Reddit Ireland banned all posts mentioning Gemma O'D. Should Boards do the same?

ShineOn7

Stop giving her a voice on Ireland's most read forum (this one)

The mods have been speaking over the last while in regards to posts which relate to Gemma O'Doherty. She's been cropping up a lot on r/Ireland lately - which has directly resulted in her twitter feed getting more followers, alongside her live streams getting a large boost in viewers. Noteably, during her last "stake-out" at Twitter HQ, the link posted on r/Ireland boosted her from about 50 live viewers, to about 400 within a very short period of time.

The result was her live feed being full of people taking the mick out of her - and while normally any sane person would welcome the mick being taken out of a woman who spends her days bemoaning the fact that black people appear in advertisements, there's a sinister motive behind how she works.

Any publicity - be it negative or positive - is good publicity for someone like Gemma.

As was incredibly common during the American Media circus circuit back during 2016, a swathe of new public figures appeared, and subsisted solely off the hatred they were being fed. Publicity is publicity, and it is an extremely powerful tool in the hands of someone like Gemma, who will without any shame, feed a barrage of racism, lies, and hatred to anyone who may be within earshot.

The classic quote on this is that while a lie is making its way around the world (such as Gemma's high-touted myths such as Vaccinations being dangerous, or "The Great Replacement"), the truth is still putting on its pants.
We've found that with Gemma dragging in a massive amount of traffic & publicity from r/Ireland posts, we're effectively feeding the problem. Yes, our posts are always to laugh at, criticise, and even to show pity for her - but they're attention for her nonetheless. And when she's capable of using this attention to spread her own sileage mixture of lies and hatred, it's better and healthier for everyone to avoid giving her what's essentially become a public platform.

And with all of that in mind, we've made the decision to remove any content in relation to Gemma O'Doherty moving forward.

We wouldn't allow any other random sub user to use /r/Ireland as an advertisement ground for their anti-vaxx, or racist blogspam - and there should be no exception for someone backed up by a Twitter following.

Note that in the event where a non-blog news source reports on Gemma, we would not remove any content in that regard. Random bull****/tweets/live streams are what we're cutting out with this, under our standard Political Agenda Spam and General Spam rules.

ronivek

Does boards.ie currently ban discussions on any particular person site-wide?

purifol0

What drives me mad about GO'D is that she legitimately, professionally and bravelly exposed Garda corruption and took on the establishment. She is directly responsible for revealing abuse of power at "top" of Irish society re the penalty points scandal, now ex Garda Comis. Callanan, former Minister Alan Shatter, and she publicly defended Maurice McCabe before the rest of the politicians decided which way the wind was blowing on that hot topic.

If she had not gone off the deep end she was practically a shoe in at a gen election. She has not only squandered all her goodwill, blew through all the benefit of the doubt in a few months and has instead purposely opted to be a force for contrarianism, conspiracy theories and now campagining against the existence and consequences (lock-down) of coronovirus. The thing that killed 9 people in Ireland today.