It may interest the wider Indymedia readership to know what the small editing group is doing in your name to control the content on the Newswire.

Over the past few weeks a number of people have raised concern over the interpretation of the Editorial Policy, the practice of hiding comments without notification and worse the now common practice of editing comments to change their meaning.
Because of this a small group of us here at a major university (no we are not stupid enough to say which one) posted a number of stories and comments to the Newswire. We were careful to ensure not one of them broke the Editorial Guidlines however they did talk about issues the IM editorial Kollective regard as 'unsuitable'.

Without exception every story was hidden however the interesting thing was that having been hidden only two (out of nine) of the stories were notified to the List and moved to the "hidden" section, the others simply went away.

A similar situation with comments to stories, the majority were never seen, (I wonder how many readers of the Newswire know that the editors notify nobody when they remove comments ?) Again these comments were checked to ensure they met the Editorial Guidlines and contributed to the original post however what they did do what offer an alternative viewpoint or opinion, one not in keeping with the official 'policy'.

Finaly we come to the editing and changing of comments which do stay. We found two examples of this with posts we made, in both cases it meant the point of the comment was lost or altered.

Sekking to become involved in the Editorial process we tried to join the "List" the part of Indymedia UK where discussion of editorial control is supposed to be however our emails were ignored and never appeared on the "Lists" meaning they were never seen. A clever policy which means people seeking to become involved or even question the system are refered to a place where they can't become a problem

Our finding are being pulled together into a paper for publication later this year ( I guess not on Indymedia UK) as part of a wider investigation into censorship within the alternative media