a bare-faced dictatorship and few seem to care, from "news" to "social media" virtually every commercially significant website does something like this. In fact, along with the paid trolling services, there is another industry that doesn't exist called online perception management services, that simply finds and, in a variety of ways, buries anything online that you don't want others to find.

When dinner walks up and introduces itself to you, then proceeds to kill and prepare itself for you, can you really blame someone for eating it?

On background I once worked for the Seattle Post Intelligencer back when they put ink on paper and editorially they were the liberal voice of the region. The world liberal had not been stigmatized back then. It was something to be proud of.

Newspapers have never published all the letters to the editor and routinely edit them for style and grammar no less than they do the reporters. We would at times receive thousands of letters and post cards a day when hot topics were on the front page. To print them all would have taken up the entire paper. With the advent of tiny newspapers barely able to survive someone simply picks a couple of comments to print. Hopefully the try for some balance. As always the company owns the press and freedom of using it means they get to choose what they print same with websites.

Little has changed in that arena. What has changed is that once newspapers tried to separate news content from editorial comment but now not so much so. The death of investigative reporting is a subtle form of censorship. In their heyday newspapers could assign one reporter to do a 6 month or even longer to write an investigative piece and report what they found without an attempt at balance. If they discovered that the governor was a crook that's what they reported. Now there is no full time staff that covers government here in Olympia WA from any news outlet at all let alone one reporter digging into a specific issue. We simply know much less about what the legislature is doing. Without our guard dog we don't even know when the fox is in the henhouse anymore.

HuffPo has similarly accepted and rejected comments for years. I believe it began when Arianna sold out. We are all free to decide where to get our news but this is nothing new. I scroll though once a day but also have other news sources I check.

Censorship is a feature of all authoritative regimes and particularly those that subscribe to totalitarianism perhaps that is a better word to use than fascism which is only one form of totalitarian government. Fascism has become too much of a catch all word which I believe is a mistake because that makes it more difficult to recognize. China created a mixed capitalist/communist economic system which, with it's Great Firewall, is one of the most highly censored nations in the world. Iran practices censorship and it is a theocracy. Petty kleptocratic dictators practice censorship that may be a closer definition of the Trump era.

Yes I suspect censorship will be on the rise under the current administration. When the President can call out a virtual brownshirt army on you bringing down millions of threatening tweets and flooding your email it is an act of coercion that encourages people to stay silent. Same when he calls in the heads of all the major news outlets for a "come to Jesus' meeting about how he expects to be covered. To me those are much more worrisome than comments to the editor and they have only just begun.

However here we sit freely speaking away. Since 2008 I've posted 6150 flag-free comments and written 60 stories on "another site. " They haven't always been popular with everyone but then speech that is just pleasing to everybody is pretty much worthless. The point is that they were all published and I got to say whatever was on my mind. Some of it pretty stupid in retrospect. On the other hand the groupthink on that site creates it's own form of self-censorship. There are subjects and ways of saying things that just get you trounced on so you learn that they are off limits or ways to gently approach them that waters down the impact of what you are trying to say. I hope this site is not like that. The root of Progressive is progress. How can you make progress without open and honest dialogue?

It's an important topic that we should all be concerned be constantly vigilant about. Thanks for bringing it up.

I tend to write long comments. Hope that is acceptable here.

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Since I'm progressive, I'm more likely to be banned by "liberal" sites that I visit. So far I've been banned from Booman Tribune (because, back in September or October, I asked Martin Longman, the proprietor, for proof about Russia hacking our elections), Balloon Juice (for suggesting that Mussolini understood how "corporatism" worked), Daily KOS for writing vaguely unflattering about H. Clinton's relationship to the 1%, Talk Left (I can't remember, but I believe this was back in 2008 during the "Obama boys" smears from the Clinton campaign), and Salon (for pointing out some of the more awful comments that Amanda Marcotte had written in 2005 about the Duke lacrosse team's rape trial in response to the awful things she was writing about "Bernie Bros".

So yes, censorship is on the rise in the US. Considering the current downpour of anti-Russian propaganda by the CIA I can only conclude that she was their chosen one for this election.