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Technical error, not censorship, says BBC

Posted: 03/11/06 By: Oliver Luft

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The BBC has admitted to technical errors after it was accused of censoring comments posted to its Have Your Say website.

Web mash up News Sniffer, which claims to 'monitor corporate news organisations to uncover bias', had accused the BBC of censoring comment to its Have Your Say website.

News Sniffer's 'Most Censored Threads' claimed that a single BBC discussion thread on NHS reforms had been 'censored' 340 times and that other discussions had suffered similar treatment.

Steve Herrmann, editor of BBC News website, told Journalism.co.uk: "We think there is now a technical glitch on our site, which we hadn't known about, which meant that some of the comments that should be there [on Have Your Say] aren't there. We are working to sort that out."

He added: "There are some in there which we have taken out and if we have taken them out it's because we have thought they contravened the house rules."

Mr Herrmann said each post to Have Your Say had to fit the house rule criteria, which he clarified on his editor's blog today, and those comments listed as censored on News Sniffer were most likely a mixture of comments that did not meet that criteria and those that had suffered as a result of the computing problems.

News Sniffer, which also monitors feeds from the Guardian and the Independent, was created by John Leach, from Leeds, UK, who describes himself as a computer geek and part-time free software developer.

Mr Leach said he started the site after hearing complaints from Have Your Say readers who could not fathom why their comments had been removed from the BBC discussion area.

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