Why we’re removing comments on most of Inquirer.com
inquirer.com
inquirer.com
I think having comments everywhere possible was an idea from the web 2.0 era that’s proven to be not all that worth it in most cases. Moderation is hard and it doesn’t make sense for newspapers and magazines to be spending resources on it. There are other forums (reddit, hn) for this sort of thing.
Very few news orgs devote the resources needed to curate messages for relevance and filter trolls and flames.
Furthermore, places want to make money on subscribers so potentially have an incentive not to remove postsade by subscribers (no substance behind that theory).
Nytimes is the only news site I see that doesn't have absolute trash for dialogue quality.
Oh, it has plenty of trash comments, they're just expressed in a manner acceptable to the urban elite. All the comments from hoi polloi are filtered.
Except for substack. In an interesting twist the comment sections on substack are thoughtful and polite with the authors chiming in -- at least in my experience. Don't know how to explain that compared to most sites. Maybe is because only paid subscribers are allowed to comment.
This is something I've seen with countless forums and message boards over the years, i.e. Quora, Yahoo Answers, etc.
1) Going mainstream / mass appeal means the lowest common denominator drops, whether that's content or quality of conversation
2) Commercialization incentivizes the wrong things - see Twitter and how its been optimised for "engagement" above all else (not quality of content, or user happiness etc).
Interesting things are happening at Clubhouse but surely they know how this will go. I think successful new platforms that want to maintain their integrity should be looking at paid membership. Substack might be OK because of that.
That's certainly not true for all substacks. Authors choose whether each post is paid-subscriber-only or not, and publicly visible posts can be commented on by unpaid accounts.
Maybe Substack comments are better because they represent a narrow audience (people interested in the output of a particular writer). Generally it is up to the author of the substack to moderate its comments.
Only because they are not moderated properly. Newspapers should simply have a staff member read and approve every post. It really doesn't take that long to read something and hit yes or no.
Nobody said the comments have to be real time.
You're talking about a lot of added cost for little added value. Newspapers aren't exactly swimming in money these days.
Newspapers aren't swimming in money because they don't go all in on online content. Moderating comments, choosing information for their readers, that's their core competence. Writing articles or printing is secondary.
I don't want 50 different accounts and comment sections. I want to take articles I'm interested in and bring them to the town square or pub to talk about. This is that.
It's not the same.
A news site running a comments section is sort of like a restaurant deciding they should also sell groceries. Can it work? Maybe - but more likely most people didn't want to pick up groceries at your restaurant, while people looking to steal food know that it's unattended most of the time, so you have a massive shrink rate problem. That doesn't mean groceries are a bad idea, it means it's something people need to specialize into.
It's a lesson that definitely pre-dates computer-mediated communication. I've seen freely accessibly physical noticeboards quickly fill up with advertisements and suchlike, posted over the notices for which the noticeboards were actually for, for one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graffito_(archaeology)
[edit: top comment on the top comment's top comment!]
And if you need to be informed to comment online should also require the same levels for voting. It seems it would be just as if not more so for the latter.
Also, who's deciding the truth so that we know what informed is?
And that seems to be the position of the Inquirer (and nj.com that they reference): they are outsourcing comments to Twitter, FB etc)
Newspapers struggle to exist as is without devoting more resources to an obsolete forum system. Better to retreat to a BBS system for overall discussion of the newspaper and let HN/Reddit/4chan provide platforms of discussion for your articles.
"BBS system" is RAS Syndrome, by the way. (-:
They claim they tried "everything", but did they actually try everything? For example, did they try limiting commenting to paying subscribers only? They don't mention in this post whether they actually tried that or not.
Anyway, more to the point: First, the comments are almost always the most interesting part of a mainstream article, to the point where I will scroll down to see if they are there (if not--don't bother). Are there idiots posting? Yep--just scroll past, no problem. Second, Mainstream media dislikes comments because they don't like people pointing out their errors. (No one does, of course.)
Comments on most news sites are typically just assholes making every story about whatever they're obsessed with.
Letters to the editor are still an active thing.
The other big advantage is that the only participants in channel are the newspaper and the submitter; no interaction between third parties on your platform means no flame wars or the like.
And if you can tolerate the meme format, [2] is my favorite academic fight of all times.
[1] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v14/n06/nicholas-spice/how-t...
[2] https://twitter.com/phonologist/status/982023915319906304
It was beyond horrible. People were commenting about how glad they were that this person they *didn’t even know* was gone. “One fewer idiot” type of comments. It was one of those things where it was so bad you didn’t want to look away.
The moderation was non-existent.
I just don’t get why a website would want to harbor a community that toxic.
* https://www.phillymag.com/news/2013/07/25/inquirer-daily-new...
* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/Our_Comments_Are_Changi...
* https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20100707_Le...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/business/coronavirus...
Who wants to scroll through 1k comments in a narrow, awkwardly-paginated column? They also allow posts from anyone with an email account (mitigated somewhat by the paywall on most articles) which results in a lot of high-emotion, low-information spam. By contrast, the Wall Street Journal limits comments only to people with a subscription. Perhaps as a result, the WSJ comments section is generally of higher quality with e.g. better spelling/grammar, less flamewar, and a higher signal-to-noise ratio.
I wonder if this is driven by the different susbscription prices, or just the different audience.
How many WSJ comments sections have you actually read?
I don't dare look at the WP now.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2021/mar/13/tim-dow...
In my mind, the answer is quite easy: increasing the amount of page loads increases the amount of ads people see. If you deliver emails along the lines of "someone replied to your comment", people are gonna click on them and you're going to serve another set of ads.
Moderation requires effort and reduces the amount of page loads, therefore most websites that use comments don't want to do that.
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them. Most of our readers will not miss the comments.
I don't think removing comments will affect page views by much.
Comments on HN are noticeably better than everywhere else. Thank you all for this oasis. I fear it’s fragile.
I think I saw one system where you couldn't comment directly, but you could post a reaction. It would need to be approved before being visible to others first. I think such a system, while pretty labor intensive, would be preferable.
Its a step in the human evolution in the capitalist internet era.
The idea that one can meaningfully socialize with more than several hundred people is.
You mean like journalists themselves ?
Thing is, newspapers as their business model currently is, have zero incentives in having quality comments. Negative incentives actually. Journalism is 20% facts reporting, 80% comments and that's generous: comments are the cheapest to write, some news website/papers are closer to 99% comments. If you have quality comments by your readers, what are you selling then?
We need to move to a business model where facts reporting and facts checking (careful: talking about facts checking, not analysis checking) are the primary services that journalists would get paid for. Comments, even quality comments can be done through a good enough moderation system and a big enough community.
As for expenses, HN seems like a lean site and likely doesn't require a ton of resources. I think there is only 1 full time moderator, dang. I have no idea whether YC makes money on HN or not, but I'd be surprised if it didn't at least break even.
