I would suggest that it should be curtailed.
And I would suggest your back seat moderation be curtailed. Honestly, this has to be your final warning - you can't keep disrupting threads with your inability to handle members criticising people you know/work with/in the industry. If comments are defamatory or an invasion of privacy then of course action will be taken. Otherwise let people have their say without fear of you popping up. And you might not agree but I think there's a damn sight more constructive criticism on here than the likes of DS or Twitter.
You did the same thing the other day in the GMB thread - couldn't help but get involved even though Charlie had it covered. Your post offered nothing to further the discussion.
So they're allowed to make blindly-critical comments about people they don't even know and I'm not allowed to defend those people, who I do know? Seems an odd way of operating a free speech platform, but then I suppose I should expect nothing less from a group of people who only issued a warning to somebody who made outright bigoted remarks about my disability, rather than saying they were no longer welcome in your community.
For the record, I was disturbed by the Laura Tobin comments at least TWO DAYS before Charlie intervened, but didn't say anything, and only did so when somebody tried to claim they were fair game... which, again, last I checked, I'm allowed to do, or if I'm not, sends one hell of a conflicting message.
If that puts me on my high horse, then it's a saddle I'm happy to occupy. If it makes you feel better to hit the "Ban" button, then go ahead, but I'm walking out of here on my own terms.
By the way, Matt Freestone (formerly of ITN) says hello. He wasn't the first insider to try his hand at the TVF game before throwing up his hands in despair, and I'm sure he won't be the last, but he too got sick and tired of the echo chamber that would rather revel in its own ignorance than even begin to acknowledge the primacy of expertise, all while laying claim to a moral high ground built on sand, where the disabilities of members and the health of presenters and their (as-yet-unborn!) babies are fair game... at least until somebody gets their act together enough to realise it might look embarrassing if they weren't seen to act.
Goodbye and good luck. I fear you're going to need it, especially when the top bloke who is Rob Francis takes his NewsChat site out of beta shortly. It may take a while to build up a head-of-steam, but he's launching it with the explicit intent of being the "anti-TVF" in terms of its level-of-discourse, and I for one wish him luck!
