Friday 23 November 2012

Trolls and the factories of malice

The last part was a memorable phrase that Portillo used last night to describe the sort of Twitter attack on Lord McAlpine which he has paid back with interest to Mrs Bercow and others who should know better. Lord M has done us all a great service by unleashing his lawyers on these twitter trolls who repeated the BBC's nasty smear on MacAlpine now doubt motivated in part by his being a Thatcherite Tory a species loathed by the LibLab BBC.

I and others have experienced nasty troll smears on Butcher's Democracy Forum. Tony Butcher is a decent man and I have never understood why he allowed these anonymous posters to use his forum. They have destroyed it as a platform of worthwhile debate and its now largely used to spew out not very good pro Farage UKIP propaganda in the name of Blog Bot. I tried to point this out to Tony Butcher but obviously my message did not get through. Who for instance is behind Arthur Fonzarelli? And  where has Skeptyk gone?

A Neil's final guest suggested the solution I put forward previously. Only allow people to post personal material under their real name supported by a current photograph. An academic discussion using a nom de plume has been used for many hundreds of years. Personal smears are quite another thing.

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