Thursday, December 08, 2005

Cafepharma censorship?

At this link, it can be seen that Cafepharma.com (a bbs for pharma sales and marketing people) seems to censor the name of the website Pharmagossip , a site that looks "beyond the spin of Big Pharma PR."

Typing the pharmagossip URL into a message gets replaced with ********* .

I'm not sure what this means, but it is certainly unusual.

-- SS

4 comments:

Bruce Grant said...

Do we know that they're doing this just to PharmaGossip? CafePharma is, if anything, even more subversive of "Big Pharma PR" than PharmaGossip.

OTOH, many websites with message boards routinely delete or obfuscate live URLs as a defense against malicious software.

Worth some double-checking here.

Anonymous said...

Try it for yourself.

Try and type "pharmagossip" on a CafePharma post.

It posts as ***********

That's censorship in my book!

Bruce Grant said...

That's exactly what sites that block URLs in messages, for security reasons, do.

I repeat my question: Do we know that it is only PharmaGossip's URL that is "censored" in this way, or does it happen to any URL that a poster includes in their message?

Rather easily verified experimentally.

Anonymous said...

It is specific for PharmaGossip.