A blog policeman’s lot is not a happy one

I love to blog because I love to write, but also to engage with those who do me the honour of reading and engaging what I have written. I am grateful when they point out errors in my writing because that is how I learn. In particular, I am grateful to the denizens of Slugger O’Toole who have taught me so much of what little I know of Northern Ireland.

I am also, for my sins, a veteran of political websites in Britain, Europe, and the USA. Some would say I have too much time on my hands. But the truth is that almost 20 years ago I suffered an illness which rendered me largely incapable of physical work and even the effort of commuting to work. For many years I was able to do little more in a day than the shopping, or mow half the lawn, or do a carefully planned and selected small selection of minor but essential tasks. I was determined to continue to play tennis but doing so made me incapable of doing anything much else for two days.

My one saving grace was that I could sit in front of a keyboard all day and it seemed to take nothing out of me. When I wrote Sovereignty 2040 in August of last year, I was able to do so in five weeks often writing day and night for 24 hours at a stretch. It helped, of course, that I was writing about themes I had blogged and dreamed about for many years, but just being able to do so was the greatest purely personal pleasure of my life.

Thankfully, my physical energy has improved slightly despite advancing years, and now I can do many other things as well. But blogging remains my first love after my late wife and current children and grandchildren. I have been truly blessed. My family and friends have been tolerant and indulgent as well, even if they are only rarely interested in what I have to say and often have the temerity to disagree with me!

One of the things you learn while blogging on many sites is that the vast majority will engage with you on good faith terms. They may not be very knowledgeable or articulate on a particular issue but are happy to engage with you provided you are patient and respectful. Most don’t mind if you disagree with them, and some may even change their minds about something during an encounter – as I have on rare occasions!

But there are also some who are loath to admit they could be wrong about anything and resort to a number of defensive strategies to avoid, deflect, undermine, attack, or overwhelm their interlocuters rather than engage in the facts. It becomes a cock-fight or an ego thing with them.

Sometimes it is best to just go silent at the point, as anything you might say will just be ignored, twisted, perverted, misquoted, or otherwise abused. I stopped blogging on a UK site when I received threats against myself and my family – “we know where you live” – when I had the temerity to challenge the dominant Zionist narrative on the Israeli Palestinian conflict. I learned afterwards that such commentary was actively monitored by Israeli security services and their supporters, and that the threat might not have been entirely idle. Having always blogged under my real name, it simply wasn’t worth it. I didn’t need any viruses, malware, or spyware heading in my direction.

Another site, The European Tribune, was vibrant for many years, but the discussion could be very robust and the moderation somewhat lax. It was populated by many very clever writers, but some had a predilection for humiliating their sometimes less well educated or informed fellow bloggers. I wasn’t a moderator at the time, and I didn’t have access to readership or participation figures, but I noticed a rapid decline in engagement, particularly by female bloggers who had no time for such behaviour. By the time I became an editor and moderator, there wasn’t much content or engagement left to moderate, and now I am now only active editor there left, with only a very few active contributors.

There were many reasons for the decline, some beyond our control. Enthusiasm for the European project has been in long term decline, with a rise of nationalist sentiment in many countries. The European Tribune’s left of centre politics were out of step with a shift to the right generally. But a whole generation of active bloggers there had died, grown older, gotten demanding jobs and families, and now had little time for the enthusiasms of youth. A new generation of younger students and enthusiasts didn’t come through.

Partly this was because any newbies who chanced on the site soon found there were people there who didn’t share their perspectives and weren’t slow to show them the error of their ways. But mainly there was a generational shift to social media sites like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram, Tik ToK, YouTube and other short form, visual, and multimedia sites which rendered very wordy sites like the European Tribune very old school indeed. I don’t know the stats, but I suspect long form, wordy, detailed and evidence based blogging is in decline world-wide, and increasingly restricted to specialist or academic sites.

There are also many excellent news and commentary sites run by professional media organisations where you can get your news, commentary, and analysis, much of it for free, and be sure of a certain minimal level of accuracy and evidence based commentary. Many have their own particular agendas, biases, and commercial prerogatives, but these are relatively easy to identify and allow for if you are an experienced media consumer. It can be very hard for amateur sites to compete.

All of which is a word of warning to Sluggerites. You don’t appreciate what you have until its gone. Slugger O’Toole is one of the few entirely voluntary sites around the world that I know of which can maintain such a high level of content, engagement, and readership in a relatively restricted space. I’m sure there are many more, but like everyone else, I only have time to engage with a very few.

So, all credit to Mick Fealty, Brian O’Neill and their team for founding, editing, and providing the technical support without which none of this would be possible. I am in awe of the moderation team for the way in which they manage to keep discussion largely civil on many controversial topics and put manners on so many strident contributors who like to test the boundaries and often seem to reappear under new handles when banned for some infraction or other.

But there is only so much any moderator team can do and many tactics a savvy contributor can adopt to get around the rules, or otherwise subvert good faith evidence based debate, and I wanted to share some of them here to help bloggers avoid the obvious pitfalls than can lead to a discussion getting completely off the rails. This is by no means an exhaustive list, and my reason for posting this OP here is to learn from the experience of other contributors.

