Close the Iris

I am a man of many contradictions.

One of them is that while I don’t believe there is intelligent life on other planets, I absolutely love science fiction and have watched it since I was a boy – particularly Star Wars, Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and my all-time favourite – Stargate.

Stargate, which ran from 1997 to 2007, starred Richard Dean Anderson as Colonel Jack O’Neill and had that rare mix of adventure, humour, mythology, and good old-fashioned storytelling. It was clever without becoming pretentious, funny without becoming corny, and based its story around an ancient device (the Stargate) that could create a wormhole between two distant points in space. Dial the right address, the gate opened, and suddenly you could walk from Earth to another world.

There were hundreds of these ‘gates’ throughout the galaxy – but the one on Earth had one crucial feature: an iris.

The iris was a protective metal barrier that could be closed across the face of the Stargate. When something hostile, dangerous, or thoroughly unwelcome tried to come through, the iris stopped it. In many episodes, some unpleasant alien invader would come hurtling through the wormhole, hit the closed iris, and be instantly vaporised before it could enter Stargate Command.

It made for very satisfying television and, oddly enough, provided a useful lesson for anyone who posts regularly in support of Israel and the Jewish people.

Why? Because if you post regularly on these topics, particularly on Facebook, you constantly have invaders turning up on your posts who aren’t welcome. People who aren’t there to debate your views but are simply there to vent their ugliness.

You’ve seen it. Abuse. Profanity. Nazi slurs. Genocide accusations. Deranged conspiracy theories. Hissing hatred dressed up as moral concern. The sort of thing that tells you, within about three seconds, that you are not dealing with a sane person.

But here’s the good news.

You don’t have to let it through the gate. You have an iris. In fact, you have two.

The first is Facebook’s keyword filter.

Facebook allows you to block certain words, phrases, and even sentences from appearing in comments on your personal profile. It is one of the most useful tools available to anyone who regularly attracts the online mob.

On a personal Facebook profile, the setting is generally found by going through this path:

→ Settings & privacy
→ Settings
→ Followers and public content
→ Hide comments containing certain words from your profile
→ Add the words, phrases, or sentences you want Facebook to catch
→ Save

The exact process can differ depending on whether you are using desktop or mobile but the principle is the same: go into your settings, find the public content or profile comment settings, and look for the option to hide comments containing specific words.

Once there, you can add the words and phrases you don’t want appearing under your posts. These might include obvious profanities, the usual anti-Israel slurs, and the phrases used by people who are not there to discuss, but to smear, provoke, insult, and derail.

A properly maintained keyword filter will stop most of the sewage before it ever appears in public – meaning that someone can spend ten minutes typing out an expletive-ridden unhinged rant, hit send, sit back with the smug self-satisfaction of the morally deranged, and never realise that their masterpiece has quietly bounced off the iris and vanished into the void.

Occasionally, a perfectly reasonable comment will get caught by mistake – but that’s easy to fix. You can simply review the hidden comments, find any that should not have been caught, click Unhide, and they appear on your public post.

But the iris is only the first line of defence.

In Stargate, every so often, the enemy found a way through. A trick. A disguise. Some clever bit of alien subterfuge. Suddenly they were inside the gate room and Stargate Command had to deal with them directly.

Facebook is the same.

Some people will get through your keyword filter because they are abusive without using the words you have blocked. Others will use sarcasm, insinuation, or coded language. Some will simply post lie after lie in a tone just polite enough to sneak past the machine.

That is when the second part of the iris comes into play: Block and delete.

Some people object to blocking as if it is an attack on free speech, but it’s nothing of the sort. Free speech means people are free to express their views on their own profile, in their own space, to their own audience. It does not mean they have a right to walk into your house, put their muddy boots on your table, and demand microphone time.

Your Facebook profile is not a public toilet wall. You’re not morally obliged to host abuse, propaganda, antisemitism, or bad-faith ranting from people who have no interest in honest discussion.

So block them. The process for doing this is simple:

→ Click on the offender’s name or profile image
→ Open their profile
→ Click the three dots near their profile information
→ Select Block
→ Confirm the block
→ Return to the original comment
→ Delete the comment

The comment disappears, and the abuser loses access to your profile. They can’t keep returning, they can’t derail future posts, they can’t keep baiting your readers and, importantly, they can’t lay or participate in false complaints.

This last one is a biggie. One of the tactics of the anti-Israel online mob is to lodge false complaints in order to drag your profile into the automated machinery of platform moderation. The mechanics of precisely how Facebook responds to this are still a dark art – but we know enough to know that blocking access eliminates the basis of the complaint for individual users. So the less access bad-faith actors have to your profile, the better.

So close the gate early. Don’t debate every fanatic. Don’t respond to every slur. Don’t imagine that because someone has typed 600 words in capital letters, you owe them 700 words of patient correction.

You don’t.

There are genuine critics who you can engage with if you choose, genuinely confused people who you may be able to educate and decent people who you can disagree with and still treat with respect.

But the unhinged haters? The conspiracy merchants? The people who can’t mention Israel without reaching for Nazi comparisons, blood libels, or the disgusting ‘genocide’ claim?

Close the iris on them.

Block. Delete. Move on.

The same principle applies on LinkedIn, although thankfully it is usually less of an issue there because LinkedIn is a different kind of platform. People generally post under their real names, their work history is often visible, and their comments sit alongside their professional identity. That doesn’t make LinkedIn immune from bad behaviour, but it does make some people think twice before behaving like they have just escaped from a lunatic asylum.

LinkedIn doesn’t offer the same kind of keyword-filtering tool for personal profiles that Facebook provides. But it does have its own version of the iris.

You can limit who comments on your posts by:

→ Going to your post
→ Clicking the three dots or More icon
→ Selecting Who can comment on your post?
→ Choosing Anyone, Connections only, or No one
→ Saving

You can also hide a comment.

That path is usually:

→ Go to the comment
→ Click the three dots or More icon
→ Select I don’t want to see this
→ The comment is hidden

And, where necessary, you can also block the person.

That path is generally:

→ Click on the person’s profile
→ Click More
→ Select Report/Block
→ Select Block
→ Confirm

The tools are a little different, and the problem is usually less feral, but the principle remains the same.

The goal is not to create an echo chamber – it is to protect a space where serious people can talk about serious things without being drowned out by people who see your posts as a dumping ground for their extreme derangement.

The online world is now full of open gates. Every day, something nasty tries to come through but thankfully, both Facebook and LinkedIn still give you an iris.

Use it.