Thread was closed "for review" on Sept 13th - still closed and no word, despite several PMs sent

volchitsa

As in the title really. On Sept 13th, @Beasty posted this on the thread below:

There are a lot of reports that need to be reviewed, but I will not get time until tomorrow. Another mod may get to them beforehand but I am closing the thread in the meantime

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058367645/french-man-accused-of-drugging-his-wife-and-inviting-men-to-rape-her

It's now the last day of September, and despite sending a couple of PMs, and making a report on the thread itself, I haven't heard a word about when/whether the thread is to be reopened.

I realise that the mods are busy, but if it still hasn't been looked at, then I'd at least appreciate an answer to my PMs to let me know that, and if possible with a more realistic notion of when that's likely to happen.

(Not sure where to post this, but Helpdesk seemed the most appropriate.)

Thanks

Beasty

Apologies - would like to say I hold up my hands on this, but with one arm in a sling all I can say this is 100% down to me

When I closed the thread it took me a couple of days to go through all the reported posts, and we had other active threads such as the Trump Harris debate and some of the Middle East issues, that were already taking up a lot of time

I know you reported it a couple of times, although I can only find one PM from you which was not directly calling for the thread to be opened but it was certainly implied by your comments

My time on the site has been a bit limited over the past few weeks parly due to my recovery from a double-fractured collarbone - that is intended as an explanation, not an excuse. The thread had caused a lot of issues and reports and TBH I considered it a pain to moderate particularly in the context of some of the other threads which were demanding quite a lot of attention

I would add though that the site has a rule that anything before the courts cannot be discussed. I realise some people think this only relates to Irish cases, but the site Terms of Use make no distinction. We have certainly closed threads discussing some UK cases. One specific memory I have on that was the case involving Rugby players which was held in Belfast, but I think it was the judge who stated that some social media commentary across the island was potentially prejudicial.

The other side on that point is we certainly see commentary on some US cases, particularly those involving Trump, which were not closed. Equally they were not reported as such and the US freedom of speech laws seem to allow extensive commentary on current cases

I have no idea what the French legal system's approach to potential prejudicial commentary is. That then begs the question of where we draw the line, and I do not have an answer beyond one that would require us to close every thread discussing court csaes anywhere in the world

However I will come back to the specifics of that particular thread. It was causing major issues and TBH if re-opened I think it would continue to do so. There has already been extensive discussion of the case before the thread was closed. The last page or two of the thread thread was largely bickering about things not directly related to the case and I remain to be convinced the thread should be re-opened.

volchitsa

I didn't get a chance to reply to this till now. I also sent PMs to (I think) @Big Bag of Chips and @Ten of Swords on the same subject. I didn't mean I'd been hasselling you with multiple PMs. But I got no answers from anyone. Hence this thread.

(Hope your collarbone is healing BTW - how did you get a double fracture, if it isn't indiscreet?)

On the topic of the thread itself, and whether it should be reopened, well I think it's clear that if it isn't reopened, you'll be doing exactly what a certain number of deeply misogynistic posters want, and indeed what the accused in the trial want: the plaintiff asked for anonymity to be removed and for the press to be allowed to report on everything in the court. Yet despite that, the defence have been insisting that they still want the press and public excluded. Several of them even pretended that this was for the good of the plaintiff.

In reality of course, it's for the same reason that most of them arrive at court in hoodies and often with surgical masks as well. As well as to be able to suggest afterwards that maybe they weren't guilty after all, since nobody else saw the video in question.

The judge tried to appease them by announcing that only some of the videos would be played, and that the public and press would have to leave whenever those were being shown. That lasted for a week. It took a lot of argument from the plaintiff's side to force him to agree that she was entitled to have the video evidence made public, and that the press and social media were entitled to discuss it. It's been fully open to all again since Monday, and is being livetweeted by journalists (the videos themselves are not allowed to be retransmitted, but are described in some detail). I hope that reassures you as to the legality of any discussion of the court case.