It's honestly a fairly transparent transaction, and much preferable to the opaque world of on-line targetted advertising. I like how my ad-blocker just sits here twiddling its thumbs.
You can make enough money to sustain the thing with a one-time joining fee or unobtrusive, directly-negotiated advertising. You just can't make unsustainable VC-level money.
If good auto moderation tools were readily available, they would be used on a lot of these platforms. Moderating comments is hard. The big guys can't get it right. You can't expect little companies who make their money on something other than user content to get it right. Most blogs have binned comments ages ago because the comments add near zero value to the site and often bring it down.
The problem is that we are both approaching this as a problem that needs to be solved, while in reality it only needs to appear like one.
Social media companies make their revenue out of "engagement", and posts breaking the rules often generate the most of it, so properly moderating them would actually hurt their bottom line by more than just the cost of said moderation.
These companies are incentivized to leave as much "bad" content up as they can (as it generates engagement) while making it look like they are taking action as to not risk bad PR or legal consequences. Same goes for deterring or punishing offenders - long-term bans are trivial to implement and would significantly deter breaking the rules, but would also decrease "engagement".
Any fee attached to commenting is little different from just banning comments. Few will pay to put their $0.02 on a story they disagree with even fewer will pay if they agree with it. They'll go bitch about it on FB, then bitch about the commenting system too.
As you say, fighting comment trolling and spam is expensive, news media isn't making money hand over fist. I've rarely seen comments add value to a site so why pay to keep them?
I mean, even on HN, which I consider above average, you have to read 100s of comments before you read one comment that really challenges your thoughts. 99% of comments are from highly opiniated people with little subject matter experience and no concern for subtlety. It's just not a very good value proposition.
I have a newspaper subscription and like reading editorials, because they often have interesting people talk about relevant topics. Usually the "professional" comments are a lot less divisive, and a lot more fact based than the simplistic bullshit that tends to be upvoted in comment sections.
I still like reading user comments, but I don't think they are a replacement for good journalism or professional writers.
The big problem: All comments have a half-life of half a day at most, and even during that short time they are buried in a mountain of other comments. If a story is popular (many potential readers that I could reach) there will also be hundreds of comments, mostly low quality, that make finding good ones hard. If there only a few comments so a good one will stand out more there won't be many readers.
Writing a blog post has a much higher chance to be found over a larger period of time. Probably, depending on the blog. A choice between getting attention (by borrowing the fame of reddit or HN to draw in readers) for a very short period of time, or be easier to find over longer periods but then it depends on the fame of your own blog.
So it is not worth spending a lot of time and effort trying my best because I only reach a handful of people in the first place, but even if it's hundreds, they are all just story- and comment browsing randomly for their daily does of entertainment. That means whatever I write will be forgotten pretty quickly because in the end it's not all that important. Nobody reading any of these comments actually needs them, no matter how much wisdom is in there.
What I mean by that is that only when you actually end up using what you read in a practical way does it really matter and you remember. Everything else, even if it's really great wisdom, if you have no practical application for it in our own life your brain does not put any priority on retaining the content. Even apart from comments, I for example took loads of courses (edX, Coursera) outside my own field, at the time I spent a lot of effort and even became a community TA in some of those courses (chemistry, statistics, biology). However, I forgot soooo much by now, because in the end none of it has any practical implications for me. With some completely random (all kinds of topics!) comments, even when they are good, it's much worse.
Therefore I don't expect such comment sites to ever rise above what we have now. It just does not really matter for either readers or writers. The quality will always just be "good enough" (on the low side).
PS: Oh and by the way, in my long reddit and HN experience, what gives the most "Likes" rarely is the quality technical stuff - but rare personal anecdotes.
Disagree. Reading these comments, especially when they relate to specific technologies, I have come across numerous systems, resources and techniques that I have gone on to use in practice. I'll just take this opportunity to say a quiet 'thank-you' to their respective authors.
For example, you see somebody posting what you know is a big misconception. You spend time and effort educating and clearing it up. Even if you succeed, you soon run out of patience - you reached a hundred people, 5 of whom cared and will remember. However, there are a few hundred million left in the world who still have that misconception, and there still are way more daily conversations and blog posts where the misconception is spread. You on the other hand spent half an hour education a handful of people. How long until you ignore comments you know are wrong and just shrug and go on with your life?
Answering a specific one-time question by pointing to some resource or project is easy enough in comparison. I did not mean to imply that all comments are always useless. I did not think it would be necessary to point that out. See, that's another problem, somebody always comes up with an interpretation of what you write that will make you spend even more time to clarify because you never thought that interpretation would happen.
Could comments be assigned some big weight that has the effect of the comment staying around high enough to clear the misconception?
Could each thread be allowed only a finite number of comments or words, to not disperse attention, with lower quality comments forced to disappear?
Could there be a fool-proof mechanism to force comments you know are wrong to disappear?
If a new site like HN or Reddit showed up, how would would like it work? I ask because I'm toying with the idea of one. Thoughtful beta users get in touch.
Not trying to be rude or a smartass, but umm... your comment didn't pass its own bar. Because you've set the bar incredibly high.
Even on HN, people come for some chatter/community, not only to have their worldview challenged every minute of the hour. Also, chatter is not the same as "no concern for subtlety".
In a typical paid product, the provider provides a service to the users who are paying the provider for said service. In this case, the provider is incentivized to deliver the best version of that service so that users keep paying, whether it's great journalism with added value (a high-quality comments section would be a plus here) or software.
With advertising, this changes completely. Broadly speaking, the profits negatively correlate with how much value is delivered to the user. There is no incentive great journalism and moderate the comments section while you can churn out inflammatory clickbait and leave comments unmoderated - the latter will actually net you more profit because outraged people barking at each other in the comments is a great source of "engagement" which is what advertising-based business models profit from.
What I do see as an increasing and disturbing trend is newspapers selectively turning off comment sections on stories that are controversial. The Seattle Times does this, and in 2020 the readers were robbed of the opportunity to discuss controversial situations freely (like CHAZ or a violent BLM riot). This was presumably done to avoid the trouble of moderation of PR, but a less charitable and very believable take is that this amounts to controlled manufacturing of public opinion by disallowing a dissenting viewpoint.
In the absence of comment sections, all that’s left is one journalist’s biased take and characterization. With news houses across the country experiencing left-leaning employee activism and newsroom revolts, the opinions of readers is extremely important to not just platform, but feature prominently as a balancing force. And yes, anonymous comments in particular must be permitted, so the voice of those who aren’t in power is heard.
It's a sweet idea, but I don't think it's at all in line with how people think/utilize comments sections.
