The BBC TV News main story on 1st April highlighted a Sunday Times report in which it claimed that more than two thousand abusive or threatening anti-Semitic posts had been found by undercover reporters on twenty Facebook groups supportive of Jeremy Corbyn. These groups it was claimed had some 400,000 members.
So what proportion of the people had posted vile or hateful emails? Let us suppose that – quite conservatively – each group member made an average of five posts. That would mean that in all the groups there would be something like two million posts. If there were two thousand vile posts that would mean that only one post in a thousand would have been hateful or anti-Semitic, or to put it another way 0.1% of the total number of posts.
I am not a member of any of these groups and I have not seen the posts referred to. But I can imagine the appalling nature of them. In any large group of people there are bound to be a small proportion of people with extreme views. It seems to me that if only one in a thousand posts were hateful that the membership of the groups is in general quite restrained, balanced and sensible. I would have expected far more unpleasant posts in such a large group of members.
It is right that people that post racist and violent material be called out and, where necessary have their membership cancelled. But given that The Labour Party did not set these groups up and were not responsible for them, what did this have to do with Corbyn, or the Labour Party?
Jeremy Corbyn may be soft on anti-Semitism and may be too weak to become leader of this country, or he may not. Either way, the BBC article has no bearing on the issue. To have run this story in the way it was is to risk seriously biasing people’s opinions. This story should not have been run, or if it had it should have been given lower prominence and the context should have been made clearer.
Peter D Fisher 