PeerFlow: Political Blocking by MySpace?

A self-described anti-war website alleges MySpace blocks it:

Rupert Murdoch's MySpace has been caught in another act of alternative media censorship after it was revealed that bulletin posts containing links to Prison Planet.com were being hijacked and forwarded to MySpace's home page. MySpace has placed Prison Planet on a list of blocked websites supposedly reserved for spam, phishing scams or virus trojans.
— MySpace Censors Anti-War Websites, Prison Planet blocked as the model for government regulated Internet 2 gets a dry run, Paul Joseph Watson, Prison Planet, Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Prison Planet says it's certain this is deliberate, because it observed it going on for more than two weeks and multiple people have observed it. However, it doesn't give any evidence that MySpace is blocking this particular site because it's anti-war, nor of any other anti-war sites being blocked by MySpace. Nor for that matter that Rupert Murdoch had anything directly to do with it.

Now I wouldn't be surpised if MySpace or some other social networking site took it upon itself to block anti-war sites, but I don't see this case proven, and it's the only one (the article mentioned InfoWars, but that's a Prison Planet affiliate). For that matter, is being against the Iraq war even controversial anymore?

According to recent polls, 70% of the U.S. public think it has been handled badly, 59% think it was not worthwhile, and 54% want to go ahead and withdraw. Yet there are still hard-core pro-war people and organizations, and that could be what we're seeing here.

Why would MySpace block Prison Planet if not because it's anti-war? In another case, MySpace spelled out a reason:

If a widget violates our TOS, we block them. Breaches would include any person, widget or software that violates copyright, poses security risks, distributes pornography or engages in commercial activity. Commercial activity includes selling ads on a MySpace page through their widget or software.
— MySpace: Why We Block Widgets, Michael Arrington, TechCrunch, 26 Feb 2007

So the question seems to be is Prison Planet using link spam to drive revenue to its site, or is MySpace blocking Prison Planet because it's anti-war? I can't tell without more information, and I don't find any stories about any MySpace blocking of any other anti-war sites, and all stories about blocking of Prison Planet appear to originate with Prison Planet's own story. Meanwhile, ironically enough the Pentagon blocks MySpace.

Users are not stuck with MySpace. You can actually choose Facebook or one of dozens of other FOAFs. This is happening to some extent: After Web cam girls and spammers bombarded Sean Conaty with buddy requests on MySpace, he switched to Facebook to connect with his real-life friends.

"Facebook seems a lot cleaner and nicer," said Conaty, 25, a Web designer at AdBrite Inc. in San Francisco. He cut back his social networking on MySpace to once a week and now logs onto Facebook daily to read comments and view photos posted by friends.

As technology companies search for acquisitions in the online world, Facebook may be boosting its value by narrowing the gap with News Corp.'s MySpace, its primary rival. Facebook attracted 69.3 million users in August, 33 percent more than in June. Visitors to MySpace declined 7.4 percent to 105.7 million, according to researcher ComScore Inc.

— Facebook grabs fed-up MySpace users, Bloomberg News, 11:41 AM CDT on Thursday, October 4, 2007 Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are more like shopping malls than they are like highways. If you get blocked on one or don't like it, you can still drive on the highways to get to another.

There are perhaps not a lot of big ones, and "cleaner and nicer" may be a motivation for them to block anything they think some significant portion of their subscribers don't like, but at least there are still choices.

As media consolidation works its way into the Internet by more purchases of social networking sites by traditional news companies, those choices may decrease, and their content may diminish. That's a problem.

Yet the first-mile ISP duopoly is a bigger problem already.

-jsq