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“Tell Shell” Internet discussion forum still “Suspended”
Published by ShellNews.net Thursday 12 January 2006 05.45 hours EDT

By Alfred Donovan

On 26th October 2005, Mondaq published my article entitled: “The Slow Death of the ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC "Tell Shell" Internet Discussion Forum”.

It focused on the barrage of criticism about Shell management made by “Tell Shell” contributors and on Shell’s underhand censorship policies used in operating the forum, directly at odds with its recent claimed support for freedom of speech on the Internet. Since then, Shell General Counsel, Richard Wiseman, has confirmed to me by email that Shell does censor postings made on “Tell Shell”.

My article: http://www.mondaq.com/i_article.asp_Q_articleid_E_35696

“TellShell” had been active via Shell’s portal website www.shell.com since 1997.

As of Saturday 5 November 2005, visitors to the forum were confronted with the following message: -

“Thank you for visiting our site. We're currently redesigning our forum and plan to be back on-line with regular, business focused discussions in the future. We'd like to thank you for all the comments, views and opinions you have shared with us over the years and look forward to being back again shortly. All of the previous debates have been archived and are available to view from this page.”

Here we are over two months later and the forum remains suspended. In any event Shell had not responded to any postings on Tell Shell since June 2005 and self-evidently no longer wanted to hear the feedback coming from the forum.

It is ironical that my article discussing the death of the forum was the last critical posting to appear on the active “General Discussion” forum. I had not anticipated that it would hasten the end of the forum in its former guise.

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