And to get back to the thread, a number of posters who have been insisting that this subject should not be discussed in the first place because #notallmen is more important than open discussion of why so many men living within a short distance of this woman were eager to rape her, and what that says about our society in general, deliberately undertook to disrupt the discussion with personal abuse. Allowing them to wreck the thread so that discussion becomes impossible is not only wrong because it condones that behaviour (they even said on the thread that it was going to be/should be closed down) but it will also encourage that behaviour in all contentious threads. So in the longer term letting them "win" with that tactic is making things harder for mods too.

Hotblack Desiato

The blatant misandry in that thread is shocking and not something that should be platformed by Boards.

volchitsa

@Beasty

The comment above proves my point. A 60-year old woman is drugged and raped by her husband and multiple other men, nearly all living fairly close by, to the extent that she recognised some of them from seeing them at the local shops, over a decade - and what matters to this poster (and others) is that a woman dares to ask whether this says something wider about society in general, and about the attitude of far too many men towards women.

That apparently is misandry, and requires the thread to be closed down.

Not, you'll notice, for any fears of preventing a fair trial, but because they don't want men's feelings to be hurt.

That, IMO, is part of the problem and is why we need to be able to discuss these events.

As for men's hurty feelings, it should be like when you bring an injured child to A&E: you know you're going to be queried as to how this happened - but you don't start roaring about how dare they be anti-parents - you suck it up because you know that there are abusive parents out there, and as decent people, you accept that it's so important to identify non accidental injuries that you swallow your hurt feelings and answer the damn questions, no matter how insulting you personally may find the idea that you would ever hurt your own child.

And in this case, posters don't even have to do that - they can just scroll on by if they don't want to discuss the issue. No worries. But no, they need to control the discussion.

Basically though - if you aren't guilty, you shouldn't take it personally.

Overheal

I think you're highlighting yourself in heavy part why it should remain closed: "men's hurty feelings," "a certain number of deeply misogynistic posters" etc.

You posts generally indicate less of an interest in the actual case than of accusing and accosting users in a most uncivil manner of having a sinister agenda. That you don't see making these claims of people being "deeply misogynistic" and having "hurty feelings" as personal abuse while making claims of personal abuse should be glaring.

The majority of the things you wanted to discuss were not in direct relation to the case, they were gross extrapolations and generalizations about men and society the world over. It was less a discussion about a court case in France as it was a soap box about the "what that says about our society in general" portion. You spent a good portion of the thread not discussing the case but pushing the notion that eg. porn needs to be banned and kinkshaming needs to be normalized - things that had limited relation to the case. You also said of your own views that "even if it were [misandry]" you still viewed it as justifiable:

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122598599#Comment_122598599

Indeed many of your comments as the OP of the thread can be seen as openly misandrist, eg.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122584699#Comment_122584699

From the charter:

You are free to express your views in a forceful manner provided you remain civil. Hate speech, insults, and purposely inflammatory remarks (i.e., trolling) will not be tolerated. Do not post threats or state or imply that any individual or group is deserving of harm. If we tell you to refrain from behaviour that we regard as uncivil, or that in our view detracts from a productive discussion, do so or face revocation of your posting privileges.

Then when presumptively male posters tried to have the very discission about proposing solutions you say they should have, exactly as your quote above suggested should happen, that wasn't good enough for you either, you posted this comic in response to them doing so - before they could even get into any specifics:

Furthermore to what Beasty has stated, it does appear French law has similar curtailments on the freedom of the press regarding ongoing court cases where the individual freedoms of the press intersect with the individual freedoms of both the victims and the accused of legal disputes, whom as abhorrent as we may feel the crimes are and as apparent as the evidence can be, still have the presumption of innocence until verdict is rendered:

For the same reason defendants have the right to come to court with as you say, surgical masks, hoodies etc. they still enjoy certain privacy rights.

https://www.ijsj.ie/assets/uploads/documents/pdfs/2006-Edition-01/article/media-reporting-of-trials-in-france-and-in-ireland.pdf

Many of the things you say were 'wrecking' the thread I assume you mean those posts which pointed out the uncertainties of the case, given the fact that the trial is still ongoing and hasn't been completely adjudicated - such as a comprehensive finding of facts, convictions etc. and instead internet sleuthing was used to make tenuous suppositions, yourself making inferences from information gleaned from eg. Twitter and obscure references to people's family names. All of that argument over things yet to be resolved by the court would be irrelevant in a discussion were it to be had after the trial had resolved itself.

