The Hill should really stop pretending their moderation is politically neutral. It would really have saved us a lot of time if we didn’t have to compare notes and make years’ worth of observations to conclude that it is in fact very much biased against center-left commenters. We’re fools for thinking an ostensibly mainstream, “straight news” site would only delete comments containing profanity, racial slurs, vulgarities, threatening content, et cetera, and just leave the rest alone, but no. They seem to relish in deleting the inertly worded comments designed to annoy the delicate sensibilities of angry right wingers, almost as if the moderators themselves feel insulted by, for example, being associated with disgraced R&B artist and notorious sexual predator R Kelly.
I mean, if it was a dumb joke and it didn’t hit home, one would ignore it, right? Like a mod who leaves their personal politics out of their job, or isn’t even a Republican in the first place would just look at that and say “So it doesn’t say ‘fuck’ or ‘[bundle of sticks]’ or any of the other banned words and doesn’t otherwise offend anyone within reasonable expectations, so I’ll just leave it alone”.
Instead they’re like “That’s mean! You know plenty of Republicans have normal sex lives! It’s not our fault there are a bunch of bad apples in our party! I’m deleting this! I hate that Spartan dickhead – and that Bob Smith jerkoff who also made the same exact joke – for bringing that up on an unrelated article! I’m deleting both of their comments! They’re not funny!”
Anyway, it’d be nice if they would just be straight with us and say “We’re totally cool with blatantly racist shit being posted on our site by right wing trolls. Sure, we’ll delete some of it to keep up with the appearance of consistency, but by and large we welcome them and are unremittingly hostile to any center-left wiseasses who get a laugh mocking MAGAmerica and its voters.”