Tag Archives: lib dem voice

I am picking up on some comments made on a previous post. Readers had noticed that recently we have been pre-moderating comments more than usual and wondered why.

Sadly, we have been at the receiving end of a lot of trolling lately. Not only that, but comments have been posted that are defamatory and possibly libellous. Whatever the legal position may be about what appears on our pages (it is not clear whether we could be sued for something written by a commenter) we simply do not want to be associated with that kind of illiberal and hurtful content.

As many of you know most of the LDV team have day jobs (some very demanding ones) – I’m the only one who is enjoying retirement – and we are all politically active. So we fit our editorial duties around the other demands in our lives, including our families. It would be much simpler for us if we didn’t have to moderate every single comment, and it would be so much less frustrating for our commenters if they didn’t have to wait a couple of hours whilst their comments are sitting in limbo, so it isn’t a decision we take lightly.

We do try to pre-warn you with this note under the post:

This post has pre moderation enabled, please be patient whilst waiting for it to be manually reviewed. Liberal Democrat Voice is made up of volunteers who keep the site running in their free time.

Of course, people do get cross if their comment is binned, but there can be several reasons for that happening:

I have enjoyed being back in the editor’s chair today. My role on LDV these days is to provide cover when members of the team are away, unwell, or, as today, busy fighting by-elections.

I have been dealing with around eight submissions, some of which were more fully formed than others. Plus a few of those bizarre emails offering us guest posts on subjects ranging from setting up powers of attorney to tyre maintenance for car fleets.

But one thing struck me quite forcibly: ignoring the SEO chancers – not one of those eight submissions was put forward by a woman. In fact, of the 20 posts published so far this week only three had female authors, and two of those were written by our editor in chief, Caron Lindsay. A similar pattern emerges for the whole of the last month – and I have rather lost the will to trawl back further in time.

So what is going on?

Of course, I can’t pretend that there ever was a golden age when half our posts were penned by women, but I can certainly remember a higher proportion than we have now.