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posted by martyb on Wednesday December 28 2016, @03:27AM   Printer-friendly
from the Eternal-September-part-deux dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:54AM

    by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:54AM (#446623) Homepage Journal

    True but around here he's half likely to end up scored 5 Flamebait.

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  • (Score: 1) by Francis on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:24PM

    by Francis (5544) on Wednesday December 28 2016, @06:24PM (#446774)

    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.