Indy Media Watch

Over at UK Indymedia, there was a pointless, vindictive and stupid argument brewing in the comments section of the post "All men are responsible for stopping male violence against women". Scroll down to the hidden comments, and just follow those. Here's a quick taste of what you can expect to soil your eyes:

I know a man who posts here regularly under a variety of aliases and shares your family history, attitudes and writing style. He violently attacked a teenage girl less than half his age and size recently, a complete stranger, simply because she was teasing him. He couldn't control his temper as most macho obsessive sexually hung-up drunks can't. And then he tried to justify that as acceptable behaviour due to his childhood. "I'm a victim" seems to be the rallying cry of bullies. So I'm sorry your dad was a bastard but that doesn't excuse you becoming just like him.

Of course, when nasty personal debates drag the comments off-topic, you expect them to be hidden, especially when the moderators of Indymedia in the UK are so trigger-happy in this regard. But one shouldn't expect them to hide comments like:

There are many lies presented in the original article.

Myself and others have attempted to deal with this deceit and have been ignored while you quite happily publish what is clearly a dispute between two individual contributors which has nothing to do with the issues at hand.

Very disppointing. Very disrespectful. Very dishonest.

...and:

Thank goodness gwallan had the patience to deal with the stupidity of some of these comments. I certainly didn't. Hopefully someone will learn something. Most likely you will all just whine about how you're right, though.

And I agree about shame on the moderators, but I am hoping you're just very busy at the moment. But if you're going to post things like this Utopia Bold article would you please slap a big 'opinion only' warning on it because it has very little basis in fact.

It would appear that asking the moderators to stop a two-day long slanging match of abuse, while pointing out that the comments against the original post have formed a far more convincing argument than that original post, is enough to get your comment hidden. Agreeing with a comment like that also appears to go over the Indymedia UK editorial guidelines. Although, somewhat strangely, the last two quoted comments are not repeated, they're on topic, they don't discriminate, they're accurate, they don't advertise, they're attempting to stop disruption, and they're not reposts. So it's hard to see where the comments in question have crossed the line.

Previous applications of the guidelines by UK Indymedia often range from questionable to being blatantly biased. The Indy Media Watcher (one person, with no Zionist funding either) in this calendar year alone found examples of that here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Indymedia UK is a laughing stock, and virtually the polar opposite of free speech.