The Artfully Meticulous Maintenance Of Sarah Palin’s Facebook Wall

Sarah Palin mans most of her political media empire from the not-so-lofty perch of her Facebook page– a one-stop shop for all of Palin’s latest news, editorials, policy and political moves. Given it’s status as the most reliable hubbub of Palin activity, it takes an extraordinary amount of maintenance to keep it tidy. Today, Slate took a backstage look at what goes into keeping the most democratic part of the page, the wall, nice and clean.

Many other politician Facebook pages do little to censor the wall posts various fans and foes leave on their wall, and often pay a price for it (see Sen. Scott Brown), the Palin team works around the clock to make sure that wall posts are g-rated and not embarrassing. Author John Dickerson compares the process to that of selection questions at a town hall meeting: “Both appear to be spontaneous but are actually highly choreographed.” To figure out what kind of comment was most likely to be found unsuitable for republishing, Dickerson had a colleague capture all the comments with a program before they were deleted. They found that the censorship was minimal– about 10% of posts– and that it didn’t exclusively address negative comments.

In fact, a number of the posts deleted were favorable, just a bit on the kooky side. Birther talk, overly zealous religious comments, ad-hominem attacks on anti-Palin posters, and vapid messages of support all qualify. Predictably, and appropriately, anything racist, sexist, or ethnically offensive goes too, as well as comments on the Palin family. But the comment that is most likely to shake up Palin detractors that Dickerson caught before deletion was one he categorized “polite disagreement”:

“Sarah, perception is everything! I learned that in the military. All you have to do is disassociate yourself from those Tea Partiers that are indeed racist and the NAACP gones [sic] away,” wrote one in response to Palin’s post on the NAACP’s charge that the Tea Party tolerated racism. “Even they [the NAACP] admit the Tea Party is not a racist organization. Mrs. Palin, I believe you to be an honorable Woman. You believe in your cause. Sometimes for the good of the cause one has to make a stand even to those that support the cause. Remember John Mccain, circa 2008 in which a woman stood up and called Candidate Obama a Muslim. The Honorable John Mccain rebuked her. This could be your moment.”

Neither offensive nor anti-Palin, just a sensible, agree-to-disagree comment. The deleting team likely has a metric for measuring what stays and what goes and, judging from a lot of the comments the Slate team found, it seems to have little to do with dissent, the “polite disagreement” comment notwithstanding. The Palin team did not answer any inquiries, though Dickerson gives them the benefit of the doubt that “given how prolific Palin has been, and how carefully the posts are screened, they could be too busy.”