1. Getting Personal. If you can’t win the argument with facts, you can always try to undermine the credentials of the person making it. None of us are perfect and we all have our vulnerabilities, particularly if it is known that we don’t live in/come from/work in the area or have a known allegiance to a particular religion, party, or organisation. All, in the eyes of some, disqualify you from having the right to comment on a topic, render any comments you make on a topic suspect, and in general make you incapable of objectivity. There is a reason the main Slugger rule is “play the ball, not the man.” Relatively Easy to moderate
2. Deflection. If you’re not doing well on one battleground, deflect the discussion onto something else where you feel more comfortable. Most bloggers will blindly follow your lead and the original argument is lost in a blizzard of commentary. A lot of sub-threads on Slugger bear little relationship to the original OP. Open Threads are there to host such discussion. Relatively easy to moderate, but people get annoyed when their brilliant off topic comments are deleted.
3. Distraction. “Oh look! There’s a dead cat over there! The dead cat strategy, also known as deadcatting, is the political strategy of deliberately making a shocking statement to divert blogger’s attention away from your failure in the current argument. It is associated with British former prime minister Boris Johnson’s political strategist Lynton Crosby. The shocking statement may indeed highlight an important issue, but it has nothing to do with the argument you are seeking to avoid. If they complain, you accuse them of not caring about the important (but irrelevant) issue you have raised. Moderators don’t have the time to crawl up every rabbit hole.
4. Appeal to Authority. I’m a professor of XYZ, I’ve worked in the industry for many years, what’s your qualification for saying that? I have included some really erudite quotes from world-wide authorities on the subject. (Which may have only the vaguest relevance to the topic, but you are not bright enough to understand their relevance) Read: I’m a big noise around here, and who are you to challenge me? Often done by presenting a host of authoritative looking stats which may only be tangentially relevant to the point under discussion. The most extreme form of this is presenting a host of unsourced “evidence,” and putting it up to others to falsify them. Their failure to have the time, energy, expertise, or inclination to do means that – in your own eyes – you have won the argument by default – and annoyed your opponents to boot. A double win! How dare anyone moderate such an authoritative contributor!
5. The Gish Gallop. The most extreme form of the above is the Gish gallop most associated with Donald Trump, where he seeks to overwhelm an opponent by abandoning formal debating principles, providing an excessive number of arguments with no regard for the accuracy or strength of those arguments and that are impossible to address adequately in the time allotted to the opponent. Gish galloping prioritizes the quantity of the galloper’s arguments at the expense of their quality. “During a Gish gallop, in a short space of time the galloper confronts an opponent with a rapid series of specious arguments, half-truths, misrepresentations, and outright lies that makes it impossible for the opponent to refute all of them within the format of the debate. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes considerably more time to refute or to fact-check than the amount of time taken to state each one in the series. The opponent appears weak, confused, not in command of the facts, and the audience really isn’t interested in detailed explanations. “When your explaining, your losing”
6. Weak Spotting. Someone makes a long well evidenced and researched post which demolishes your argument. But they included some minor comment not particularly relevant to the main thrust of their argument but which is factually falsifiable. You point out the weak spot and declare their entire argument undermined by their obvious ignorance of the subject. In your own mind, you have won, and all discussion is focused on their weak point and failure to do their research properly. They’re on there own their buddy, and no moderation can help them.
7. The Straw Man: An internet favourite. Accuse an opponent of making an argument they didn’t actually make and demolish it before they can get a word in edgeways. Exploit any looseness in their language, or ambiguity in their wording. Point to all the ridiculous people who have made that argument before and damn your opponent by association. Moderator response: It must be lunchtime…
8. “Humour.” Sarcastic one-liners are often effective in sending bloggers down a rabbit hole and away from the argument you’re losing. When moderated: “Who, me? I was only making a witty comment! You moderators have no sense of humour!
9. The Dunning-Krueger effect. Academic politics are often said to be more vicious than their real world counterparts. A whole language of seemingly precise scientific terms has been re-purposed as sly insults to get past any moderator detection. Chief among these is the Dunning-Krueger effect which began life as an academic study of cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. But it is often misunderstood in blogging culture as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task. It is also not unknown for people brilliant in one field to assume their brilliance must apply to all other fields as well. Basically, when you invoke the Dunning-Krueger effect against someone, you are saying they are an idiot, but how could my brilliant reference to a scientifically known phenomenon be moderated?
10. Godwin’s law began life as an internet adage that “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” Dressed in statistical language, basically all it means is that comparisons to Hitler or Nazism are often exaggerated or vexatious and designed to provoke outrage. In some forums doing so is enough to get you banned. But the author never intended it to be an absolute prohibition. Some behaviours are comparable or at least reminiscent of Nazism. But calling out some behaviour as Nazi or Fascist is almost bound to get you in trouble. Moderators sometimes yearn for a quiet life…
11. Accuse others of manplaying when all they are doing is picking holes in your cherished argument or pointing out factual errors. Bullies often play the victim. Moderators get sick of this stuff.

The bottom line: Making an honest and coherent argument is hard. You have to do your research, make sure there are no kinks in your logic, and any loose wording is easily exploited. It’s amazing how sentences whose meaning is obvious to you can be interpreted differently by others. There are many specialists in these dark arts out there on the web, ready to take offense at every opportunity.

The more you put your head above the parapet, the more people will take pot shots at you, some very wide of the mark, but even a stopped clock can be right twice in a day. But don’t be discouraged if your posts aren’t greeted with unalloyed praise. Learn from the experience and go again. Almost everything worthwhile was controversial at some point or another, or otherwise ignored for many years.

So, let’s keep the flow of stories on Slugger going. At least they keep many commentators away from greater mischief elsewhere!

PS for clarity. I do not moderate Slugger, but am in awe of those who do.

Frank Schnittger is the author of Sovereignty 2040, a future history of how Irish re-unification might work out. He has worked in business in Dublin and London and, on a voluntary basis, for charities in community development, education, restorative justice and addiction services.