Saturday 6 October 2018

To block or not to block?


I can't find any news coverage of the background to this but, if so, it's an interesting development:

5 comments:

  1. Yes, they wouldn't announce on air: "So send us in your views...except, that is, Bert Cloggs of 54 Station Road Lytham St. Annes because you keep going on and on about Brexit and frankly we don't agree with you, Bert, so stop sending us your views."

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  2. Oooh... that's interesting. I've been blocked by Jeremy Vine on both Twitter and Facebook, as have many others. Complaints to BBC have always been swatted away with "personal, nothing to do with us". A while ago he used to use both in conjunction with his R2 programme, but nowhere near as much now. Hmmm....

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  3. Where's the background? All I see is a tweet saying when they did 'this' to me... Where is the 'this'? I scrolled down but couldn't see anything about it. I'm obviously not good at finding my way around twitter.

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    Replies
    1. Sorry, I should have added more detail. That two-part tweet (BBC Waste replying to John Benner) really is all there is to it.

      It's probably a Twitter thing. People who use Twitter a lot and interact directly with the BBC will get it straightaway. Those who don't probably won't.

      Lots of BBC reporters/presenters regularly 'mute' or 'block' critics - including those who accuse them of bias. Those BBC folk suggest, by so doing, that they don't want to hear criticism of the BBC from such people.

      The question is: Given that many of those critics pay their licence fee, should those BBC reporters/presenters be allowed to 'mute' or 'block' them?

      John Benner is saying that he's heard, because of a court case against a licence fee payer rebel, that the BBC (at its highest level) is now considering stopping BBC reporters/presenters from using the 'Mute' or 'Block' function on Twitter against licence-fee-paying critics.

      If true and if the BBC enforces a new policy on this, that's quite something. (And, actually, I might claim it as a major scoop for this little blog of ours!). It would suggest that lots of prominent BBC reporters/presenters have been behaving badly and must STOP behaving badly.

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    2. Many thanks, Craig. I never go on twitter, other than for something posted here.

      That's an interesting question and it comes up in other scenarios as well. Take for example that twitter sequence where Burley was asked by Dan Hodges on what grounds he justified keeping Tommy Robinson off the BBC politics programmes. Burl ran into some stern opposition from tweeters who are licence payers too and if they and other licence payers want to hear from Robinson why shouldn't they? That's leaving aside, as some pointed out, he'd been on the BBC before. And that's leaving aside all the other sorts of people who've been and maybe continue to be on the BBC. There's plenty of those, who could be deemed as undesirable or extreme in a different direction from Robinson.

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