The Setup Post
Yesterday, Justin posted an excellent article for Liberal Conspiracy on the whole issue of honest debate on blogs
There’s been an interesting development in the comment thread. At around 1.30 am this morning, someone posted a comment using an ID from a brand new Blogger account. That brand new blog contains very thinly veiled nasty personal attacks on Nadine Dorries. They are, in fact, exactly the sort of attacks which are described in the standard defence employed by certain bloggers - “I refuse to answer your legitimate question and to justify that refusal, I’m going to spin it to look like it’s part of a personal attack”. The brand new blog contained unjustified attacks of just the sort which are often falsly claimed.
When Justin deleted the first comment, the brand new blogger complained about Liberal Conspiracy “sinking to the depths of Guido Fawkes, Iain Dale etc”.
Which is funny given that the brand new blog contains just the sort of unsubstantiated tabloid gossip, crude jokes and other assorted cheap shots pioneered by Guido.
There is a very obvious difference between deleting links to nasty gratuitous personal attacks and deleting legitimate comments because they are politically embarrassing. We can argue about what is and isn’t legitimate but here a couple of my own rules of thumb:
- Questions about the behaviour of a member of parliament acting an their capacity as a member of parliament - normally OK.
- Links to nasty personal attacks of a potentially libellous nature - normally not OK.
I don’t think that’s overly controversial (especially for a project like LC) but it apparently is to the brand new blogger.
Of course, a link to that nasty personal attack against that MP in that context would have been very useful to those attempting to spin away legitimate criticisms with false accusations of “vitriolic” personal attacks. A cynic might draw conclusions from that.
A cynic might also suggest that someone is deliberately attempting to divert attention from the legitimate discussion and turn the thread into a fatuous debate about Liberal Conspiracy’s own comment policy.
But we’ll never know what their motivation was. The brand new blogger chose to remain anonymous so it could have been anyone at all.
Anyway, Sunny has deleted the brand new blogger’s comments and rightly so. Liberal Conspiracy has a clear comment policy.
If anyone wants to sensibly continue the discussion into the difference between nasty personal attacks and legitimate comment, feel free.
j0nz said,
November 10, 2007 @ 5:51 pm
Firstly, yes, the comments by that loon Iron Sardines were deleted and rightly so.
The problem is that legitimate comment is deleted too. Yes, it does say it in the comments policy. But I think it’s a very bad thing for the blogosphere to start ’shaping narrative’ by deleting comments of people of whom you disagree. It’s rude, aggressive, and brings down the blogosphere to an elitist only club. They are simply trying to emulate the mass media. They want to hit it big. Yet this is the exact accusations they through at the right wing blogosphere. They don’t want to play fair. Yet they accuse others of that very thing.
Garry said,
November 10, 2007 @ 6:44 pm
Hi j0nz, thanks for stopping by.
The problem I have with your complaint is that the policy isn’t about deleting comments just because they take a different view.
There are plenty of people on the interwebs who to disrupt threads with provocative comments . The policy is supposed to try to stop that sort of thing and create a space where genuine discussion is possible.
And it is, importantly, explicit.
That’s very different from selectively deleting politically embarrassing comments and then pretending, no, let’s not beat around the bush, lying about not having done so. No-one is denying that you’ve had comments deleted.
I’m sure you must be able to see that there’s a very big difference between LC’s upfront position on comment moderation and Ellee Seymours dishonest approach.