Anonymous Abuse Found On Internet- Hold The Front Page!

Much of the established media dislikes the blogosphere intensely viewing it as some kind of competition, in reality most blogs don't aspire to compete with the core functions of the press, such as news gathering, but they can fact check lazy journalism and present viewpoints as cogently as the op-ed sections. Which possibly explains why the Belfast Telegraph has run and incredibly dishonest and misleading account of an exchange that occurred on the blog "A Tangled Web", which is run by the Northern Ireland resident David Vance.

On the 21st of October David posted about the murder of a young man by the supposedly-no-longer-murdering-anyone-anymore, IRA after he was involved in a dispute with some of it's members. The post was clearly expressing anger at the murder of a young man, and the likely lack of consequences his killers would face. Most of the posts which followed displayed similar sentiments. On the 25th of October a troll going under the alias of "Local" insulted the dead man, and the small number of number of people who were still paying attention to the thread after 4 days took the writer to task.

Now you're probably nodding off by now because this story amounts to "Troll found at popular Blog!". Which is to say something that occurs thousands of times across the world each day. Not to the Belfast Telegraph who devoted a whole article to it:

New agony for Quinn family as sick abuse appears on net

Abusive comments about murdered Cullyhanna man Paul Quinn are being posted on the internet.

Web users are utilising a popular UK political commentary site to insult the 21 year-old who was beaten to death by a gang in Co Monaghan almost two weeks ago.

Not only is it a smear to imply that A Tangled Web condones such comments, almost no one would be aware of the abuse if a couple of comments left on a dorment blog thread weren't hyped up to ludicrous proportions by the major newspaper of Ulster in the first place.