December 18, 2012Dear Sir,Over the past few months, and particularly in the weeks leading up to the election, numerous posts on The Royal Gazette website either hailed one or the other party as the saviours of Bermuda, or dismissed them as at best unreliable or untrustworthy, and at worst the dog’s dinner. A few sought to confuse the blogosphere with contradictory and pirated pseudonyms that almost — not entirely, but almost — drowned out the genuinely reasoned voices with hysterical or deliberately misleading rants in an attempt to create or incite cyber-havoc.That third kind, malicious blog-mayhem, is a blight on what for me out here in the Bermudian diaspora, has been a very useful facility for reading what people in Bermuda and elsewhere think about newsworthy subjects of the day in Bermuda. It’s a kind of static on my reception, an inevitable, if inhospitable, consequence of a free-access space for anyone to air their opinions, contribute accuracy to otherwise erroneous comments, and generally blow off about matters to hand.Archaeologists say that the subspecies of hominid known as Neanderthals died out around 25,000 years ago. Some of the comments on The Royal Gazette and other Bermuda media websites suggest otherwise; that Neanderthals are still among us, clogging up the blogosphere with their misspelled, ungrammatical and largely pointless gruntings. It would be a Sisyphean challenge to get such creatures to abide by the established laws of evolution and just stay in their caves and become extinct. They are still here, however, and, by some kink in the evolutionary line, have gained a rudimentary ability to “write” and, more worryingly, access to cyberspace.Some people might find Neanderblogging a kind of sideshow amusement, not to be taken seriously, to be ignored. And they, the Neanderbloggers do have the same rights as the rest of us to express themselves. But, like the rest of us, they do not have the absolute right to say whatever they want, whenever — not without consequences, at least. Consider the recent case of two Australian radio show hosts who quite innocently made a prank phone call to the London hospital where Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge was being treated for serious illness relating to her pregnancy. The nurse who took the call committed suicide a few days afterwards, apparently because she was so ashamed of having being deceived by the “harmless” prank.Neanderthals who take aim with their venomous, bilious bloggings have no conscience about how they might discourage or even cause distress to less thick-skinned readers who simply want to engage with others and their opinions, however passionate they might be. An impassioned debate is one thing, however; a triple-barrel full-frontal assault with a deadly adjective with intent to cause mayhem is another matter altogether. These media forums are not free and open public spaces. They are privately owned. They are regulated by conditions and guidelines established by the private media owners. Their job is not to kick out all the Neanderbloggers but to ensure that they, like the rest of us, comply with the site’s terms and conditions — or else then kick them out. The principles of these guidelines (on The Royal Gazette site, at least) concern respect for other contributors by not using insulting, threatening or defamatory language, or language intended “to incite emotional responses and disrupt conversations” about a specific topic.Some of the most egregious comments in recent weeks have clearly contravened those principles and not been appropriately sanctioned by deletion. I’m not a big fan of censorship, as a contravention of free speech, even when that free expression is offensive or otherwise “gribble”. But Neanderblogging isn’t a matter of freedom of expression; it’s a question of abuse of that freedom. I don’t ask for these forum sites to be sanitised — just more regularly disinfected.The Royal Gazette has established boundaries of Neandermisbehaviour for its web forum site. It has its own discretionary powers of censorship, clearly stated on its website; there is no equivocation about where the boundaries of free speech lie for its blog forum contributors. The editors of The Royal Gazette who monitor their forum should, therefore, exercise their powers at their discretion with as appropriate consistency and expediency as their terms and conditions demand, namely by pasting Neanderbloggers into some X-rated holding cave where anyone interested in what they have to say can peep in at them, at their peril. Alternatively, they could just delete them to where the archaeologists think they already belong, namely, laid to rest among the fossil remains of other prehistoric hominids in the cyber trash bin of extinction.GRAHAM FAIELLALondon, UK