Dissent will not be tolerated

Clare Curran blogs at Red Alert:

The trolls who inhabit this site are on notice.

You have been tolerated for long enough. Your tactics are increasingly obvious. Real debate is encouraged on Red Alert, but not trolling.

You will be banned without notice.

Banned for life without notice. Sounds a great way to get rid of dissenting voices. Will they rename Red Alert, Pravda?

I was going to put this post up a few days ago. Instead I ran a poll. As a litmus test. The results are pretty clear. Of the people who comment, most are put off by the tone of many commenters.

The poll was hilarious. There was no option to say that there was already too much censorship of the blog. The only options were to agree with Clare that something must be done or a couple of neutral options, in the best traditions of the Ministry of Truth.

Even then, only 26% of readers said they think the comments are dominated by trolling right-wingers. That means 74% do not. Yet that is taken as an endorsement to ban dissenting opinions – now known as trolling.

I have sympathy when it comes to genuine trolls. But I have a very transparent system for dealing with them.

In the last couple of weeks the intensity of trolling by anonymous commenters on Red Alert has increased.

I’d say that is directly related to the increasing stupidity of the posts. If you don’t want to be drowned in critical comments, then stop Trevor doing his texts from John Key and stop trying to link John Key to the Iraq War through a PR firm. Even your own supporters groan at such puerile stuff.