The idea of selling things online was never about how to sell them to people who don't want them. You're clearly not the target market. It would be for people who are so fiercely loyal they don't think twice about how nice of a bonus it is to be able to be in the select audience that CAN comment. I don't know if people are this loyal to publications, but I've certainly felt it towards YouTube personalities that align with my thinking so strongly that I feel supporting them is promoting my values.
To support the content producer. Maybe $5 is too high, but what if it was $2 or $3? I pay that to a few producers.
[edit: rewrote a badly written subclause to be clearer than before]
Your suggestion would address spam, but as major newspapers end up paywalled that's largely a non-issue. The others are moving to compulsory social login (e.g. FB) which also mitigates that (and basically makes you "pay" with your personal details).
Newspapers should totally have an easy feedback form, possibly even a dedicated forum, but not comments.
I believe the parent means that you pay/it hurts your wallet (even if it is $5 per year). When you "pay" via your facebook details being shared, then this cost doesn't affect you. If you cared you woulnd't be using FB in the first place :)
I could be wrong - I don't know if those accounts are able to comment or not.
I'm experimenting with a fix for this at repowcha. There's probably a cost threshold past which it becomes unprofitable to post bad comments with an agenda.
I'm not trying to be snide, but I genuinely believe you are underestimating the overwhelming drive that is caused by spite.
The Athletic, for example, has its own comment section (duplicated on a much larger scale by Reddit discussion of quotes from the paywalled articles). Even niche outlets like the Dunc'd On Podcast come with their own Discord.
The lure, I think, is basically what's being discussed here.
Sports discussion ... suffers perhaps more than average from an absence of moderation, so a paywalled community is seen as a benefit.
So, like most of the content above the comments?
As has become clear, “engagement” means public brawling. It generates clicks, and clicks are gold. It also encourages people to sign up for accounts, just so they can jump into the cesspool. Those accounts are quite valuable, as they are fodder for data miners, correlators, and aggregators. Making those accounts free, and easy to create (but not so easy to delete), is a natural.
That’s why so many of these sites wait until their comment fighting pits reach brand-destroying levels of rancor, before they do anything about it; sometimes, too late (remember when SlashDot was the HN? It’s now the place to go, if you want ASCII-art swastikas).
Yeah, I’m cynical.
I've been there for like 10 years and I don't remember this. Was it even before? Do you have a link or something? I tried some searches but didn't find any relevant result. Thanks in advance.
The guy was a paid subreddit mod, and an engineer in Arizona or New Mexico, or somewhere.
The story destroyed his career. I know he was immediately fired by his day job. Maybe it's a good thing that the story is hard to find. We all deserve a second chance. I actually felt a bit sorry for him.
They used to pay moderators?
I am not much of a Reddit user, so I don't know the landscape well enough to be cognizant of the terminology.
Thanks for the correction. I [honestly] appreciate it.
I suspect this was what had me confused:
> Violentacrez's privileged position came from the fact that for years he had helped administrators deal with the massive seedy side of Reddit, acting almost as an unpaid staff member. Reddit administrators essentially handed off the oversight of the site's NSFW side to Violentacrez, according to former Reddit lead programer Chris Slowe (a.k.a. Keysersosa), who worked at Reddit from 2005 to the end of 2010. When Violentacrez first joined the site and started filling it with filth, administrators were wary and they often clashed. But eventually administrators and Violentacrez came to an uneasy truce, according to Slowe. For all his unpleasantness, they realized that Violentacrez was an excellent community moderator and could be counted on to keep the administrators abreast of any illegal content he came across.
I did know about this shady part of the internet but knowing and seeing it in action is different.
[0]: https://www.techeblog.com/rare-look-inside-an-app-review-far...
I do, and I had an old account there, back in the before times. But now it just looks like a less popular reddit comment section. What do you mean with the swastikas?
They probably aren't real Nazis; just bored teenagers, trying to get a rise.
You usually need to max out the comment filters to see them (rightly so).
But there's also plenty of good old-fashioned abuse trolls, there.
One of the reasons that I like this place, is because it highly discourages that kind of behavior.
If it starts happening here, I'm heading for the hills. I used to be a troll, but as I have gotten older, the shine has worn off that brand of behavior.
I think it's always been like that. The GNAA (when it was new back in early 2000s) was copying the template of existing trolls by challenging those on probationary on their IRC to get racist first posts, something like that. It was already just one of those things you ran across on Slashdot, like bizarre Natalie Portman copy pasta.
I had proposed charging a nominal amount for comment account creation, but I got a hard no. Too bad. It certainly would have thwarted the worst offenders, who were creating dozens of accounts a day.
Urbit ID solves this problem, too.
This is not a problem that requires blockchain to solve, and it makes me wonder what other issues are built into the project.
"Bitcoin (₿) is a cryptocurrency invented in 2008"[2]
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbit [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Can't really find any info about when they officially "created" this thing, but color me skeptical when someone says they "worked on blockchain" before blockchain was even invented.
https://urbit.org/blog/why-urbit-probably-does-not-need-a-bl...
I'll revise my position to simply being that of course Urbit needs a consensus ledger, and that blockchain technology is a good solution for that.
For a start they redefine a lot of words and concepts to their own meanings, rather than commonly accepted ones, in a way that's reminiscent of cult-y organisations. These then feed into their own obscure programming language. This serves as a barrier to entry and an in-group language.
Secondly, well it was started by Curtis Yarvin, whose (unpalatable) ideas about neo-feudalism are baked in.
But yeah, look up prior HN discussions if you want more info. Urbit is an oddity, and not necessarily a good one.
Besides, what you're proposing is essentially the same as "charging for account creation", but with extra steps.
You're begging the question (i.e. whether or not Urbit ID would succeed). Besides, Urbit ID needn't be forced on users, it could be offered side-by-side other options.
>Besides, what you're proposing is essentially the same as "charging for account creation", but with extra steps.
There are several major differences, the most obvious of which is that an Urbit ID user would not have to pay to create an account. This is because the Urbit ID could be tied to many different accounts across the internets. In other words, a person could pay for one Urbit ID, and then be able to comment on many on-line internet journals using that single Urbit ID.
In the early 2000s I used to run a small travel related website and added commenting. Ads just on comment deep link pages paid the rent on my apartment.
That's an excellent idea, too bad management said no. a friend of mine works on an outlet where only paid subscribers can comment. Not only it reduces spam by 100% but it actually allows for a more thoughtful and meaningful discussion.
Is it an all-time ban? Or just a temporary ban, until their subscription renews? What if they deserve an all-time ban? Will that lead to them cancelling their subscription altogether? I think management was (overly) concerned about tying a person's conduct in the comments to their subscription, for fear of lost revenue.
There are numerous articles from the past decade arguing against. (These turned up searching fror the "pro" argument.)
Why comments sections must die (2018) https://www.salon.com/2018/11/17/why-comments-sections-must-...
Is it really wise for news websites to stop people from commenting? (2015) https://www.theguardian.com/media/greenslade/2015/sep/25/is-...
