I told my wife to stop reading my Facebook comments – Manasseh defends blocking trolls

Manasseh Azure Awuni says he is the tolerant type of person on social media but that he does not accept people coming onto his wall to rain abuses on him or others.

“I don’t block people when they disagree with me, I block people who are not supposed to be on my timeline,” he said in response to claims that he was largely intolerant and took to blocking people that disagreed with him.

He told GTV’s Abdul Hayi Momeen on the ‘Momeen Tonight’ programme last Wednesday that he had actually asked his wife to refrain from reading comments under his Facebook posts as a means to maintain her peace of mind.

“If you go to my Facebook, I have 5,000 friends and about 152,000 followers. And every single post I put, you will find… I have told my wife to stop reading my comments and that is how she has been able to cope. So if you say I am not tolerant, just go to my Facebook wall.”

He said another good reason to employ the block button was because of the proliferation of paid trolls: “I have also come to realize that there are some people who have been paid and they use pseudo accounts to come and abuse me and also some people I write about.”

He cited a post he put on Facebook earlier this week about Gabby Asare Otchere-Darko adding that he had to include a caution that he was going to block anyone that employed insults whiles commenting.

On Gabby, he said despite their disagreements on and offline, the lawyer and close relative to President Akufo-Addo “will never insult you. If you come to abuse people, I don’t think we must allow that,” because in Manasseh's view, such conduct discourages intellectual conversation on the platform because people with good ideas to share will refrain for fear of being insulted.