About five hours after the end of yesterday’s match, FIFA.com, perhaps in response to pressure online, began allowing a limited number of comments onto the “Have Your Say” discussion board that referenced the disallowed goal. The first such comment allowed was from Deutschnuk, on June 18 at 21:49. In the 24 hours or so since then, by my count, seven other comments, not including replies, have been posted that are critical of the call (by sp0rtsfan8, bknutz, T-Rixx, stinson87, LAUREN2010, MarcS420, and jacob163).

To counter these, FIFA.com has also posted (as of this writing) seven comments arguing that the call was justified, often by suggesting that the USA side was playing rough (from algeroid7, Stipe24, Brisaca, roedl22, j0000nz, and two from SVNFTW). One comment has also been posted that discusses the call but considers both sides. From reading the board, in other words, you’d assume that soccer fans were more or less split on the question of whether Coulibaly made a bad call.

The reason that this distribution seems utterly unrelated to the distribution of opinion amongst soccer fans, bloggers, and commentators across the rest of cyberspace is that there still seems to be massive comment suppression happening on the “Have Your Say” board.

The primary evidence for this suppression is that the volume of comments does not appear to be returning to anywhere near the normal volume on other boards (which, it bears mention, are also probably subject to some censorship as well). If things have improved since the first five hours after the match (during which only 37 comments in total were approved), it’s only slightly: only 77 total comments have been approved in the 24 hours after the game, whereas 137 comments were approved in that same time span for the lower-profile Algeria-Slovenia match.

And of the comments that have been approved by FIFA.com since the match’s end, only 31 have come from Americans—that’s an average of less than one per hour. By comparison, 31 comments by Americans were posted in the first half-hour after the conclusion of the USA’s 1-1 tie against England.

In spite of what seems to be a slight policy shift, none of the undoubtedly numerous deleted comments that referenced the call in the first five hours after the match ended have been revived and posted. And there are many areas of discussion that still seem taboo, so we have no idea how many comments are still being deleted. As of this writing, for instance, no comment has been approved that mentions the referee by name, even as FIFA itself prepares to comment publicly on his performance on Monday.

And no comment has been approved that mentions (as do most newspaper articles about the match) the numerous soccer analysts and experts that have criticized the call, including Bob Ley and Alexi Lalas of ESPN (who called Coulibaly’s nullification “a disgrace”); CNN/SI’s Peter King (“Americans, and the world, should be outraged at FIFA”); the New York Times’ Jeff Klein (“Horrible performance from the Malian referee, who wrongly nullified what would have been the winning US goal!”); and even the British paper, the Guardian (“what looked like a perfectly good late winner was ruled out”), whose home team stood to benefit from the call.

Some other interesting FIFA-censorship-related tidbits have also been floating around, such as the organization’s decision to seize and destroy a Liverpool FC banner containing the words “Save Liverpool FC Hicks & Gillett Out,” according to Richard Buxton of Click Liverpool, because it “contravened their rules against obscene or vulgar images being displayed at games.” George Gillett and Tom Hicks are the unpopular American owners of the club.

Buxton also reports that FIFA “ejected 36 Holland fans from yesterday’s 2-0 win over Denmark for wearing mini-dresses designed by Dutch brewer Bavaria, citing ‘ambush marketing.’”

And here’s some interesting new wording from the capsule summary of the controversial match result on FIFA.com: “USA retrieved a 2-0 half-time deficit to earn a deserved draw with Group C rivals Slovenia.”

Emphasis added.

Other soccer discussion boards, like the Washington Post’s Soccer Insider, were flooded with debate and discussion about the questionable call, which began almost immediately after it happened at about 16:40 GMT (the time zone used by FIFA.com). So were Twitter feeds (although at some point Twitter crashed, as it frequently has during the World Cup). The discussion over the controversy really exploded around the internet after the game ended at 16:51, and before long, USA’s tie with Slovenia already had more Google News blog hits (850) than Serbia’s upset of Germany (701).

But on FIFA.com, the silence about USA-Slovenia has been deafening. The latest comment to appear on the discussion board has a timestamp of 20:04. In the 193-minute span between the game’s end and the latest comment’s time stamp, only 24 squeaky-clean comments have been approved. For instance: “great fightback by the USA”; “this is the right result on the balance of play”; “way to go USA”; “the match was really exciting!”; “slovenia is the best team”; “USA are becoming a real nice team!”; and “Slovenia had a great chance to qualify in the next round!! But in the second half we were too defensive.”

By comparison, in that same span of time—193 minutes—after the end of Germany-Serbia (which ended today at 14:20), there were already 175 comments posted. That’s more than seven times as many.

At one point, a user named Rossus, from South Africa, posted one comment that did, in the most polite possible way, at least hint at the idea that there might have been some controversy. Rather than suggesting any human fault, Rossus’s comment merely used the word “luck”: “I am not a USA supporter but the USA was very unlucky not to win.” But even that comment, after briefly appearing on the match overview page (which streams the latest comments), was later censored, and never made it to the discussion board page itself. The comment is no longer on the site, but I took a screen shot of it during the brief time that it appeared on the overview page, which appears here to the left.

Just to test my theory personally, I also tried posting the following comment: “I disagree with referee Koman Coulibaly’s decision to nullify the third US goal.” Sure enough, as other posts materialized on the board, mine never did. It goes without saying that FIFA.com refused to comment on or post my followup questions about what the standards were for censorship on their site.

It’s interesting to see how often, and how deeply, large organizations seem to misunderstand the purpose of discussion boards, blogs, and other internet debate and discussion fora. They seem to imagine that most users and readers won’t notice the censorship, or that they will find cleansed discussion boards to be valid platforms for authentic debate and discussion.

I suspect, though, that these organizations tend to underestimate both the curiosity of their readers and the power of the internet as a commons, and that this sort of board cleansing just leads people simply to speak with their fingers by ditching FIFA.com—in spite of its undoubtedly large software budget—and seek their information elsewhere. This goes not just for the would-be commenters that have suffered through the sting of a rejected comment, on which they might have spent a good deal of time; it also goes for the would-be readers, many of whom immediately notice that something seems fishy.

This doesn’t just undermine fans’ trust in FIFA; it also squanders an easy opportunity for the body that administers the world’s favorite sporting event to become a place where fans can share, discuss, and debate the things that they care most deeply about—thus engendering goodwill and helping to spread the good word about soccer.

Instead, the fans are turning elsewhere. A homemade-looking website called bigsoccer.com, for instance, already has 728 posts on its SerbiaSlovenia-USA discussion thread.

Its motto? “Share the passion.”