Comment sections are poison: handle with care or remove them (2014) https://www.theguardian.com/science/brain-flapping/2014/sep/...
No Comment! Why More News Sites Are Dumping Their Comment Sections (2018) https://www.kqed.org/lowdown/29720/no-comment-why-a-growing-...
I'd also think it comes from a positive vision of technology. The internet as a means of "making the world more connected". Empower people to communicate in ways which weren't possible before. - Turns out this wasn't as positive as expected.
Comments and social sections were the big in-thing in the latter part of the noughties, if you were trying to make your site modern and hip, it was assumed you'd have comments and share links on everything. I recall a degree of belief that social media was the future and if you didn't integrate with it you'd get left behind, but I think as much it was just a design fad.
I'm reading some late-1990s sources (Lawrence Lessig's Code, Andrew Shapiro's Control Revolution) which cover some of this ground. I was there for it myself, though memory is a faulty guide..
Online search is difficult as later writings cloud the results.
On the one hand, I formed these overly rosy views prior to Eternal September, but on the other it should have occurred to me that the reason trash tabloids sold in large quantities was not that people were tricked into buying them but because a lot of people are in fact awful.
Ah, the 90s... when people would deliberately leave mail relays open as a service to the community, and people just made stuff for others to use, without worrying too much about hacks or security because the internet is a community and that sort of thing would be bad netiquette...
A simpler time.
There was a time and a place for flamewars, and it was called usenet.
But you are giving up something. Rather than focus on the small commenting audience as a detraction, look at it as an opportunity to grow. 2% seems small, but I bet a huge portion of that is paying subscribers. There are publications that have a healthy commenting section, so we know it's possible.
At one point in time Digg (which has gone to the dogs now) had a thing where they'd have a sort of AMA with the author of an article featured on their front page. I thought that was fantastic. I wonder if the Inquirer considered allowing subscribers to ask questions of journalists, which (if answered) would appear as a comment below the article. You take the money you're paying your moderators, and you pay your journalist more for the time they're spending on that.
The difference is quite drastic. They still need to moderate a bit, but the effect is quite good. It also learns from the moderation, thereby lowering the amount of moderation required.
The site does close the ability to comment during the night, comments are closed after a certain period, plus commenting is sometimes not possible (if they don't expect the article to be visible during the day).
See (Dutch, use e.g. google translate) https://www.nu.nl/blog/5226107/nujij-terug-weer-reageren-nun... for details; it includes a link to this Talk software.
People still often complain about the comment section of NU.nl, but for me there's been a drastic change. There's almost no trolling going on. They allow different opinions, even if those comments are badly researched. People tend to focus on the poorly thought out comments. Though I appreciate them (not everyone knows everything or can easily find the answer).
Only very establishment public opinions will now be allowed to be shared on mass media. What good is freedom of speech if you’re not allowed to publicly assemble because of COVID and social media is cut off from you?
Next time there’s a destructive unpopular war or bank bailout or police shooting or event that threatens corporate profits there’s no public ability to call the corporate press out on their BS.
What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society? Above a certain size, these platforms are public utilities and public town squares. For the right to free speech to be at all practical and meaningful, they must be required to platform all legal speech.
So newspapers will be required to publish any story, no matter how true? Universities will be required to teach any theory, no matter how crackpot? Twitter will be required to promote porn just as it does other content?
> What good is freedom of speech when powerful and influential organizations (like Twitter or Facebook) control virtually all speech in society?
But they don't. You have huge, successful websites devoted to porn. A publication like Quillette builds its reputation around pseudoscience and is free to do so. You have entire cable news networks devoted to conspiracy theories. But yes, more mainstream venues try to shape their reputation by not amplifying more fringe speech. Not only has this always been the case, but that's what everyone understood "free speech" means. You have more mainstream publications and fringe ones.
I think we’re getting a bit off topic but since you mentioned it - universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories. As institutions with tremendous power, they influence society greatly but their commitment to a one-sided biased environment serves to only amplify one ideology, and this unbalanced outcome is effectively propagandizing all of society. Giant social media platforms are similarly problematic, because their degree of reach and network effects give them power other new social networks cannot mirror or challenge. Their policies restricting content that they don’t like ends up amplifying one worldview disproportionately while shutting down others, which also is effectively propagandist. In both cases these institutions are as powerful and influential as nations’ governments, and their choices to promote certain speech or censor certain speech are as damaging as the government taking such action. We have outsourced the ability to exercise fundamental rights like free speech and free thought to spaces that are legally non public but really should be held to the public standard.
Your claim is that there are “huge, successful sites” or other media that fall outside the control of these institutions I am complaining about. However, that’s not really the whole truth because the scale of those alternatives is simply completely different. Facebook has more users than any country and Twitter is probably close to that as well. Universities have no diversity of thought and there isn’t much of an alternative to the university system at all. It doesn’t matter if some other alternative site could have millions of users carrying speech blocked on Facebook or Twitter, because the amplification of ideas allowed on the biggest platforms will drown out all others. These are really public squares that should be held to public regulation, including upholding the right to free speech.
As an aside, your inaccurate and uncharitable characterization of Quillette as building a reputation around “pseudoscience”, when it is actually built around high quality critical thought, makes me think you’re on one side of this ideological war and happy with the status quo because your ideology is currently winning the power struggle by censoring/deplatforming dissenting views. But what you’re labeling as fringe wouldn’t be fringe if it was given a fair chance to be heard and amplified in various institutions or platforms. Because ideologues have tried to suppress and diminish challenging views in aggressive and unfair ways, these ideas are in lesser prominence than they deserve.
Can you be more specific about which views precisely are being censored/deplatformed en mass, which, in your opinion, gained more mainstream dissemination and/or respect in the past?
When people attack the freedom of speech in the name of the freedom of speech, what they want is their fringe speech to be treated with the same respect as more mainstream kinds of speech. That is not freedom of speech, nor has it ever been the norm. Freedom of speech includes the freedom of various institutions to relegate some speech to the fringe.
> universities already teach many crackpot theories - the social “science” fields are full of them (https://areomagazine.com/2018/10/02/academic-grievance-studi...). But they don’t teach the alternative viewpoint to those crackpot theories.
That those theories are crackpot is the opinion of a group of people who are not researchers in any relevant field, based on a "study" that, itself, meets no criteria for scientific research, but you are free to believe what you like and even say it -- see, no one is censoring you. The point is that universities are free to choose what to teach and what to "censor" as that is freedom of speech. It is not freedom of speech to demand the same level of academic/publishing respect to be afforded to all views.
BTW, my characterisation of Quillette as a platform for pseudoscience is accurate and based purely on scientific rigour. It is perfectly reasonable for respectable publications to avoid that content, and yet those who seek it or disseminate it are not censored.
