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Green Party

Twitter-happy Greens block 'time wasters' from following them

Paul Gogarty and Dan Boyle – among the Oireachtas’ most prolific Twitter users – stop commentators from seeing their tweets.

Updated: 17.17

THEY MAY BE KNOWN as some of the most prolific, and occasionally the most insightful, Twitter users among Ireland’s political elite – but now the Green Party’s Twitter kingpins, Paul Gogarty and Dan Boyle, have begun blocking users who “tweet abuse at us” or their party.

It yesterday emerged that Gogarty – whose biography on the microblogging site reads, ‘Promise I won’t tweet anything controversial…’ and who boasts 1,786 – had blocked over a dozen users including broadcasters, economists and political commentators deemed to be “time wasters”.

His Seanad colleague, party chairman Dan Boyle who has over 7,700 followers, had also blocked a number of users. though it is believed his blocking affected a smaller number.

Blocking a user means that that the blocked user cannot view any updates they post – irrespective of whether their profile is ordinarily ‘public’ or ‘private’.

It also means that the account holder – in this case the Green politicians – will not be shown any messages from a blocked user, irrespective of whether or not they are directed toward them.

Unsurprisingly, the move has not gone down well with some of the users at the receiving end of the blockings.

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The Green Party’s own official account has defended the moves, suggesting that other users would act similarly if  they had a “choice between being repetitively verbally abused by a small number of people, or not”,

Boyle himself has also said he “rarely” uses Twitter’s Block feature, “and when I do it is for the reason of people constantly giving abuse rather than make arguments.”

This evening Gogarty tweeted TheJournal.ie that he and his colleague had not blocked “critics who write stuff about us, just block those who tweet abuse at us”.

He had earlier asserted that he could block users “as a democratic right”, just as a voter who disagreed with him had the right to “rip up my leaflets if you like.”