Did Yahoo take the old message boards down because of pressure from the Bush Administration and AIPAC?

Question

The official reason was that the old boards "allowed a small number of vocal users to dominate the discussion".

I have heard a rumor that there were complaints that too many of the posts were anti-Bush Administration and also anti-Israel. Since the boards were directly connected to news stories, they were read by many who were reading just the news stories - the Bush administration as well as AIPAC were not very happy about this, so they asked Yahoo to disconnect the two - is there any truth to this story?

BTW, aol news has message boards similar to the old yahoo boards.

Answer 1

Heh. Yeah, the Bush administration cares about random people typing on the internet.

Somehow, I think they've got bigger fish to fry, more influential people to repress.

Answer 2

No.  That's absurd.

What happened was that an attorney in California named Steven Galton became alarmed by some posting on a yahoo message board about one of his clients.  He posted a number of times in response, in order to argue his client's point of view.  He was then subjected to the usual abuse that one might have come to expect on a yahoo message board.  Rather than take this in stride the way everybody else did, he chose to threaten yahoo with a class action lawsuit for not "monitioring" their boards which is arguably a violation of yahoo's own stated policies.  He set about attempting to put together a class for his proposed lawsuit and yahoo folded up like a lawn chair.

Thus the boards died, and all that fun was killed.  All because of a lawyer named Steven Galton.  Little wonder that so many people despise lawyers.

Answer 3

thanks, i didnt know that