MoveOn -- The Interview

Interesting interview with Noah Winer of MoveOn from Jewschool; read it all, or just the excerpts here. 

Two items, however, to highlight before the excerpts:

1. Noah Winer, in addition to being one of many Jews who are among the small senior staffat MoveOn, says that, "Judaism is a big part of my life, culturally and spiritually. I’m shomer Shabbat and active in a couple synagogues and minyanim in Philadelphia. My partner is a rabbinical student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Judaism is also central to the work I do at MoveOn."

2. Noah also makes a critical point that many on the right are currently (in my personal opnion, intentionally) eliding in order to smear progressives:

We have a moderator who tries to catch really offensive comments, but we don’t approve everything that’s posted. The media and the public need to learn to distinguish content entered on an open forum or in a contest from content an organization actually endorses — otherwise, we’ll be left with a less free and open society.

Excerpts follow; questions and intro are in italics:

Noah T. Winer is a 27-year old Maine native, resident of Philadelphia and a Campaign Director for MoveOn, an Internet-based progressive political action committee (PAC).

Launched in 1998 by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades, MoveOn played a major factor in the 2004 Presidential election, when, along with other “netroots” institutions like DailyKos, it helped foster a revolution in the Democratic Party by putting dark horse candidates out front and center, giving the old party machinery a run for its money. That year, Winer and his high school friend Eli Pariser joined the organization. It presently boasts 3.2 million active constituents.

Recently, MoveOn has found itself at the center of controversy after a barrage of anonymous antisemitic messages began appearing on its website forum along with a simultaneous wave of accusations by Right-wing bloggers that MoveOn, an organization with many Jewish staff members and constituents, was willingly harboring antisemites and espousing an agenda hostile towards Jewish interests.

MoveOn smells a rat.

I caught up with Winer, who’s currently on the road in Seattle for the final push of the midterm election campaign, via instant messenger.

[. . . .]

Turning to the recent antisemitism controversy: Who manages and maintains the MoveOn message forums — in-house staff or outside volunteers?

Both. The idea of the forum is anyone can post a comment and anyone else can rate it as useful or not. The best comments float to the top, and the entire staff reads the top comments each week.

Maintaining an open forum is like maintaining a democracy with free speech: it can be messy, people say offensive things, there’s open debate and disagreement. We believe in bottom-up politics, so we’re taking these risks and sometimes we get burned. We have a moderator who tries to catch really offensive comments, but we don’t approve everything that’s posted. The media and the public need to learn to distinguish content entered on an open forum or in a contest from content an organization actually endorses — otherwise, we’ll be left with a less free and open society.

Were you aware, before this scandal broke, that there were individuals using the cover of anti-Zionism to espouse antisemitic views in the MoveOn forums and that these posts were receiving disturbingly high ratings?

We discovered and removed the posts before the scandal broke. Almost all the comments were posted and rated highly by non-MoveOn members who joined the forum with multiple accounts to create trouble.

In other words, most of the comments aren’t the real views of anyone, just an effort to smear MoveOn and its members for political gain.

So it’s your belief that this incident was coordinated in order to provoke trouble for MoveOn?

It looks that way.

Did MoveOn erase the posts of individuals who raised concerns about these manifestations of antisemitism, as has been alleged by MoveOn’s detractors? Did you remove those posts acting under the belief that the complainants were also the offenders?

I don’t know for sure, but my guess is the whole thread was removed.

Comments

[Jan Mel Poller]

Mr. Winer's response is not true. Read my response that follows the interview on www.jewschool.com.

The anti-Semitism went on for more than 2 1/2 years before I went public. MoveOn.Org has a right to tolerate anti-Semitism, to ban me and remove my posts from the forum. (I haven't posted for about a year). I also have a right to show what is in their public forum.

People have an obligation to understand what an organization that they support stands for. YOU can then make your own decision.

Mr. Winer and Mr. Pariser have not shown that anything I revealed is a lie. They are attacking us with inaccuracies and innuendos.

[Bill Levinson]

Mr. Winer should know the first rule of playing cards: don't see and raise when you ain't got no cards and your opponents have all the aces.

The above statements are not only patently false, they can and have been proven false.

"We have a moderator who tries to catch really offensive comments, but we don’t approve everything that’s posted."

http://www.actionforum.com/general/faq.html (MoveOn's FAQ page, not mine) says each comment is read twice. Furthermore, the moderators had no trouble at all in finding and deleting my postings, while I had no trouble in finding and archiving literally dozens of hate speech examples more than two weeks after MoveOn's press release of September 2.

"We discovered and removed the posts before the scandal broke."

See above, this is not true. The fact that I have several dozen on my own Web pages, all of which I collected on or after September 17, proves it.

"Almost all the comments were posted and rated highly by non-MoveOn members who joined the forum with multiple accounts to create trouble."

Two individuals (Hutchinson and Ellis) who were responsible for quite a bit of the hate speech were forum regulars. Jan Poller's letter shows that this Hutchinson individual was posting as long ago as April 2004.

"Did MoveOn erase the posts of individuals who raised concerns about these manifestations of antisemitism, as has been alleged by MoveOn’s detractors?"

Yes, absolutely. Jan Poller and I can both attest to this.

One posting that MoveOn's moderators deleted was my observation that MoveOn is a liability to the Democratic Party. MoveOn.org and John Kerry (who has probably blown hundreds of thousands of undecided votes for next Tuesday) is why you got four more years of George Bush.