Cif Watcher: Guardian Catches Anti-Semites
THE pages of Comment Is Free, the Guardian’s opinion blog, have been redesigned, and moderators will hold more sway over the often anti-semitic comments that get through.
The Telegraph is not impressed:
So our friends over at Guardian ‘Comment Is Free’ had their early June facelift, as promised. Former CIF Editor and founder Georgina Henry explained the changes to the massed ranks of Guardianistas:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jun/04/1
There were three announced substantive changes. First, threads will remain open for only two days (previously it was three). Second, clicking on the name of a commenter gives access to all their comments in the past. And third, the comments are now paginated in pages of 50, which does not help with the continuity of a thread since one has to keep paging backwards and forwards to see what was written and by whom.
CIF has a longstanding problem with antisemitism posted there. (It results from the unholy alliance between the unreconstructed ‘left’ and the Islamists). The pattern is that the Editors commission an article from one of their stable of one-sided anti-Israel commentators in the full knowledge that it will open the floodgates to antisemitic comments – it never fails. The Moderators have failed to even spot most of the antisemitic posts – indeed they admit that they rely on readers to do so.
A few weeks ago Matt Seaton (the new CIF Editor) was asked about the implication of the changes for the problem of antisemitism on CIF: “Will it mean that the Moderators pick up and delete more of the antisemitic instead of relying on the readers to do it? I hope so.”
His response: “the short answer is yes. I can’t promise you that antisemitic comments and other instances of hate speech will disappear from the site overnight, but (from early June) I think you will notice a progressive improvement.”
The result?
Several non-Zionophobes (I hesitate to say pro-Israel commenters, since they simply try to confront CIF’s resident colony of Israel haters and antisemites with the truth) are having their comments pre-moderated (perhaps the new technology allows this to be done, whereas the old one did not).
Newspaper envy, or something more?
Posted: 9th, June 2008 | In: Broadsheets Comments (12) | TrackBack | Permalink