Content producers of any ilk are in no way obliged (and imo expected) to provide and administer a public forum alongside their work.
You would have a point if 'mass media' wasn't privately owned.
There are still plenty of places you can put up your own website.
Free speech doesn't mean that others are obligated to subsidize your speech.
On some level, private companies have to allow everyone neutral access. Like phone companies and the USPS, the internet should be accessible.
On the other hand, comment sections under news articles are really not the way I'd make this argument. Let's talk about net neutrality first.
Actually, it does, that's the liberal ideal of free speech, that it 's a public protected good. Having a free opinion and practically keeping it to yourself because you have no audience is not freedom of speech.
It absolutely is. You are still free to propagate your ideas. You have no claim to use other people's tools or access other people's property to do so.
You are not entitled to an audience. If that means you're literally screaming into the void because nobody else wants anything to do with you, then that's still free speech.
I m actually talking about the case where you are not. Private actors cancelling people is exactly that, taking away their freedom to propagate them. They can say "build your own twitteR", but we don't say that about other fundamental needs like, nobody says "build your own electric grid". We live in era of digital communication, and just like in the past the state built roads to connnect people, it needs to build basic infrastructure for communication and social networking. Association is a fundamental human right and that includes digital association (esp. in a time of pandemic and lockdowns)
No, you aren't. You're talking about using other people's services, infrastructure and registered users.
Twitter is not the world. It's a small subset of the world shouting at each other. It's not the way to reach everyone, nor is it the only way to reach people. And it's certainly not the commons or public property.
> They can say "build your own twitteR", but we don't say that about other fundamental needs
But you can build your own twitter-alike, and people have done, rendering this entire point moot.
Further "fundamental need"? Maybe take a step back and look at your life if you don't think you could get by without twitter. I've never joined, I know very few people that bother with it.
> Association is a fundamental human right and that includes digital association
Clearly it's not a right, as people can be and are frequently denied access to the internet entirely by judges in many countries including the US. And even if it were, using a particular platform is not.
Your right to free speech doesn't extend to other people's property, and you do not have a right to access any audience. And you never have had.
It's always someone else's services, whether that was a printing press or a telegraph. We can't go back to primitivism
> Twitter is not the world.
Governments are in it in official capacity, and not in some other system. It is a lot more than "one private company"
> Further "fundamental need"?
Yes communication which includes social networking is a fundamental need for a modern civilized society, i think it should be obvious in this pandemic
> Clearly it's not a right,
Freedom of association is a fundamental human right. The fact that it being taken as punishment is just an admission of it
You can easily make your own printing press or telegraph system, though the work is in laying lines. Further, you never had the right to compel someone to print your book, nor send your telegrams. You are inventing these rights.
> Governments are in it in official capacity, and not in some other system.
Are there really governments who put information on twitter that is not published by other means? That's a massive dereliction of duty if so, given twitter serves a small subset of any given population.
> Yes communication which includes social networking is a fundamental need
Twitter kicking you off is not denying you the ability to communicate. Social networking is not a fundamental need, as evidenced by the fact that not everyone uses it, in fact the majority do not. The vast, vast majority if we're talking about twitter, which has an audience of around 100-150 million worldwide. You are exaggerating this massively.
> Freedom of association is a fundamental human right
Your idea of digital freedom to associate is clearly not something that exists at present, nor ever has.
You had the protected right to distribute the thing you printed, it's called freedom of press. There's a reason why those freedoms were enshrined to constitution and not just left undefined.
And i m not sure why you keep bringing up twitter, i m not claiming that twitter should be forced to accept everyne, but that individuals should be a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative and b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
But you couldn't, for instance, gain access to private premises or gatherings to do so, or force them into people's hands. You could (and still can) hand them out on the streets. Marconi was never obliged to broadcast it on his radio systems.
> There's a reason why those freedoms were enshrined to constitution and not just left undefined.
And they aren't under threat.
> And i m not sure why you keep bringing up twitter
You mentioned it first, if you go upthread - "build your own twitteR", so I presumed that platform was primarily your concern. It certainly seems to be one that's copping a lot of heat for deplatforming lately, mostly around election denial, Q etc.
> a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative
I mean, nobody is completely deplatformed at the moment. There are choices up to and including building your own pages. What if nobody uses the publicly funded alternative, because it's crap? No problem is solved, people relegated to that public platform would still be shouting into the void.
> b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
If they do so on a commercial platform, which they joined because it already had a critical mass of people, I don't believe you can say they acquired them all themselves.
You seem to be arguing there for a federated system - might be worth your while looking into Mastodon.
I m not american and i don't care at all about those
> nobody is completely deplatformed
I m pretty sure there are quite a few who have been chased out of the internet completely , without being illegal
> What if nobody uses the publicly funded alternative, because it's crap?
So what, public TV usually doesnt get high rankings but is still valuable. It's still better than having no platform at all
> don't believe you can say they acquired them all themselves
They should at least have a real way to get a copy of their audience, through some well defined protocol. The friend identifiers they get should be actually usable, enough so that they could find their audience in another platform.
Mastodon is actually a good platform to use for a public platform, and i look forward to seeing publicly-funded servers.
That has nothing to do with what the original post was about. Yes, you can print whatever you want. But you cannot compel someone else to do it. You moved the target for some reason.
>but that individuals should be a) protected from complete deplatforming by providing them a publicly-funded alternative
So your argument against censorship is to hand the reigns to the actual government? What happens when your free platform for individuals to ensure they cannot be deplatformed becomes a voice of violence and hatred against a minority group?
>b) should be always able to keep the audience they acquired by themselves
They didn't acquire the audience themselves. They used a 3rd party platform to do that. I don't understand this statement.
> a voice of violence and hatred against a minority group?
Then it becomes a subject or what is allowed by the legal system, which is a situation vastly superior than being at the whim of a few high ranking employees with no transparency.
> They used a 3rd party platform to do that.
That's like saying dostoyevsky didnt write his novels, he used someone's pen to write them. Sorry i find that absolutely weak
You sound a lot like someone who is against net neutrality with this statement. Does ATT or Comcast have to allow all content through their network or not? Why can't they regulate what goes through their infrastructure? Twitter has a near monopoly on their type of service, similar to ATT or Comcast. What makes it ok for Twitter to regulate but not more root services? What about DNS? Can the registrars regulate who can register a name? Why?
Twitter has a user base of approximately 1.5% of the world's population. It's not an essential communications tool by any stretch of the imagination. There are multiple other services, most of which gain little to no traction because it appears that to most humans, twitter-style communication is entirely uninteresting. I count myself in that (large) number.
> similar to ATT or Comcast
Except those companies appear to have literal monopolies on internet access in places in the US, which is not the same situation at all. Not being in the US I find that situation bizarre.
> Can the registrars regulate who can register a name?
Probably. Certainly the various authorities are empowered to do so.
