September 16, 2004

Borders Book - not quite what it seems...

Charles at Little Green Footballs uncovers a particularly nasty bit of misrepresentation if not outright lying from the corporate management at Borders Books... There is an Employee Union bulletin board for internal use. This is accessible from the internet . There was a recent thread regarding the book "Unfit for Command" which is highly critical of J.F. Kerry's political stance and actions in Vietnam. The thread discussed Borders employees who would damage copies of the book (for return to publisher), hide them, tell customers they were out of stock, etc... All this was visible until today and when you go there today, you will see this message: bq. Dear visitors from land of blog: bq. Thank you for your interest in the Borders Union web site. Please be aware that it is not the policy of Borders Books, or of any of the Unions that represent its employees, to "hide" or refuse to sell a book based on political content. Borders management can be expected to take appropriate disciplinary measures if they catch employees interfering with sales. bq. Some people who post on our bulletin board do not work at Borders. We do not verify employment. According to IP Address records, the person who posted the "let's hide the book" message was also posting under another name, responding to the messages he posted under his first name. Under his second ID, he claimed to be a conservative who was shocked that Borders employees would not tolerate diversity of opinion. This suggests to us that this was a troll who was trying to manufacture controversy. His account(s) have been deleted. He was a new user. Other, long time users told him his ideas were bad. We are temporarily ending user registration to prevent further incidents of trolling. Accounts created on September 15th have been deactivated. bq. We have temporarily blocked access to a portion of the site in order to protect our webserver from crashing due to high traffic. Please be patient. The site will return in full when traffic levels ebb. bq. Since Borders, like many corporations, refuses to pay a Living Wage, Borders local customers have the option of speaking to an underpaid manager if they feel an underpaid floor employee is pursuing an agenda different from the sales agenda of the corporation. bq. Have a nice day. Gee, from this message it sounds like it was just one person using two accounts and coming in to troll... However, if you look at Google's cache of this thread, an entirely different picture shows up... Veeeery interesting... Posted by DaveH at September 16, 2004 5:44 PM