Very high volumes of troll traffic is turning up here right now.
I am - probably first the first time ever - deleting maybe one third of all comments at the moment because they come from first time posters who are often abusive, offer no argument, add nothing to debate and bizarrely think I should post their comments despite those facts.
There is, I would remind all those thinking of doing something similar, a comments policy on this blog. I have never given anyone, even if they have posted thousands of times, the automatic right to comment here. I certainly do not give that right to anyone breaching the comments policy, as anyone posting in the style posted above will have done.
To also be clear, it usually takes a fraction of a second to identify posts of this sort and deletion follows immediately, so you are hardly wasting my time doing it. So, respectfully, why waste your own? All you prove to yourself is just how foolish you are. I know you don't like the fact that my comments are widely read or viewed (more than 60,000 times yesterday) but unless you actually have a polite counter-argument you're not going to address that fact.
And, just in case you do think you have such an argument, if it looks like your comment has come from a trolling factory because it appears remarkably similar to that of other people of apparent like mind, it too will be deleted. You have to be able to think for yourself to appear here.
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Well if you are worth trolling you must be saying something worthwhile
Spot on. To update Oscar Wilde’s famous dictum – Trolling is the sincerest form of flattery
So you’re pissing off a lot of right wingers then Richard. Good, they deserve it. As a soon to be retired civil servant and fan of the public sector generally I’ve had to endure 14 years of ghastly right wingers attacking and damaging the CS, BBC, local government, the NHS and just about every aspect of life in pursuit of their imbecilic ideology, prejudices and all the rest of it. More power to your elbow Richard.
Thanks
You’ll have no complaint from me about your editorial policy. I think most of us on this blog can all recognise a troll when we see one, but on so many online comments sections they simply dilute the seriousness of the conversation, and pollute the entire space, as they do unfortunately engage some genuine contributors. The Guardian comments have become totally vacuous in the past year or so, having once been a useful conversation space – I’m talking 10 years ago or so.
I do check the comments on your YouTube videos, and there is a sprinkling of daily trolls and useful idiots. However, there are also a number of genuine contributors, who clearly find your videos enlightening and offer informative comments and information.
This blog has attracted so many very experienced, well-informed and articulate contributors, that it is just about the only online space I come to now.
Thanks to all the regulars on here, and please keep on posting!
Thanks Helen
And your note re comments on Yotube appears right: the to;lloing is limited there. It is worse on TikTok
No surprise re Tik Tok Richard. It is the epitome of zero attenton span idiocy; the few Tik Tok thingies I’ve seen have been no more than 15s long, usually of very good looking Korean or Chinese girls being all ‘feminine’ and singing harmless if vapid pop songs or doing silly stunts.
Utterly impossible to have any serious subject meaningfully discussed on it from what I can see. No wonder that’s where you get most of the trolls. It makes the rest of social media look intelligent.
We put up the full videos and large numbers watch them all the wau through, even on TikTok. We do reedit them in vertical format for that channel.
Seems to me the trolls routinely come from the right, and their understanding is incoherent. Seems they want a particular kind of unfettered freedom to conduct themselves as they wish, hence their predictable attack as “leftist” anything they see as encumbering themselves with either concern for, or consideration of, others before speaking or acting. The incoherence is that they don’t wish others to have those same freedoms (which I would argue are not really freedoms but forms of alienation and isolation) – they want them solely for themselves. For instance, they physically interfere with those who wish to welcome and support refugees (e.g. stopping rescue boats, protesting refugee accommodation, intimidation, violence, media reporting and framing). Similarly, they prevent tooth and nail those who want them from having good, comprehensive publicly owned, funded and provided services (e.g. insufficient funding, lobbying, legislation banning public ownership). If they actually believed in the freedoms they call for they would let the “leftists” get on with it. Which reveals what they’re trying to badly conceal, which is a repellant authoritarianism. They’re not interested in genuine freedom, only the “freedom” to dominate.
I think you should gather all the troll posts in one long thread, both for our entertainment and also as a demonstration of what not to post.
Maintaining a record would also help spot the obvious troll factories, hopefully.
I suspect GDPR would not let me do that
The orchestrated troll attack yesterday was from right wing supporters of the IEA, all of whom used pseudonyms based on the names of their cult heros including Pinochet .
Anyone who legitimises a right wing murdering fascist dictator and then seeks to claim some doctrinal higher ground and moral rectitude is beneath criticism, dwelling in the permanent darkness of the F-wit untermensch gutter.
Given that Richard admits he doesn’t post anything from what he considers to be the trolls, how can you make any sort of conclusion about what the ‘trolls’ are saying or what they believe in?
Perhaps if Richard actually posted everything, especially those who don’t agree with him and who explain why, you might actually get a different viewpoint to consider?
Or do you just want an echo chamber?
I posted you, just to prove I do post trolls, as would have also been apparent to you if you had even read this afternoon’s comments.
And this is no echo chamber – which you would know it you were not a troll. It is a place for the seroius discussion of idea you do not like. But that’s very different from an echo chamber.
You only post here where it suits you to do so, never where someone has pointed out your errors.
I post on a wide variety of platforms. People can comment everywhere, but here, at will. What nonsense are you claims then?
And no, I do not respond to most comments. I would heed hundreds of hours a day to do so.
@ Noah Stevens. (The Lacrosse star ? or another Noah Stevens?)
‘…if Richard actually posted everything, especially those who don’t agree with him and who explain why, you might actually get a different viewpoint to consider?
Key phrase: ‘….who explain why’.
Nobody here is afraid of counter arguments. But we don’t appreciate vacuous twaddle.
Keep hitting that delete button, Richard. there’s enough “shite” (as they call it in Scotland) without having it cluttering this space.
I will, Andy
As Helen Heenan points out so well, the quality of the comments on your blog are usually so well-informed, and add so much to the topic itself, that I nearly always read through them all. I have very little to contribute myself, as most of these discussions are out of my league, but I feel I’ve learned a lot and had my eyes opened on not just a few issues.
I’m just sorry that you have to deal with this, Richard. It’s such a pain in the bahookie to need to go ‘trolling for trolls’ before you start your day. Sign of our times, unfortunately.
Thanks, Jan
Did you recently decline to publish a comment by me? Can you let me know because if so I shan’t bother in future.
A person claimning to have your name with a different url posted here on 21/7
I deleted what looked like a troll comment
It still looks like a troll comment to me now
Well I wasn’t expecting you to delete it so I can’t remember what it was now.
So, you are wasting my time.
That’s good enough to be blocked.