> Why?
That's a far more interesting question, and certainly up for debate. Should some level of communications access be a right? If it is, who pays for it? Who runs it? Does anyone or any government get to decide what's acceptable behaviour on such a system? Why? But equally, why not? I'm entirely open to that discussion, it's probably a discussion that needs to be publicly had in western societies, at some point.
But "It's my right to exercise my speech on twitter!" reeks of entitlement and is not supported by any existing concept of speech rights. It also reeks of conflating twitter, a large but still niche service, with communication in general. Twitter just isn't as important as people like to make out.
You don't and can never have, a right to an audience, because people have a separate right to choose whom they associate with, and everyone can choose not to be in your audience if you're terrible/boring/stupid enough.
I don't understand the "right to an audience" argument. Maybe CNN can claim they have own their audience because they literally earned it, but in social media individuals earn their own audience and the companies can't claim ownership. Even though one's social network is not yet protected legally, it should, and people's audience grown in a platform still belongs to people, the same way that private information put on a platform is still owned by people
It really isn't. They can keep you off their platform, nothing more.
> states should provide social networking/communication services to their citizens.
And you think this would be less censored?
> in social media individuals earn their own audience
So ... individuals got all those people to sign up to twitter? Twitter itself has nothing to do with it? You really think that? Platforms just pop out of the air fully formed?
yes?
It's nothing at all to do with twitter building the platform, advertising the platform, creating a user base? Nobody followed someone else because the platform promoted something, or made it easy to discover people, anything like that?
In that case twitter itself is completely unimportant. If you can build an audience without relying on twitter's existing user base, then why do you care if twitter bans you? Go build that somewhere else.
Interesting view of the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_media_as_a_public_utili...
Your question is poorly worded. Twitter created the platform and fostered the community. The content creators and the platform have grown together. I'm challenging your idea that the platform has contributed nothing, not asserting that it contributes everything. Without their creative ideas to build the platform in the first place, make content discoverable etc etc, it wouldn't exist either.
> that world view is by no means uncommon
I'm not convinced that wikipedia article describes the worldview above - "twitter is both a fundamental right that cannot be easily replicated, and a complete irrelevance that has done nothing at all"
I understand why there might be interest in developing ideas around digital communication rights. It's definitely an interesting topic and one that's going to become more relevant over time.
I am specifically challenging you on the idea that they already exist, and are encompassed by rights such as freedom of speech, which has never encompassed free access to the means to disseminate that speech, or freedom of assembly, which has never included the right to assemble on someone else's property.
Go ahead and argue these are useful ideas we need to talk about, that existing rights need to be mapped and interpreted more expansively in the digital world, that we should start building platforms as a society which encompass these ideas, I might even be on your side.
But being banned on twitter is no violation of any existing right. Especially as twitter is a niche communication tool.
Look, i see this as shorthand for "twitter gathered the attention".But that doesn't mean that they own the attention or the people whose attention they have. Good of them to be pioneers, but, like everything, social media is 15 year old tech now and is commodity. The undeniable thing is, users funded 99% of the effort with their work and often with their own ad money, and twitter did 1%. Same (or worse) would go for other social networks. They created a viral vortex, but the intrinsic value of that is not as high as is perceived to be -- in fact most of the value is in lock-in and monopoly rather than in technical facilitation. I find the fact that neither twitter nor FB pay their users quite egregious, and attribute it to 2 things: 1) they have no competitor in their niche and 2) user collectives dont exist and users are not uninionized while those companies are uber-powerful in terms of money and lobbying.
> they already exist,
They don't exist but are coming, in fact i'd say they are late already. I think we 'll soon see major shifts to that direction . Practically, yes they will be just an extension of freedom of speech laws, that's the category where they belong (like how e.g. sexual orientation was added to anti-discrimination laws).
I m not arguing that free speech/free assembly rights will trample on property rights, but that the state should make sure public spaces exist for people to exercise those rights. However platforms should be required by law to make user data (including their friends identifiers) exportable.
I m no legal expert but I wouldn't rule out that some companies may be held into account if a judge judges that they acted in coordination and maliciously to obstruct someones free speech rights.
You can't have this both ways.
There are no free speech right implications at all for this, a judge would throw the case out.
FB and Twitter don't pay their users because they're providing a service that their users value for free. Frankly if that's not a good enough deal for you, don't use it. I try not to, they're a waste of bandwidth IMHO.
>And you think this would be less censored? By law, in the USA, it would have to be less censored. They could only censor constitutionally unprotected speech.
>> in social media individuals earn their own audience
>So ... individuals got all those people to sign up to twitter?
Is this honestly how you interpreted the OP comment? Without people posting to Twitter nobody would be following Twitter. They are nothing without the content creators since they don't create any content.
No, but I believe that in general they have a legal right to control the services they make available, within the limits of the laws on hate, discrimination etc.
> By law, in the USA, it would have to be less censored. They could only censor constitutionally unprotected speech.
Twitter is not just in the USA, FYI. People engaging in unpopular speech on "Gov Twitter" could still be sidelined effectively, by other groups. I imagine an adblock-style distributed blacklist might spring up pretty fast. Then what? I have a right to be heard by anyone I choose to spew my opinions at?
> Without people posting to Twitter nobody would be following Twitter.
Without the platform on which to create and disseminate said content there would be no audience. I'm not trying to say that it's all one party responsible. Quite the opposite.
I'm trying to point out that this - "in social media individuals earn their own audience and the companies can't claim ownership" - is wrong. The company have provided a platform and fostered its use, which gives people a place to go and gather an audience. It's symbiotic. You can't at the same time claim that twitter is a fundamental, irreplaceable human need (that 98% of humans apparently don't need) while claiming it's contributed nothing to creating a community and an audience.
That doesn't make it wrong and we do seem to be headed in that general direction. Just understand that what you're proposing doesn't necessarily follow from pre-internet free speech protections and is a different ideal.
I actually think the opposite , that in the past free speech was a well guarded liberalist ideal, and we 've regressed to confusing the freedom of internal monologue as free speech.
It does require more effort though; there is that.
They would have to get rid of Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, on down the line for this to be true. There are dozens of places where you can call out the media for their nonsense.
As recent politics have proved, calling someone out for their bullshit is pointless when you have millions of people willing to buy into their bullshit regardless.
In my opinion, the current state of our response to Covid shows that the social cohesion of society has already been destroyed, mostly by pigeonholing everyone into neat little online boxes.
The corporate press doesn't care about being "called out" in an online comments section.
Real-life cohesion is incredibly more powerful than anything online.
This was a good decision. Nothing of value was lost. The 2% of productive commenters can go back to writing letters to the editor. The 98% can go back to the chans.
From the article:
The First Amendment limits the government’s ability to regulate speech. It does not require news organizations to treat all speech as equal, or to provide an open forum for comments. Rather, the First Amendment ensures The Inquirer’s right to publish what The Inquirer chooses to publish.
