I’ve been banned from the Telegraph’s website

The Telegraph’s website has banned me from its message boards permanently, and I’m pretty miserable about it. Why was I banned? I have no idea - they don’t tell you your crime. This is the same Daily Telegraph that is big on extolling the virtues of free speech, apparently having little truck with social justice warriors who censor those with a different point of view.

Let me run through what occurred, with a bit of background to start.

About a year ago I took advantage of my dad having a Telegraph account and their offer for one other person to use the website for free. I’ve been familiar with the paper for years and it was great being able to read, gratis, the fine likes of Douglas Murray, Allison Pearson, Allister Heath, Andrew Lilico (when he was in lockdown sceptic mode) and Philip Johnston (when he wasn’t in jab-happy mode). 

These were times of derangement and despair, as a nation emerging from the catastrophe of lockdown - by far and away the most disastrous decision ever made by a British government at any point in history - blinked in the sunlight to see the wreckage of inflation, collapsed customer service, lower immunity, vaccine injuries, censorship, lies, hypocrisy, and damaged people all around them. (And that was the sort of comment I would post on the Telegraph message boards.)

The DT comment threads are subject to a lot of censorship before you even get to permanent bans. If you type a comment with a swear word in, the comment will simply not appear on the page. Then there are the comments you might input that will appear for a minute or so and then disappear, flagged with ‘This comment has been deleted’; it’s often a struggle to work out which are your offending words. You can try to do so by copying your comment and then pasting it back in with certain words deleted to see if it stays up. Through this method I discovered that the word ‘numbskull’ was forbidden by the censors, bizarrely.

Their software must also be programmed to zap any posts which have offending phrases, so when I wrote in one comment something along the lines of: ‘Things they want you to believe that may not be true: men can become women; fat is healthy; masks work; Islam is a religion of peace’, it was instantly obliterated by our wise web lords.  

Something else that happens is that you think your comment is up there and being admired, when in fact they’ve gone in a while later and removed it. I was very pleased to be the Most Liked comment on one story a few months back (get in early and you’ve always got a good chance of that happening), I can’t remember what about, but when I returned to the thread a few hours later my comment had been vanquished, although all the replies to it were still there.

The day my ban probably kicked in went something like this: in the morning, after breakfast and before I started work, I did what I generally do and had a browse of some stories and op eds, and left a few of my thoughts. A bit later I was back on doing the same. And here’s where I noticed the super-sneaky behaviour of the censors: you post your comment, it looks like it’s gone up there, you’re happy. But it hasn’t gone up. And you only really notice this if you hang around, perhaps post a few other comments, and note that you are getting zero likes and zero replies. There are probably people out there still merrily posting on the Telegraph’s website with no idea that their comments are only visible to themselves. You could call it sinister and cowardly on the Telegraph’s part. Would it not be far better customer service, and less authoritarian, to email you to warn you that you’ve overstepped the mark?

Anyway, I was furious that my comments weren’t appearing, so I tried to contact the Telegraph to complain. This is easier said than done. The Contact Us section is frustratingly circular, in that you often end up where you started after following the Help and Contact Us tabs. I eventually managed to email what looked like what might be a helpful address but I received a reply about ensuring all my cookies were removed from my device, trying to use a different browser etc, which was not useful and struck me as a fending-off tactic. I tried what they suggested, knowing full well that it wouldn’t work, and when it didn’t, I emailed them again. They then responded with - finally! - the magical email address: moderation@telegraph.co.uk, the one you need. So I sent an email asking why I could no longer comment.

Their response was a templated melange of politeness and hostility. It read:

Thank you for getting in touch regarding our commenting platform.

We can confirm that you have been permanently banned from our commenting platform due to leaving comments which contravene our community guidelines.

Our guidelines also state that all content is subject to our Terms of Use and we reserve the right to remove any content, comments and/or commenting privileges at any time, without reason and without prior notice or warning and will not enter into any discussions regarding moderation decisions or actions.

Kind Regards,

The Community Moderation Team

‘Kind Regards’! The Vs given in a velvet glove. Those ‘community guidelines’ are the standard stuff you get in the PC straitjacketed era of the early 21st century, even in allegedly right-of-centre publications - ‘We do not tolerate religious abuse, racism, sexism, homophobia, minority abuse or any hate-speech’ etc - but there’s one that says:

• Any comments containing conspiracy theories and/or deliberately misleading information which could be injurious to third parties will result in a suspension or permanent restriction from commenting.

Was that what did me in? Maybe. In the furious response that I fired off, I included the following lines: ‘So if a year ago I had posted that Covid came from a lab leak you would have banned me? And now that is the most likely explanation for it. So would you then un-ban someone? And what harm do 'conspiracy theories' do anyway - do you have so little faith in your readers that they cannot make their own minds up about things?’

I continued: ‘You conform to all the most censorious and brainless ways of big tech. You are helping create a much bleaker world with much less free speech. You are also driving away customers. I will NEVER pay another penny to the Telegraph.’

A couple of days later, still steaming, I wrote them a PS which included the paragraph:

WHAT THE HELL IS YOUR PLAN HERE? What is the point of your message boards? Why are you so precious about what is written in threads? It’s not what the writers on the paper have written, it’s the commenters. And who are you afraid of who will see these threads and make a judgement that you so obviously fear? It is weird. It is dystopian.

Okay, maybe I was OTT. The Telegraph is a private organisation and can do what it likes. But the paper weighs in heavily against cancel culture, and they purport to be pro free speech. And yet their very own comments policies are not just stifling, they are pernicious. Their system of ‘justice’ is positively Kafkaesque: you are not told what your offence was; you are given no right of appeal; you are deemed automatically guilty - and guilty forever (and, of course, they didn't reply to any of my emails). 

I have pondered since exactly which posts threw me into the eternal digital gulag. Was it the dwelling on certain topics? Perhaps: replying ‘thanks for this vital link, everyone should read this’ to another reader when he posted a link to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s page showing that it recently donated another £2.4 million to the Telegraph; pointing to the German government’s admittance that there is one serious vaccine injury every 5,000 doses (it’s almost certainly much higher than that); or just my scathing running commentary on psychotic bale of hay Boris Johnson, the worst prime minister in our history.

It surely couldn’t have been my more light-hearted comments, such as saying we are in the era of over-correction, which ‘is prevalent in matters of race, sexuality, mental health and the reputation of Yoko Ono’, or pointing out that 54 years after a leading Conservative’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, the surname of the black candidate in the Tory party leadership race spelt ‘Bad Enoch’ in you broke it in two…

I’ll never know. In the kangaroo court of the Telegraph’s comment section, you know not the crime and you’re guilty as charged. 

I still read the paper but it’s agonising not being able to comment on articles. It was something I used to hugely enjoy, and letting off steam (under a pseudonym, like on this blog) probably helped me conduct my life better, in that a lot of the intense anger I frequently feel - because of what the villains and the cowards and the technocrats and the utopians are doing to wreck this world - can be channeled in a digital direction, rather than at my family and friends (I sometimes fail on this aim). 

Yes, there are many other publications and message boards, but the Telegraph was perfectly suited to me, with fairly sound content tail-ended by readers’ generally intelligent discussion with some wit (the Telegraph might say that their community policies have created this welcoming space, but I’d disagree because I know that I, with my many thousands of Likes on my comments, was adding to its quality, and now I’m banned).

It’s a dismal tale for our censorious times. One would have hoped that the Telegraph was better on this sort of thing than the likes of Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. But no. So now I've gone the way of Julie Burchill and Bob Moran!