BeWelcome censorship

BeWelcome is quite an open and transparent organization compared to CouchSurfing and Hospitality Club but there have been some alleged cases of censorship in BeWelcome, in ocasions where the moderation team aplied the forum rules and this decision was disputed by the ofenders.

Moderation team

BW's forum is moderated by the moderation team, which coordinates itself in a private group. This team was created in 2006 [1], and was then named "Forum team". In 2007-2008, it intervened a first time (by a warning), but this team started to be busy in 2011 [2], when the forum activity increased.

Removal of posts

• In March 2013, invitations to Seek the duck (a toulousan event promoting BW) were cross posted 39 times. Groups and forum were then displayed on the same page, and some members have perceived an irritating disruption of all other on-going threads of the forum. After several days of crossposting, 39 copy-pastes of the same message were eventually deleted by a member of the moderation team because there was a clear infraction of Forum & Groups rules. This opened a debate [3] about many topics including moderation. Local members later reposted the message in their groups, and it was made sticky, which made it very visible for a while, but the moderation team has not changed the ruling about the infraction to the rules. It can easily be claimed that this incident itself is not censorship as only 39 repeatition of the very same message were deleted, and the original post was kept, which some consider as less of a restriction of your freedom of speech.

• In June 2013, Concerns on censorship/moderation a forum post by Puneet, about his deleted forum post that contained an offtopic unsolicited offer of his professional services for money in a local group forum.

Banning of members

In December 2012, Tim Loal, notorious (some would say infamous) for being vocal about the management of BW, was banned from the forums for one year. This ban was the first of its kind and happened after repeated violations against the site's official terms, 3 official warnings and 2 short-term bans which had separate warnings and were lifted to allow for better behaviour. A protest group was created.

Member profiles that are created solely for sending spam to other members are banned from the site on a daily basis, usually after abuse is reported.

Censorship of the BeWelcome censorship couchwiki page

The censorship on BeWelcome page has been modified to become irrevelant by the BeWelcome team.