Sarah Palin's Team Deletes 10% of Comments on Her Facebook Page

Sarah Palin's handlers delete about 10 percent of the posts to her Facebook wall, according to a new Slate investigation. As a some-time troll fighter and comment moderator, that number seemed low to me for such a controversial figure, but apparently Barack Obama's staffers only delete about one percent of the messages left on his page.

To help me find out, my colleague Jeremy Singer-Vine wrote a program to capture comments to Palin's page before the clean-up crew could arrive. (Here's an explanation of how Jeremy's program works.) All these posts were initially public, if only for a few minutes. We looked at the comments to 10 Palin posts over 12 days, capturing the deletions in the 24 hours after the posts were live. In that period, a rough average of 10 percent of total posts were deleted.

The deletions amount to a real-time look at how much effort and care Palin puts into protecting her public image. It's not just the number of posts that are screened out that gives some indication of how seriously Palin's team is monitoring things. The superfine mesh through which posts are sifted also gives an indication of the work involved.

Read the full story at Slate.