Imagine scrolling down to the bottom of a story on a popular website to see the readers comments and then realize that they are all written by neo-Nazis. Ever read the comments section at the end of a news story on Yahoo or MSN? It is a habit of many people to read the comments and to even voice an opinion of their own. Here in Greece there is a regular war of opinions in the comments section with all kinds of arguments over things like the debt or foreign policy. In the days leading up to the elections there was a regular war going on in the comments section. Every kind of fascist had wriggled out of the woodwork to leave their little poop in the comments section. After every story dealing with gallop polls or the rise of the radical left party SYRIZA there would be comments with all kinds of foul language. I too wrote comments answering to these fascists telling them that democracy will not be intimidated. I was not alone. Soon we got to learn each other by name. Avatar name that is. There was Greek23, a fascist, Π, a leftist and many others.
In December then Prime Minister Samaras announced his Presidential candidate and set the 22nd as the election date. Seems our imminent exit from the oppressive memorandums was not to be, instead the so called e-mail Hardouvelis (finance minister at the time) was to be the future. Said e-mail described a horrific future of more pension cuts and wage rollbacks along with massive layoffs and the end to the first residency protection. The first residency, as described in the Katselis law, is to be protected from foreclosure by the banks as it is an indisputable human right, the right to shelter, regardless of ability to pay ones' mortgage. Imagine a law like that protecting over 300,000 homeowners and their families was introduced by a right wing Prime Minister! Samaras really had no choice, he would either protect the right to shelter or face a civil war. So under threat by the Troika to bring in more austerity measures or be led to a default Samaras chose his other option calling for the indirect presidential election five months prematurely. His candidate, a technocrat banker by the name of Dimos had no real chance of being elected. In spite of that there was a last ditch effort to bribe MPs so that he could win in the third parliamentary vote. The failure to install a new president leads to a new general election within about a month which brings us to the January 25th election of this year.
So in December and as all this was starting to crystallize Yahoo pulled the plug on its comments section in Greece. I lost my ability to comment on Greek Yahoo although I can still comment on other Yahoo sites with my old avatar. The explanation given by Yahoo Greece was a long winded one at first about improving user services then followed by a more honest one that the comments section was supposed to be a place where people could constructively interact. Not a place for commentary warfare. I will not go into too many details other than to say that conversations did get quite nasty at times with threats and foul language way out of control. The fascist commentators usually worked in teams at the time and would not argue their point instead making threats to other commentators well being. Comments like "We will come and we will be many" a sort of storm-trooper SS kind of threat, may have been answered by a left winger saying "I will be armed and waiting". Then there were threats to family members and the like. I can't blame Yahoo for pulling the plug.
So sometime in early December we lost our ability to write on all the old sites and then Disqus popped up on Yahoo. It is a forum to write comments that many new news sites were using. Iefimerida was one of them and we started writing there. Sometimes editorial writers would actually answer commentators trying to argue once more the point of their stories. Seems the commentators were often better informed than the journalists of said site. All the way up to the elections of January 25th Iefimerida kept the comments section open. The feud between left wingers and right wingers carried on. I should be more clear because it is not so much left vs right as pro-Greek vs pro-German that was at issue. It may seem strange to you dear reader that a Greek national would take the side of German interests but here I must remind you of a theme that has been part of this blog for the last four or five years. It is a fact that a minority of Greeks have benefited from the entrenched German interests and corruption in Greece. German law actually allows corrupt practices by German companies outside her borders! Iefimerida, as well as the River party are both financed by the Bobola group of companies. Bobolas has been making a killing. while not paying his taxes, throughout the Samaras years. His brother was jailed by the present SYRIZA government for tax evasion and opted to pay a 1.8 million euro fine to avoid felony charges. How things change.
Iefimerida cancelled its comments section shortly after the election and continues without giving its readers a voice. Many other sites have comments sections that they heavily edit and censor. During the days leading up to the elections I would often leave comments to stories late at night or on the weekend to find that they had been answered to during working hours. After every comment there is the ability for another commentator to leave an answer to the comment. There is also the ability to give a vote of approval or disapproval,a like or dislike. So I would often challenge these commentators pointing out how obviously they were on the payroll and so on. We gave them a name. The name is Troll.
Many commenters leave links to their blogs or to other sites or to statistics to prove their points. Their is also a new kind of animal here in Greece that lives on the net and lurks in the comments section. It is known as the troll..Now I do not know if this is a familiar occurrence back in Canada but here in Greece it is. Trolls enter sites just to leave comments with misleading information or to harass other commenters. We also say something is the action of a troll, a trollia, when official news sights publish false stories. So if you want to live in interesting times then Greece is the place to visit.
Here are three links to some of the better blogs linked in comments section. They are from a news site called Pandora's Box. Please enjoy.
p.s. a good knowledge of Greek will be helpful.
http://nea-metra.blogspot.gr/2015/03/blog-post_15.html
https://projectantisystem.wordpress.com
http://my-pillow-book.blogspot.gr/2015/04/champagne.html
