Hearst Corporation, a large print, television, and internet publisher, has notified one of its bloggers that he needs to stop removing the vowels from certain comments on his blog. Apparently Hearst’s lawyers have some concerns about the practice.

As some of you might know, removing the vowels from offensive, abusive, or otherwise crappy comments is called disemvoweling. We disemvowel comments that don’t follow our comments code; it seems like Matt, the blogger in question, disemvoweled any negative comments.

Matt didn’t post the letter from the lawyers, so we can’t see what their specific concerns are, but we’re curious what legal issues might be created by disemvoweling.

A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes why [Times Union]

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