Critics may accuse President-elect Donald J. Trump and his supporters of dragging down public discourse in America, but civility took leave of open discussions years ago – online. Beneath digital news stories and social media posts are unmoderated, often anonymous comment streams showing in plain view the anger, condescension, misogyny, xenophobia, racism and nativism simmering within the citizenry.
In the early days of the World Wide Web, digital conversation areas were small, disparate, anonymous petri dishes, growing their own online cultures of human goodness as well as darkness. But when virtual forums expanded onto mainstream news sites more than a decade ago, incivility became the dominant force. The people formerly known as the audience used below-the-line public squares to sound off with the same coarse "straight talk" as our current president-elect.
[...] As a scholar of journalism and digital discourse, the crucial point about online comment forums and social media exchanges is that they have allowed us to be not just consumers of news and information, but generators of it ourselves. This also gives us the unbridled ability to say offensive things to wide, general audiences, often without consequences. That's helped blow the lid off society's pressure cooker of political correctness. Doing so on news websites gave disgruntled commenters (and trolls) both a wider audience and a fig leaf of legitimacy. This has contributed to a new, and more toxic, set of norms for online behavior. People don't even need professional news articles to comment on at this point. They can spew at will.
Freedom of speech is only for approved narratives. Miss America explained it best in Bananas.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @04:17AM
I didn't think it was so much "disagreeing with their narrative"?
Weren't many comments sections taken down due to trolling (and the reactions of the unwitting troll-ees), and also some small fraction of comments that were batshit crazy, off the tracks?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:14AM
That depends on what you mean by "trolling." In most cases I've seen personally, a lot of the time forceful disagreement or outright disagreement was classified as trolling.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Francis on Wednesday December 28 2016, @08:33AM
I see articles that are likely to result in incorrect views to have the comment section disabled proactively.
After all, we can't possibly talk about how the various candidates aren't qualified to be President, that would be sexist. It leads to a situation where nobody is able to attach things to articles to indicate that they're biased. As a result, the Clinton's get an advantageous article up and nobody can dissent. Had those posts been allowed, people might have realized what a shitty candidate she was when there was still a chance of doing something about it.
Likewise, people would have had a chance to point out that Trump is probably no more racist than most 70 year olds and that his positions on various GLBTQ issues were grossly distorted by the press to sell newspapers. He's going to be a deeply problematic President, but probably not in the ways that people were predicting during the election. Or at least, not necessarily just in the ways people predicted.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:39AM
Ahh, I see you have been modded 'flamebait' for 'fueling hatred' because you wrote something that some individuals are still in denial about:
No accurate assessments can be tolerated, especially not by the 'tolerant left' who cannot tolerate the idea it was they that won Trump the White House. No, No, NO... it's off to online commenters gulag for you my friend!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:54AM
True but around here he's half likely to end up scored 5 Flamebait.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:24PM
That's one of the reasons why I tolerate the trolling and some of the shit posters, it at least means there's some possibility of coming across some actual thought provoking comments rather than the approved comments that just go on about how great the article was and serve to form an echo chamber.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:12PM
Indeed, he is a master baiter.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:55PM
> [...] his positions on various GLBTQ issues were grossly distorted by the press [...]
More important than what Mr. Trump said is his choice of Mike Pence as his running mate.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @08:48AM
No, that was the justification. The genuinely bad comments are easy to moderate because there aren't that many edgelords on the Internet compared to normies. Problem is that the "hateful comments" that the media wants to restrict are statements like "unrestricted immigration is bad" or "Brexit will be good for Britain" or "Trump is not a racist".
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Wednesday December 28 2016, @04:34PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:26PM
That would be an insult to the equine posterior.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:44PM
A human still needs to do the moderation, though. And as we all know, businesses love spending money on humans that don't add anything to the bottom line.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by art guerrilla on Wednesday December 28 2016, @02:53PM
not really, many, if not most, of the sites who have eliminated comments or relegated them to farcebook, do so because their readers were collectively smarter and more informed than the writers, and they HATED being called out on their shitty reportage...
based on a true story...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @07:43PM
I thought it was spambots mostly... because it was either that or an authentication system that sucks if the moderators are not doing their jobs or if there are no moderators. I will never train googles AI so I can post somewhere; I will never register with a phone or give out my phone number or real name so I can post some comment on a news site or blog. It's too much to ask.
Anyway I guess the places where I visit, people are not posting stupid things most of the time, and at those places, spambots were the worst issues.
Differences in opinion are common and not to be avoided; ads for women's shoes and penis pills (strong enough for a man, but made for women?) and so on... I mean without a quality system in place, it's either accept the spambots or accept google or facebook or even linkedin now. it all boils down to authentication, and the most acceptable to the public is authentiation to show you the correct narrative's advertising. So, i refuse it all!