You can’t hide your lyin’ eyes

During Johnson’s recent Twitter tantrum over Glen Greenwald’s link to the Diary of Daedalus, he got agitated enough to respond to some unflattering facts being presented concerning banishment of dissenting opinion from LGF. In these tweets, Charles makes a number of claims on which he was called by some rapscallion named @RocIngersoll, and which warrant deeper scrutiny by the BRC.

15000+ ACTIVE LGF ACCOUNTS?

Let’s give Charles the benefit of the doubt and round his “more than 15,000” all the way up to 16,000.

• We know that there are more than 36000 registered LGF user accounts, and
• Charles claims that LGF has 16000 _active_ accounts, therefore
• Charles has apparently blocked at least 20000 accounts.

Now let’s look at what Charles means by “_active_”.

• Around 23000 accounts have left 1 or more comments at LGF, and
• Around 13000 registered accounts have never posted, and
• Of the accounts that have posted, about 7000 remain unblocked, therefore
• Charles must count 9000 unhatched accounts as _active_

We’ll return to this issue of active LGF accounts a bit later…

NOBODY IS BANNED FOR “DISAGREEING”?

The chart above depicts the number of accounts that permanently ceased posting to LGF within the previous 6 month period indicated on the bottom axis, grouped by current blocked status. For instance,

• 964 LGF accounts posted their last during the period Jul-Dec 2006
• Of these 320 (33%) are now blocked, while 644 are not
• 2028 LGF accounts posted for the final time between Jul-Dec 2007
• Of these, 2013 (99.2%) are now blocked, while 15 are not.

Charles claims “we [we, Charles?] automatically suspend accounts if they’re inactive for a certain amount of time”. What period of time is that? 10 years? Oh wait, Charles is on record stating that the inactivity limit is 6 months.

There is obvious evidence of a massive purge of the accounts which last posted during Charles’ Great Awakening between mid-2007 and early 2011. Thousands walked away from their accounts, and thousands of others were blocked as they individually incurred Charles’ wrath along the way.

But the BRC previously established that over 10000 of these accounts were blocked en masse at a later date, in a one-time event, sometime between March 2011 and March 2012. No inactivity timer played a role in the suspension of these accounts.

In addition, there is no evidence that any sort of automatic inactive account suspension has been in effect since that time. Quite to the contrary, the 6500 as yet unblocked accounts whose last posts were made between 6 months and 10 years ago prove otherwise.

Which takes us back to Charles’ _active_ account claim.

• If LGF has 15000+ _active_ accounts (generously rounded to 16000, above), and
• 9000 of them have never posted anything, and
• 5500 haven’t posted for over 7 years, and
• another 1000 have been silent for at least 6 months, then
• LGF has less than 500 accounts that can reasonably be considered _active_

UPDATE!
In an unprecedented series of admissions, Charles publicly set the record straight regarding the specious claims deconstructed above:

Who’d’ve ever believed it?