CBC Censorship Out of Control!

It wasn’t the first time today when the 3rd post I’d made to a CBC News article in the past 2 months got censored for some unknown reason. I was responding to another comment by “John Thomas Cromarty”, who posts quite regularly to CBC’s news story comments about the article entitled “Should people take Russia’s new COVID-19 vaccine? Increasingly, experts say it’s probably just fine” and I’d responded with the following:

Reply to @john thomas cromarty: I have very little patience for those playing politics with the vaccine and I think we should keep a list of these bastards for later consequences to follow. That said, the bare fact we participated in the development of the vaccine should result in some percentage being made available to Canada immediately – the effort spent in its development wasn’t some kind of academic exercise, after all. Then again, China loves to break the treaties it signs and the Communist Party of China needs to be destroyed. They’re guilty of atrocities unheard of since the end of World War II (where the Uighurs are concerned) to say nothing of the human rights travesties that are visited on its own people interested in greater democracy. Maybe we should’ve thought of that before pairing up with the Chinese government to develop anything!

As for now, we shouldn’t compromise on Weng’s (the Huawei CFO that was arrested in Canada which China has demanded we release). We have a long-standing treaty with our ranking ally, the United States, and regardless of the circumstances, our obligations under that treaty are clear. And let us not forget the two Canadian hostages China already took to retaliate for Weng’s capture. I for one will never support moving away from the US as an ally – and becoming some kind of Chinese sympathizer isn’t gonna help much either. It’s not as if China is anything close to making itself a worthy replacement for the US! 

— CBC News, http://cbc.ca/news, 28-NOV-2020 (in reply to comments by John Thoms Cromarty)

I am unsure what the rationale was, but apart from one word which (arguably) could have been disallowed due to the use of an expletive – the entire article was censored about 10 minutes after being made available publicly.

In fact, I’ve twice taken the time to write letters to both the CBC ombudsman and CBC content folks about the censorship issue without so much as the courtesy of an automated reply. And I’ve started to question whether CBC even takes such comments and questions seriously. I’ve certainly taken the time to read the posting rules and other pertinent literature and can find nothing in any of the aforementioned posts that was technically “out of bounds”, according to my reasoning. Also according to that reasonsing, either I’m missing relevant information or something in CBC’s process is flawed. If they don’t want end-users commenting on stories, why provide a “fake” comments section where 30% of the posts are disabled for some unspecified reason? It feels a little arbitrary and contrary to the public transparency so often decried as the fault of governments to provide when the CBC doesn’t even adhere to that same standard itself.

And I, for one, tend to disdain hypocrisy…