I Commented on an Article in Today's Guardian and my Comment was Removed

[LuluBlakey1]

This piece is in today's Guardian in the Opinions Section.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/12/keir-starmer-labour-poor-sick-disabled-tory?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

I commented after reading it:
.....'What’s the point of Starmer’s Labour if it won’t stand up for poor, sick or disabled people'......or women?
That was it. I added two words to the article's headline - the words 'or women'. The comment was removed for 'not meeting community guidelines'.

I'm really angry that we have reached the point where expressing the view that Starmer's Labour won't stand up for women is now considered unpublishable by the country's only non-right-wing broadsheet - the one that rants on about protecting freedom of speech in journalism.

The last line of the article is
'In the end, some people matter and others don’t.' Oh the irony!

The Guardian clearly think women don't matter.

I am cancelling my subscription and DH is cancelling his.

Odd.

I love their big begging banner that floats across the screen, I love clicking out of that thinking 'nope, wont be supporting you at all'

How is it that the biggest oppressed group in the country (women and girls), making up over 50% of the population cannot be considered as needing support and questions about whether labour provide that support or not are deleted?

Quite incredible.

Not odd at all, at the Grauniad. Par for the course.

I think the way it works is the community guidelines include rules about staying 'on topic'. So if an opinion piece mentions any subject that the G don't want you to discuss (usually gender) they can just not enable commenting on that article, and if you try and talk about gender/women's rights on an article where this wasn't the main subject, most of the time you'll have your comment deleted.

This means that on some topics, guardian readers only get a very one sided view because the opinion writers can put one side but readers can't discuss, disagree or point out factual errors.

And I'm only on MN at all because I was permanently banned from commenting on the guardian, which I used to enjoy, for having too many posts moderated. But you should be good for a while OP, I think I got to a few hundred deleted posts over several years before I was booted out.

The Guardian has got worse and worse since Vyner became editor. Their best female journalists have left.

Quite. I'm so annoyed by it.

There are many comments, that vary from the topic of the title, which have not been removed but they are not about women.

I wonder if the two words I had added were '......or muslims?' if their response would have been different.
'...........or the elderly?'
'............or jews?'
'............or black people?'

On another topic, what Diane Abbot has faced today is disgusting.

I love the suggestion that as white women we are as oppressed as any of those listed. We really aren’t you know..

We shouldn't be oppressed at all as women- whatever our colour- but we are. We are oppressed, subject to institutional and cultural misogynism by men in general (although not 100% of them but a large majority).

Who is a white woman?

You?

Is there a league table of the oppressed and do you need to be in the top 5 to be discussed?

Or perhaps the point of the article was something completely different? Here's a quote to refresh your memory:

"Put together, such narratives have very clear implications. They tell us that under a Starmer government, the wealthy will never be asked to pay their fair share in tax. When pushed, it is those with the least – poor, sick and disabled people – who will be expected to give the most... If you reinforce the fear that disabled and sick people are a burden on the struggling taxpayer, there is less pressure to address real insecurity such as low wages and crumbling services once in office."

Women are an oppressed group, yes. But other oppressed and ignored groups do exist within society, and as sub-groups among women. There is no basis to think Keir's Labour isn't standing up for women on the basis of this article and on the Guardian's response to your comment.

My experience of the Guardian's moderators is that they tend to delete comments that they disagree with, rather than those that breach community guidelines.

Yes the article was talking about the poor sick & disabled, but if the OP's comment had been to highlight some other vulnerable group that she feared werent being prioritised by Labour for whatever reason - care leavers, the elderly, asylum seekers etc, instead of women, her comment probably wouldn't have been deleted.

This. It's been absolutely shit for years now. And to think I used to earnestly buy it as a student...

Users are often banned outright for posting comments that the Guardian doesn’t like. And I mean comments which do not contravene their community standards.
I was part of a five year experiment conducted by a media studies group at a Scottish university which was gauging the treatment of dissenting voices on newspaper online forums.
The Guardian was by far the most censorious. Even the Daily Mail was more tolerant of comments which opposed its editorial line on all sorts of issues.

Commenters are often banned after only one comment.
Yes, just one comment - not off topic, not abusive and not breaking their community standards. Just comments the mod doesn’t like.

That is so interesting @Totality! Doesn't surprise me at all. People on the Left tend to be far more censorious than people on the Right.

The Guardian is captured by trans ideology so they will never allow such a comment.
I used to read the guardian for intelligent news but these days it’s just as openly biased as the Daily Wail

I'm assuming you think Labour are destroying the lives of the 50% of the population that are female by not casting the 0.2% of the population that's trans women into the outer darkness.

Haven't looked at the whole thing but suspect the transphobes descended on it in droves - maybe they were mass removing transphobic comments because there were so many of them, they're boring, predictable and it were 'silting up' the comments section. Shouldn't have been removed tho.

0.01%, according to Keir Starmer.

No one wants trans identifying men cast out anywhere - they just need to stay out of women's spaces.

No. I don't want them cast into the outer darkness.
I do want them cast out of women only spaces.
I don't want to see language that refers to women and mothers only, changed to accommodate them.
Nor do I want to see terms referring to women excised from language to suit people who are not women.
Nor do I want to have the rights of women altered or detrimentally affected to suit those people.

And I am very upset that the Labour Party does not see any of those concerns as worth supporting.

I got banned for my GC "rants"-i.e. saying men cannot change sex, ffs.

I had a Guardian account for over a decade, since what was then called ‘Comment is Free’ started. At first it was great, and comment really was free, but as time went on and the paper became ever more obsessed with rigidly enforcing its identity politics based agenda, more & more of my comments were deleted for trivial divergences from the party line. Eventually I just gave up, and then I gave up reading the comment pages entirely.

I’m aware of the irony of complaining about the Guardian’s comment pages becoming an echo chamber on the MN feminism section, but there we are…

I've always had a bit of cognitive dissonance reading comments about the privilege of white middle class men when written by the white middle class women that marry them and benefit from their wealth/privilege - joint bank accounts etc.