This entry was posted on
Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at
2:19 pm and is filed
under The Political Weblog Movement.

[For those who came in late: Ellee Seymour: a timeline of lies and libel]

After spending most of yesterday afternoon denying that she had deleted any comments, last night – just before leaving for a two-day freebie in Spain – Ellee Seymour reinstated some (but not all) of my comments that previously appeared in the comments thread under this post.

This, in theory, allows her to avoid any tricky questions asking – if no comments have been deleted – why people are talking to a ‘Tim’ that isn’t there.

Well, here’s a little treat for you:

This is a full and unaltered* mirror of that page before Ellee deleted my comments:
Mirror 1 – Captured 21:58 06/11/2007

This is the same thread after she deleted comments:
Mirror 2 – Captured 22:17 06/11/2007

This is the same thread after she reinstated some comments in order to convince people that she hadn’t deleted any comments at all:
Mirror 3 – Captured 08:43 08/11/2007

[*In each file, the Statcounter code has been removed to avoid corrupting Ellee’s tracking data and a ‘noindex,nofollow’ tag has been added to avoid Ellee being stung with any ‘mirroring’ penalties.]

You may note that the main comment that Ellee has failed to reinstate links to the kind of evidence (1, 2) that she’d rather not take into account. Presumably because this allows her to continue to insist that Nadine Dorries hasn’t done anything wrong.

She has also failed to reinstate another comment from me that originally appeared right above this comment from Welshcakes Limoncello. It’s possible that this is a courtesy extended to one of her regulars who later in the *same* thread seems to have trouble difficulty recalling data that has since disappeared down the Memory Hole:

Well, I’m not sure I understand all the above comments but I do understand that if Ellee says she hasn’t deleted any, she hasn’t!

Strangely, Nadine has yet to reinstate the single comment from me in the thread where she is being pressed hardest about missing comments.

1. Semantics

Ellee Seymour has been insisting until she is blue in the face that no comments of mine have been deleted (see #3 below). She could very well be aiming for a future claim (once she gets back from her jolly holiday) that these comments were not ‘deleted’, but instead ‘filtered’ (i.e. withdrawn from publication after being classified as spam). She may even have the audacity to suggest or claim that it was all a bit of an accident and she didn’t know what was going on, because she’s a PR blogging expert who doesn’t know her way around her own back-end.

Bunnies to that.

The purpose of the filtering is and was to remove comments that don’t fit into her narrative. It’s censorship, pure and simple. Even if the comments have not been so totally destroyed that they are irretrievable, they have still been removed from the thread. This counts as ‘deletion’, even if Ellee later decides to click the ‘undo’ button in order to cause confusion and/or avoid further embarrassment.

Well, I wish her luck with that, because now – in front of many credible witnesses – she has not only deleted comments, but denied doing so and then later reinstated them without any indication or admission that she has done so.

2. Selective Moderation

In theory, bunging off on holiday provides her with a good excuse for taking this next measure, but it’s become clear that Ellee engaged general moderation again well before leaving, effectively queuing comments that contained awkward questions about her conduct, but publishing a series of happy comments wishing her well.

Garry has an excellent example in this updated post.

[Psst! Do recall before this next bit that Ellee’s timestamps are one hour out of whack.]

This comment submitted by Garry at 8:35 pm last night aims to present a potentially awkward predicament to Welshcakes Limoncello. It is – at the time of writing – still being held in the moderation queue and does not appear in the thread it was submitted to.

It could be argued/claimed that the happier and less problematic comments cleared for publication at 8:31 pm, 9:06 pm, 10:16pm, 10:17 pm were automatically cleared because these people are ‘trusted’ commenters (WordPress and Movable Type allow you to hold comments prior to publication if they come from people who are not regular contributors; I use this system myself), but there are two anomalies that complicate this excuse:

a) ‘Quasar9’ makes a comment here (at 1:30am) where he appears to be confused about a previous comment. The two previous comments visible… are his. An interim comment submitted and published between 10:17 pm and 1:30am appears to have been deleted.

b) Take another look at the comment submitted by Garry at 8:35 pm. Welshcakes Limoncello is insisting that if Ellee says she hasn’t deleted any comments, then she hasn’t deleted any comments, but – if Garry’s comment were cleared for publication at that time – it would clearly show that Welshcakes Limoncello was there to witness the missing comments.

At some time after 10 pm, Ellee responded to this difficult problem by altering the evidence (i.e. by reinstating comments that are suddenly awkward for Ellee if they are *not* there).

Here’s another mirror for you… this was saved to disk on my computer at 10:04 pm last night:

Mirror 4 – Captured 22:04 07/11/2007

Essentially, Garry’s comment was held back (and is *still* being held back) while a clear effort was made to undermine it a few hours later.

Dirty tricks, and yet more censorship.

3. Outright Lies

Below are the comments made by Ellee Seymour yesterday in response to repeated questions about her deletion of comments. Now, you have to remember here that Ellee is making these comments knowing that I’ve published a fully documented account of the deletions and the surrounding circumstances here on my weblog, and that the gaps are there for all to see on her own.

Ellee Seymour at 10:22 pm Nov 6 (just after comment deletion):

Tim, Sorry, but no, and please don’t send me any more threatening emails. Don’t expect me to respond, or to phone you. And I’m not going to divulge confidential information to you about people who leave comments on my site. I regard Nadine as a superb woman, a superb MP and a superb blogger. Nothing you say will change that.

Ellee Seymour at 5:17 am Nov 7:

Clive, no comments have been deleted. I’m afraid I can’t answer your question as I don’t know the answer. I admire Nadine and respect her judgement on this.

Ellee Seymour at 3:57 pm Nov 7:

Jherad, I haven’t censored one word of Tim Ireland. Maybe he censored himself.

