The Education Secretary’s official Facebook profile routinely removes statements that question Labour’s controversial private school tax raid, parents and teachers have alleged.
As reported in The Telegraph, more than a dozen concerned parents say that replies they had written underneath Bridget Phillipson’s posts – in which they criticised the decision to impose VAT on school fees – had vanished. The report continues:
In an attempt to discuss the policy, parents said they tried to reply to comments under her posts.
But in the time it took them to compose a response, they found that the original comment would be deleted, triggering an error message.
Gemma Clark, who teaches at the fee-paying Kirkham Grammar School in Lancashire, said she had seen comments on posts from Ms Phillipson’s Facebook page disappear “within minutes”.
Mrs Clark said she was concerned about the detrimental impact this policy will have on her pupils and said that the apparent censorship “smacks of a dictatorship”.
One mother said she only became aware that comments could be wiped after she got a notification that someone had “liked” her comment “about feeling like Labour is a dictatorship”.
By the time she clicked on the notification, a grey error message appeared.
It read: “Couldn’t load comment thread. This comment may have expired, or it may only be visible to an audience you’re not in.”
Another parent who received the same error message suggested Ms Phillipson’s team could be “hiding” comments with which they disagree.
“If you monitor comments on her [Facebook] page you can actually see them disappearing over time,” they said, adding that, “I think her team is hiding them so that the original poster can see their own comments but they are hidden from the view of others.”
In theory the error message could have been triggered if the original commenter had deleted their post, but the father whom Mrs Thorn had been replying to confirmed he hadn’t.
Parents and teachers interviewed by The Telegraph all produced screenshots of their comments, and the error messages triggered, to evidence their concerns.
Nicola Redford, a 35-year-old mother from Lincolnshire, said that the same error message appeared when she tried to reply to a comment from another parent concerned by Labour’s education policies.
Her reply – which could not be sent – read: “If they spent as much time deleting/hiding comments that challenge their views as they did sorting education out, [there would] be no problems left to fix!
“Disgusting infringement of free speech from a publicly elected government!”
When asked by The Telegraph, the mother to whom Mrs Redford had tried to reply confirmed that her post was “absolutely not deleted by me”.
Many parents also pointed to the Labour Party’s social media policy, which states that: “We want debate and discussion to flourish on our channels and will encourage feedback wherever appropriate.”
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