Apple's bizarre PR strategy: delete unflattering threads

I learned 10+ years ago that deleting comments was a bad idea. Obviously, spam, scams, hate, porn and malware should be deleted, but real comments (critical or otherwise), voicing real concerns, by real people shouldn't be deleted. In fact, there's a long internal discussion going on here at ZDNet about how to better manage the spam trickling into the TalkBacks. (For now, keep flagging them...)

But Apple deals with things in weird ways.

Antenna flaw? Blame the user. Blame the algorithm that calculates the bars.

Unflattering issues in Apple's support forums (discussions.apple.com)? - delete them. Maybe they will go away.

TUAW discovered that numerous threads referencing Consumer Reports' recent article 'not recommending' the iPhone 4 were being summarily deleted from Apple's support forums, and it isn't the first time. In my piece about the iPhone 4's proximity sensor bug I noted that Apple was also deleting posts about it as well.

I was going to end this post by saying that despite TUAW's story, there were still some posts about the bad Consumer Reports review of the iPhone 4 in the Apple forums -- there were some there this morning -- but alas, they also appear to have been deleted, so I can't.

Maybe if Apple spent as much time fixing the iPhone 4 flaws as it did deleting critical comments we'd actually see a software update for the iLemon in a timely manner.

(At least fix the silly proximity sensor bug so that I can actually make a phone call without hanging up every time!)