A DISPUTE erupted this week over claims that Teignbridge Council allegedly deleted negative social media comments in response to a survey. 

According to eagle-eyed district councillor Liam Mullone, of Newton Says No, a post inviting people to comment on a survey on ‘garden towns’ was hastily deleted after a cascade of negative comments were made at around 6.15pm on Friday evening.

‘There was a sponsored link asking me to comment on a survey about a Garden City,’ explained Cllr Mullone.

‘Now, I can’t even see this survey which is floating in the ether somewhere.’

He added: ‘About 15 people who commented say they cannot get back to link... They’ve asked if we’ve been blacklisted and don’t know what happened because it seems like we have.’

Cllr Mullone accepted it was ‘entirely possible’ that this could merely be the result of IT or human error, but said that any such survey should be loud and clear on Teignbridge’s actual page, not ‘floating around’ as a paid advert on Facebook somewhere.

‘This is important stuff,’ he added.

Initially, the council denied this was the case, and said it didn’t know which post Cllr Mullone was referring to.

Teignbridge did, however, suggest that comments deemed ‘offensive’ or ‘libelous’ in their view, would always be deleted regardless of the subject matter. This, the district council suggested, could result of a thread of comments being deleted and could explain why some comments would ‘disappear’.

An initial response from a spokesman for Teignbridge Council said: ‘As a rule and irrespective of the topic or the views expressed, the only posts we delete are those which are offensive, discriminatory or libellous – as set out in our published social media ‘house rules’

‘We don’t know what post Cllr Mullone is referring to but we have no knowledge of any posts being deleted on Friday evening.

‘We have not and do not ‘censor’ any critical posts but we will not permit offensive material to remain on our social media accounts.

However, upon further investigation, the council concluded that by using a third-party agency to target ‘certain postcodes’ to maximise their presence to local people, some of the comments would not be visible.

The spokesman added: ‘This is the first time that we have used an agency for such targeted activity and in seeking to maximise involvement, we did not anticipate that people’s comments would not be visible.

‘We repeat that we do not remove or edit comments from our Facebook pages, nor do we ever seek to restrict the ability of people to criticise on social media.’

Reacting to the update from Teignbridge, Cllr Mullone said he was ‘unconvinced’ by the explanation:‘It doesn’t explain why so many people could see it one minute and not the next’, he said