Talk about perfect timing...
Yesterday I commented on the right's fears about government intrusion into personal liberties and its trust in the free market to protect consumer privacy.
I subscribe to (and donate to) a feed from Truthout that aggregates news from domestic and international sources ranging from the New York Times and The Independent (see links for two recent articles related to climate change) to its own reports. Several email newsletters a day arrive in my inbox digesting news that might be of interest to what we'll call an anti-war, pro-environment progressive.
But suddenly, they're not showing up the same way for AOL subscribers and users of "free" email services such as Microsoft-Hotmail and Yahoo, no matter how they try to adjust their filters. Here are some representative comments from Truthout subscribers:
I subscribe via my Hotmail account to a couple of conservative newsletters to keep track of what they are doing. Hotmail is not censoring those mails at all.
What I receive is the newsletter from Conservative Alerts.com, Family Research Council's prayer targets newsletter, and the Northern Virginia GOP Agenda newsletter. I don't often go into my Hotmail account and read anything there, but there is no censorship of the conservative stuff.
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I have also had a problem with my newsletters from your organization, as well as ones from antiwar orgainzations, now being diverted to my Yahoo bulk mailbox, regardless of how often I mark them as "not spam". This started several weeks ago, and before that I always received such messages in my regular inbox. I find this insidious censorship frightening.
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It isn't just newsletters that are being blocked - articles forwarded from Truthout are also being intercepted. An article on Gen. Petraeus that I forwarded yesterday to an AOL subscriber was marked ARTICLE NOT AVAILABLE
You can read more here.