Does anyone ever try and post comments in the Daily Mail? What are your opinions of it? Personally I’m starting to suss something is a bit dodgy. OK there are sometimes reasons why a comment gets censored, which is fair enough. The usual reasons are that it is off-topic; it is offensive (e.g. bad language), it has not been published because it seems the Daily Mail stop accepting comments way before they notify you that they have done so, and of course there are potentially libellous comments. A libellous comment is one that harms someone’s reputation unfairly, as in untrue accusations. It is fair enough that the Mail plays on the side of caution with these because it does not have the resources to check each comment is true, so they will ban factual attacks on individuals.
Right you say, that all sounds reasonable enough. However there is more. There are comments that get censored for many other political reasons. That is not to say you might be a Labour supporter in an ostensibly right-wing paper. Oh no, these get published without a problem, except of course they get massive negative votes. There are other classes of comments that I have established are regularly censored.
One class of comment that I have a problem with are comments that in any way do not pay homage to political correctness. Now this is hypocrisy at its finest if you consider the Mail rants about that. They are in fact more politically correct than any they accuse of being so!
Now the real bone of contention however is the comments that have a degree of understanding and intelligence about them. These are nearly always censored. I was down to about one in three of my comments being published, and that one in three were the ones that were of a more trivial nature, e.g. perhaps comments on fashions and suchlike. To give you an example of one that was not published today in an article about the government trying to save the euro I said two reasons the euro was bad is firstly the EU regulations on business. Now that would have been in the realms of publishability, but the second comment knocked it out. I said the reason for the failure was because the euro artificially increases the credit rating of member states beyond that of a free market floating currency system, thereby causing them to borrow more than they would otherwise be able to borrow. Well that is it in a nutshell. However, as is mandatory in the Mail, such comments are disallowed. The conclusion drawn is the Mail is trying to dumb the population down. It is therefore part of the problem, and as such it is part of the police state that is being built before our very eyes (or not, as the case may be!)
If you have tried to publish a comment in the Daily Mail that has been censored, I would very much appreciate it if you could post it below together with the time you posted it and the link to the article. Just check that it was sent within the time of the last comment published, and that it is not illegal in some way, because we don't want to get Anthony into any trouble.


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