Freedom of speech is necessary in a democratic society in order for citizens to be able to criticise their government freely. It is not meant to protect any (non-existent) right to verbally attack one's fellow citizens with impunity. Indeed, most modern nations that have legislation that protects freedom of speech also have legislation that protects their citizens from defamatory, or libellous speech, and many also protect individuals from hateful speech that targets personal characteristics like sexuality or religion.
tl;dr, freedom of speech sets you free to punch up, not to punch down.
[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/vvdjjy/were-getting-rid-of-c...
The Economist (for most articles, if not all): https://medium.com/severe-contest/help-us-shape-the-future-o... and https://www.reddit.com/r/theeconomist/comments/81zwcw/whatev...
Bloomberg: https://www.theguardian.com/media/2015/jan/28/bloomberg-swit...
That said, this doesn't seem to be the norm yet. A number of news sites I frequent try to solve this by hiding the comments section by default. NYT sometimes hides comments on articles posted on weekends when they have fewer content moderators available, they say. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/reader-center/comments-mo...
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/anywyse/gfohefaikk...
[0] https://hub.packtpub.com/mozilla-and-google-chrome-refuse-to...
Reddit and HN both support searching by url and there are extensions that e.g. replace youtube comments with reddit comments.
But I still think we need this kind of service, allowing anonymous annotations that could be turned on/off as a visible layer for any visitor to a website. Seems to me, it might be time for this idea to be re-tried ..
But how does this address the problem of comment sections easily devolving into a dumpster fire? There's a reason why newspapers, like the Inquirer, are turning off their comment sections. That reason is sound.
It's like hosting a block party and having it overrun by neighborhood maniacs, weirdos, libertarians and homeless people. What you're proposing is a means for inviting, organizing and publicizing commentary for all content on the web whether the content creator wants it or not.
In an absolutely shocking affront to the neutrality of web browsers, Firefox banned Dissenter from their extension stores (https://reclaimthenet.org/firefox-rejects-free-speech-bans-f...) because they disagree with an exceedingly small number of offensive comments made on there. Chrome later did the same and Dissenter has its own browser now (https://reclaimthenet.org/dissenter-free-speech-browser/). But obviously being removed from those browsers’ extension stores seriously limits its reach.
There are many HN comments saying “you can just discuss these articles elsewhere”, but when tech companies are censoring/deplatforming any views they disagree with in unison, there aren’t ways to have honest and open discussions unless you align with a certain worldview (progressive views) or have incredibly limited reach. You simply can’t speak freely on controversial topics like gender identity or critical race theory or illegal immigration on Reddit, Twitter, on your own apps in App stores (see bans of Gab or Parler), or even our web browsers. I will be not at all surprised when it comes down to browsers or phones blocking which websites you can visit.
The “toxic a-holes in the comment section” problem is difficult for small blogs where commenters sustain the bulk of the public discussion surrounding each post. But, even for small local newspapers, the conversation about the articles happens outside of the newspaper, and very rarely is there anything useful or substantively original in the comments section on a newspaper website. So while there are arguments for keeping a moderated comments section, it is a lot of cost for probably little benefit (and, as the Inquirer says, they would rather focus on reporting).
Let us also not forget that we are not allowed to be politically incorrect, we all have to be namby-pamby because nobody's feelings are allowed to get hurt for any reason: we cannot have gentle sensitivities having to deal with how other people really feel or view things. Truth about how people feel deep down is ugly and dangerous, therefore sweeping the ugly side of humanity "under the carpet" is far preferable to dealing with it, especially since that has also been proven to work extremely well in the past.
This is simply grand, just imagine the possibilities: anyone can now label anything one does not like as toxic and use that as an extremely effective method of censorship and oppression in a special propaganda war, while people sit in a bubble hoping all of it will go away! What could possibly go wrong?
The NYT seems like one of the last remaining organizations that offer moderated comments on its articles. The Guardian UK dumped comments a long time ago (except for sports).
Comment spam and hate speech is a huge issue that I'm surprised anti-spam tech has not been able to address. The cost of human moderation is why websites, blogs and community groups ceded their audience to Facebook a decade ago. We've been paying the price ever since.
Metafilter has done this for years quite successfully.
HN being an obvious example, but there are plenty of others, each with its own approach.
Many successful online discussion forums rely on user moderation, which makes it feasible without Inquirer hiring a huge dedicated staff.
Also, a large part of it may be that the comments are at the bottom and a large part of their readership don't get that far on many articles. Some will read the headline & byline, some complete the opening paragraphs, and only then if it seems interesting enough (or they are otherwise lacking anything to do) will people read on further (never mind all the way to the end of a long article). Getting around that by putting the comments higher up probably isn't a good answer. I've seen some places have a "<number> comments below" link near the top but I can't imagine that drawing people through unless they would read that far anyway or the <number> is high enough to suggest some interesting controversy.
They have done.
Removing comments will reduce some engagement, but as pointed out they've come to the conclusion that the sort of engagement lost is of low value to the majority of their target audience and comes with a cost (in terms of moderation effort) that isn't worth, to them, any residual "good" value the comments sections have.
>HN being an obvious example
I think a key difference between HN and news pages like those in the enquirer in this matter is that their comments area is more of an afterthought to start with where much of the purpose of many visiting HN, good sub-reddits, and do forth is for the comments. This means removing them would be much more sufficient a loss. It also means that for a greater part community moderation works, reducing more costly (for the need site) central effort (it is still needed, of course but the cost/benefit balance is very different).
- A commenter
[1] https://www.thestar.com.my/news/nation/2021/02/19/malaysiaki...
In the US, it is protected by the section 230 ("no provider [...] of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider"). In other words, you can sue the commenter, but not the platform hosting the comment.
In the EU, there's an opposite precedent (Delfi AS v. Estonia), in which the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) confirmed that fining Delfi (Finnish web portal) for comments doesn't go against the platform's freedom of speech. Of course, that's not a law, but it might impact future EU-wide laws that aim to regulate that sort of thing.
A few bad apples spoil the bunch. :(
In that way, everybody could still have a voice and the narrative isn't just owned by the media owners.
There's a small price to pay-- even Benjamin Franklin distributed papers anonymously-- but I think it'd be worth it.
And most stories here are far less controversial than most news stories these days.
I wonder if this is a common pattern. Perhaps sports stories naturally encourage healthier discussion.
Intuitively it makes sense. Talking sports with someone can be a great icebreaker if they come from a totally different background.
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/philadelphia-progressive-co...
(transcript: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/1019:_First_Post)
comp.lang.c++.moderated used a system where submissions needed approval by the moderator(s) before posting. It worked well for many years. The delay could be up to a day, but people accepted that.
After all, it's like the pre-internet "Letters to the Editor" section of the newspaper.
