The Joys of Censorship and a looney leprechaun
In the fall of 2011, Beth Mason gave her “soldiers” the order to collect online comments against “member of our.” The email order sprurred her “business partner” James Barracato and ubermensch backer Lane Bajardi off to collect everything in the Hoboken blogosphere.
By March of 2012, the operation was fully underway and a meeting with Beth’s husband detailed by Lane Bajardi depicting imaginary threats from people associated with the Reform movement. Repeated requests in depositions for Bajardi to point to any such threat produced no coherent response (or no response at all). Similar requests to produce the claimed threats from his attorney produced no evidence of any kind.
Here however, Lane Bajardi rattles his tin cup to sue others. In an email titled “Some of the latest threats,” a partial email to Richard Mason at his work address at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz and his wife Beth Mason with James Barracato and Kimberly Cardinal Bajardi on March 4, 2012. The bold parts are from the Lane Bajardi original:
Later, a curious exchange with Kimberly Cardinal Bajardi and her friend discus the joys of censorship on Hoboken Patch. From a partial email celebrating the discovered tool of automatic comment deletion on Hoboken Patch.
Subject: How many licks does it take?Sent: Fri, Mar 16, 2012 1:23:25 AM
….At one point the article had over 146 posts, but it took me over 4 hours to delete ThisMeansWar and all but two of Pincus’. As of this email, the article has gone from 146 posts to 109.
You are simply amazing. No, they never leave the keyboard. I need to invent a new term for Pincus. Stalker or Internet terrorist doesn’t begin to cover it.
From: Sara Stojkovic <sastojkovic@gmail.com> March 15, 2012 10:58 PM
Ha! Now it got fun – I’m really jerking them around. I got it all the way down to 105 comments and it’s freaking them out because now they realize Patch comments can be censored.
After doing it so long I doubt now that it goes through Clare. I think it’s automated either locally or at a central national Patch server and if a post gets 4 or more flags (you have to leave the site each time) then it removes the offensive post about 85% of the time. I got so good at it that I would flag 4 comments in the same article leave the site immediately by using my bookmarks and then come back immediately and flag the same comments so the posts were coming down in 4 to 10 minutes. I got it almost automated on my part so to speak, I could cook dinner and make phone calls to MN and still keep the deleting process going.
But of course, it will all come back up because they have nothing else to do. Oh well. Now we know we can screw with them and Patch.
BUT- if we organize and do this periodically, where we wipe out a whole days worth of their posting work, the zealots will be furious with Patch and start posting berating comments about Clare and Patch and then thy’ll have to create articles on MSV and Pincus site devoted to bashing Patch censorship. Seriously, best way to get back at Clare and Patch…..
The love of censorship harkens back to the good old days on Hoboken411. Perhaps the return of a looney leprechaun is in the wings?