I don't see therefore why this thread regarding the ongoing case needs to be reopened; I do see how a new thread after the trial is concluded could be workable with much fewer facts about the case at that time being up to debate, albeit I think such a thread would need to be sanitized/inoculated from the type of misandrist commentary and abusive comments about "deeply misogynistic posters" etc. were it to be permitted, as commentary that detracts from a productive discussion as per the charter, otherwise it just becomes an apparent 'man-bashing thread,' ie. the platforming of hate speech. It should be a discussion of the case and it's conclusion, not a 'why nobody should trust men'-athon.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122695623#Comment_122695623

I mean you have consistently misrepresented not only what I said but also the facts of the case - remember when you were telling us that recruitment of the rapists was Europewide and not local at all? Or when you were pretending to believe that I had ever said all men were rapists?

Now you’re trying to claim that you know French law better than journalists from French national radio who are live tweeting the coverage, which is what I’ve been posting. The victim has asked and been granted for the trial to be fully open and fully reportable. The only exception is that the videos and photographs themselves are not retransmitted in the media, and since they haven’t been, there’s no chance of them appearing here.

But that isn’t why you’re desperate to have the thread closed. You’ve been so consistently wrong on it that OF COURSE you want it kept shut. That way it can sink to the bottom of the internet. 😏

Overheal

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122695702#Comment_122695702

I said from the information we had we cannot say what area recruitment was limited to: it was a website after all and reports indicated it was part of an investigation that spanned Europe. This is an example of uncertainties about the case that a discussion post conviction would not entail.

Again you’re engaged in personalities, accusations of sinister motives and snide emojis etc in a show of why the discussion was not productive or in keeping with the charter.

Journalists will know what they can report without being prejudicial, libelous or defamatory (and/or are held to that legal jeopardy for what they publish under their own names and outlets). Similarly the fact that RTE reports on matters regarding an ongoing court battle has never formed the basis to keep a boards thread about that ongoing court case open, so the observation about journalists covering it professionally is moot.

volchitsa

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/122695739#Comment_122695739

Not true: I posted links to the live coverage with translations, but you kept quoting a single line from (as I recall) a NYT article which was ambiguously translated. Other posters even pointed out to you that you were obsessively relying on a single line that didn't necessarily mean exactly what you thought. Yet you kept doing it.

What the NYT article meant was that the internet site in question had recently been closed down after multiple, unrelated legal cases. Again, I pointed this out, but you were so determined to be right that you refused to take anything else on board.

In fact the site was used for drug dealing, fake meetings in which homosexual men were set up and then robbed, and in planning at least one gangland murder, apparently because it was common practice for messages to be deleted after a certain time. Nothing to do with the Pelicot case at all, AFAIK. Some of this I posted on the thread at the time, but there's not much point in trying to put someone right with yet more information when they're determined to ignore most of it and misrepresent the rest.

The Pelicot case was local though. As I said right from the start - I said it on the first page if not in the OP itself. And if you hadn't been determined to prove me wrong by hook or by crook, you would have realised it was you who had taken it up wrong.

And yes the two journalists whose livetweeting I posted do know the law - they both specialise in reporting on legal cases for two major French news channels. Replies are allowed and I've not seen any sign that there is much censorship of those replies. Not on the basis of legal issues.

Since the men were filmed raping the woman, and coverage has been declared by the court to be permissible in France, I wonder why you have now convinced yourself that an internet site in Ireland might have legal issues doing the same thing.

Beasty

OK, drawing a line under this

That thread remains closed, and this one is now also closed