[Note – Ellee is running on a WordPress platform. Unlike platforms such as Blogger, it does *not* allow me to delete comments that I have submitted to another website.]

Ellee Seymour at 5:01 pm Nov 7:

David, the fact is that no comment has been deleted. One was held up in comment moderation while I was out and later published. That seemed to upset him, and the same with his trolls when it happened to them too because I was out. Also because I refused to give him the IP address of a blogger who criticised him, he has turned against me in this way. I shall always protect the confidential information of people who post comments here. My credibility is firmly in tact. I shall not give in to any intimidation and threats.

A pack of lies. This is not what happened at all.

The comment she refers to here was published last night for the first time after 10pm.

It was not held up in comment moderation, but instead was cast into the spam pit, along with a series of previously published comments. The message I received after I submitted it read:

Sorry, but your comment has been flagged by the spam filter running on this blog: this might be an error, in which case all apologies. Your comment will be presented to the blog admin who will be able to restore it immediately. You may want to contact the blog admin via e-mail to notify him.

The classification of my recent comments as spam – that I now regard to be deliberate because no-one with the capacity to use a keyboard could possibly be as ignorant as Ellee is pretending to be – neatly removed all of my recent comments from two discussion threads.

Ellee also has the audacity to repeat a tactic that I grow tired of; suggesting that I am easily upset and that this is the reason for any objection I may have to her conduct. As with her blunt refusal to admit that any comments have been deleted, this is an attempt to rewrite history. It’s also a bit of a smear.

Speaking of which, to suggest that the contributions from people supporting me are in any way troll-like really is taking the biscuit. The comments that she published here and here that are so central to this issue (and still live!!!) are the only troll-like comments anywhere in recent exchanges. Everything else is a clear attempt to call her to account for her publication of these comments, her refusal to investigate or delete them, a completely valid question about her censorship/deletion of comments, and/or her inexplicable refusal to consider the facts surrounding the removal of comments from Nadine Dorries’ site.

This is yet another example of something that keeps cropping up when I’m forced to confront dishonest bloggers; Rovian projection (the deliberate projection of one’s own misconduct onto one’s opponent). There are echoes of this in Ellee’s laughable claim that I have somehow deleted these comments myself.

[Note to self: Attempt to ‘hack’ Ellee’s website while she is away. Her password might very well be ‘1234’.]

(ahem)

Moving on…

And Ellee was indeed in at the time she claims she was out, because she made this comment at almost exactly the same time as I submitted the one she claims was held up by moderation while she was ‘out’.

She was also busy deleting my comments at the time. Let’s not forget that.

What has also been made clear by my publication of evidence – including every email I sent to her – is that at no threats were made and that at no time was I insisting that she share sensitive data with me. Some might argue that I have a right to that data given the nature of the comments involved, but I’m a man of experience, me. I’ve dealt with dishonest bloggers before, and I know that they like to scream about ‘rights’ this and ‘freedom’ that when they have no respect for the rights and freedom of others. I made it clear to Ellee *repeatedly* that I wanted to and was able to – at the very least – help her to identify the culprit without being privy to details myself.

Yet, strangely, Ellee appears desperate to arrange her narrative in such a way that she will never be compelled to investigate the source of those comments.

And I think I know why….

At any stage, Ellee may choose to throw a spanner in the works and suggest that her technical adviser Geoff Jones or someone else within her immediate circle was involved in a key/admin capacity at some stage, but let’s operate on the fair assumption that it’s Ellee’s site and she’s the one behind the driving wheel.

What we already have from the evidence still on Ellee’s site (and documented in detail on this site) is the undeniable fact that Ellee Seymour allowed libellous comments to be published, and acted irresponsibly as a moderator by allowing them to stand and not challenging, addressing or deleting them herself.

But I’m going to go a little further than that:

It is my contention that it was Ellee Seymour who wrote, contributed to or otherwise called this comment into being:

Is this the same Tim Ireland who stalks people on their blogs? Maybe you are the low life Nadine is referring to? Read the stuff about the Guardian – seems she was right to me. You wouldn’t be trying to create a storm in a teacup would you so that people will hit your blog via the links you have put on Ellee’s site and put your hit rate up? if I were Nadine I would write to the editor of the Guardian, this guy seems pretty un-profesional to me. Ellee, you should put a block on the name Tim Ireland – he is the reason many MPs don’t blog. He makes their life a misery with his obsessive comments and stalking.

It is my contention that it was Ellee Seymour who wrote, contributed to or otherwise called this comment into being:

Really Tim, funny that, because on the other blog you and this Garry guy blogged straight after one another.So is Tim Garry and Garry Tim? A certain Anne Milton MP has had some very bad experiences with you hasn’t she Tim?

And here, finally, I’m going to get a little bit emotional on you….

I. Am. Sick. To. Death. Of. This. Bullshit.

Weblogs should allow us the capacity to finally discuss political issues openly and honestly, and one thing above all is currently holding us back:

The general population is constantly assured by mainstream media owners and representatives who clearly can’t be trusted themselves that weblogs are not to be trusted. We are essentially at odds with a machine that is still much larger than our collective strength, and the only weapon that gives us the edge is integrity.

But the credibility of all weblogs is undermined when the self-proclaimed ‘leading’ political bloggers cannot conduct themselves with integrity.

It is undermined even further if it becomes clear that ‘leading’ political bloggers will lie outright to their readers, even when they have been caught bang to rights compromising their integrity for the sake of personal or political gain.

We cannot call for accountability if we ourselves refuse to be held accountable.

We betray our readers if we unfairly moderate their input or secretly alter our own to give the impression that we are always right.

We can and we must do better than this, or every scrap of potential is going to be pissed away.