In Reply to: re: re: puritanism posted by Gagged on August 26, 2009 at 11:37:23:

Hi Gagged – at present the posts that are deleted by the moderators are as follows:

posts that are merely spam
posts that are merely porn
posts that merely contain an attack on another poster
(and this last seems to be the main bone of contention in this thread)

In addition, there are indeed occasional posts that are deleted because they adversely comment on a named local person or enterprise - i.e. that are potentially libellous and that would not be published by any of the local print newspapers either.

If that's being cut off at the knees then so be it but this goes back many years and we still have over 3.5 million hits and 160,000 visits to the site per month.

There are few posts about 'healthy local discourse' as opposed to libellous local discourse' that are deleted.

There never really has been 'free speech' due to Irish libel laws - this site is one of the very few boards that allow anonymous posts.

And even Stateside a recent libel case about a twitter post, where a woman said that her apartment was mouldy and the estate agents didn't care about it, illustrates that even in the USA you have to be careful about what you say. In S. Korea, one of the best served countries in terms of internet access and broadband speed that we can only imagine, you would have to submit your passport number and name before you can post to the web.