I don't see any words like that in what I posted.
comp.lang.c++.moderated is not a good example, that's a niche topic with relatively high barriers to entry. On mainstream news websites a big story can attract hundreds of comments a minute.
> Only about 2 percent of Inquirer.com visitors read comments, and an even smaller percentage post them.
So it’s a tiny fraction writing the comments, which is disproportionately represented by racist trolls. Removing the comments manually is a lot of work, an automated system is problematic, but The Inquirer very understandably doesn’t want to leave up hundreds of hateful comments.
Besides, have you read the comments on local news websites? Even the very best are almost always useless. It is not like Hacker News or Reddit or another news aggregator, where the value is in the discussion. I don’t think any meaningful discourse is being lost.
It’s not worth the headache, imho.
Comments in periodicals have attracted a lot of people who seem to enjoy being part of the rage cycle. It has sadly ceased to be constructive “community” dialogue in most cases, if indeed it ever was.
It's a hard job to do right and theres no incentive for it. Instead we have a bunch of idealists who's dream is to influence people. (But they don't have the experience to understand why their position is misfounded and harmful) [This is where you get vice and other extreme positioned based papers]
Anyways, journalism never really caught up on the idea about online news and tried to go the ad revenue route. They didn't innovate and they degraded their product. (Clickbait). Then they tried to put the genie back by doing paywalls. (Expensive and they've been using dark patterns to try to prevent you from cancelling)
They've had their chance to understand what the context of their work is and to innovate. But all we're seeing is a profit driven approach with no clear acknowledgement about how people want to interact with them.
Subscriptions mean that papers will cater to a wealthy audiance and lock out the poors. Advertising makes news available to the poor, but makes their opinions unrepresented because newspapers can't say anything that would upset their advertisers.
Given the news doesn't really make money and is necessary for a functioning society, we might need to look towards public funding and ways to include the public.
EDIT: As a side benefit, a publicly funded news agency doesn't need to maximize eyeballs on it and so can afford to be less sensationalist. That is, it can be, but it has no life-or-death obligation to do it.
Given how skewed and inaccurate the articles are becoming. At least the comments can point outright lies and biases. It somewhat levels the playing field. So I'm of the opposite opinion. I think comments should be possible on all news articles.
If you're given section 230 protection, you must allow all public comments. However, I would allow moderation in the style slashdot does. Where you slide a bar, to determine how much moderation you want.
Section 230 says nothing about "you must allow all public comments."
Its not very long, go read it.
When the ratings are assigned by users (like github comment "reactions") they are sometimes pretty helpful.
Town criers in the ancient times, teachers, theaters, art galleries, books, newspapers, radio/TV.
The idea that one "must allow all public comments" if you talk about other people is a pretty weird one. Things generally do not work this way in real world, and I see no obvious reason why it should be different online.
Would you allow random people to attach notes to your pictures -- the notes that everyone who wants to look your pictures would see? Or will you say, "this is my table and I decide what goes here"? If the later, does this make you undemocratic authoritarian?
It is not just "the powerful" who "get a microphone". Anyone can speak out. There are tons of places where we one comment on articles -- we are on one of those. And getting your own site is pretty easy, too.
It’s about public spaces. News media are not private forums, they receive a public license to operate, which is in the interest of society.
???
Now in the age of global news and the internet, counterpoints need to be made in the same medium.
I'm fairly certain virtually every newspaper on this planet will gladly give someone who is subject of criticism a page to respond, however nobody who is serious thinks that means you need to give anonymous trolls a place on your website to argue on that person's behalf.
Secondly, that is not how 230 works. 230 grants platforms the right to moderate their sites and be shielded from liability. (or else Hackernews, which you are commenting on right now, would cease to exist).
Are you familiar with the James Bennet / Tom Cotton incident at the New York Times? The self-proclaimed Paper of Record forced their editorial page editor, James Bennet, to resign for publishing an op-ed by sitting US Senator Tom Cotton advocating for a position supported by a majority of the US population - that we allow US Military to assist local police in dealing with out-of-control riots.
We are way, way past the era of giving people who are the subjects of criticism space to respond.
Just a few years ago readers got to write letters to newspapers, and when the newspapers thought the comments had something particularly thoughtful to say they'd publish them at their discretion. But the quality of user comments in general is so low, there's no reasonable case to be made that they all ought to stay up.
NYTimes has quite a good comment system with decent moderation. If you present dissenting views, that's fantastic if it's well presented.
Contrast Fox News comment area and you get a mix of lies, mud slinging, and lots of left vs right blame game. Well presented/thought out comments on Fox almost never surface.
With News orgs, the further left or further right you go, it seems to only get worse.
So while I agree with you in idealism, practically speaking, it's never was as simple as throwing up a Disqus comment section.
https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20200531/23325444617/hello...
If you said "Section 230 was designed to encourage websites to be neutral common carriers" You are exactly 100% wrong. We've already covered why it does not require neutrality above, but it was also intended as the opposite of requiring websites to be "common carriers."
One of the regional comment platforms has adopted this and requires you to sign in using BankID, thereby confirming your identity.
I don't know if this is solving the problem or if it's just masking it a bit better by introducing a "shame" aspect, but it's working on the sites that I've seen using it.
Furthermore, many people need anonymity: https://geekfeminism.wikia.org/wiki/Who_is_harmed_by_a_%22Re...
If you don’t personally need to be anonymous, you are privileged; don’t assume everyone else is as lucky.
In practice, though, this just ends in ideological witch hunts. If you look at, say, the Twitter comments that got Gina Carano fired from The Mandalorian (and evidently blacklisted from Hollywood), they were actually pretty tame overall, just not in line with the nouveau moral minority.
But we see that the Inquirer wants to be proactively censorious.
Why? Economic reasons? A religion-like desire to police what they suppose is morality? A desire to avoid giving their political opponents more power?
“Women getting paid less in the workplace is because they purposely pick lower paying jobs, not because they’re discriminated against”
“The BLM protests from last year were more riots than protests and were not justified considering the events that sparked them”
“Transsexual people are experiencing a mental disorder and this shouldn’t be encouraged or accepted”
How are you not taking a position on these if the question is in regards to "true things that happen to be taboo to say"?
The second semi-factual ("not justified" is a maybe subjective distinction);
The last is purely subjective, both in the "shouldn't" and the somewhat vague definition of "mental disorder".
That said, the furore around TS seems to be as much about enforcing terminology that appears to muddy-the-waters wrt biology i.e. what "woman" means, or should mean.
As a counterpoint, by invoking the "bear trap" argument you are dismissing the only possible way to prove your point. Both sides sound like logical fallacies to me.
This is absurd, how are you supposed to slide past them without at least speed-reading the very content you're offended by? I fail to see why priority has to be given to the people who go out of their way to make others miserable.