In Malaysia, most of our brouhahas tend to break out online these days, especially on Facebook. Just in the last two months, we've had people start Facebook campaigns to boycott bread, rally against a new national healthcare program called 1Care, and just last week, the focal point was the award of an honorary doctorate to the Prime Minister's wife, Datin Sri Rosmah Mansor, by Australian university Curtin. The criticism of Curtin via the university's Facebook page was so ferocious that the University had to suspend the comments feature on its Wall. Some users claimed that their comments had been deleted from the Wall.

It's not, however, the fact that Facebook is assuming such a monumental importance in the public consciousness in Malaysia that is of interest, but this business of deleting comments that intrigues me.

It is an open secret that organizations and brands who have gone big into social media use the delete post button to do damage control on their Facebook Walls. The more insidious but less blatant method of controlling negative posts is to populate the Wall with "Fan" posts (usually employees of the company or alter ...

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