Janet Lee Johnson | The Art of Marketing

There’s a kerfuffle brewing about censorship at eMusic over on TechDirt, which covered a very stupid move by eMusic - editing people’s comments on their blog post.

“We just wrote about the PR nightmare facing eMusic for announcing both a price increase and its first major record label signing at the same time — leading many to assume that the price increase was due to the Sony Music deal. Some in our comments pointed out that eMusic subscribers were protesting in a variety of places — including on Twitter, where they were using the hashtag (used to designate a unique cause or event): #emusicfail. And, as usually happens in such situations, many of the hundreds of commenters on eMusic’s own blog post on the deal mentioned the Twitter hashtag, and encouraged others to start using it as well, while making their protests public. So, how did eMusic address these angry customers?

It apparently made them disappear.”

Now I’m the first to tell any business their blog is their living room, and they can control who comes there and comments. But to actually edit the comments themselves? Epic #Fail. Epic #emusicfail.

You either publish a comment or not. It’s your choice. But don’t edit a comment. And you sure as heck better not edit it after the fact! And when commenters are customers? For fun, have a look at the comments on the TechDirt post. It’ll give you an idea of what people think about the act.

And for even more fun, check out the original post over on the eMusic blog - there have been (so far) 867 comments, many with salty language that hasn’t been removed, so they’re extremely selective about their editing.