SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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: 1) by khallow on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:21AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 28 2016, @10:32AM
We don't all want to be put in charge. We don't all want to take credit for wonderful ideas and insight. We do want our fellow human beings to think hard before they vote, though, or influence the policies of political parties.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 28 2016, @11:08AM
Yup. For proper discussions, we're about as heavily posted as I can see us reasonably being on contentious matters. We could handle at most a 2x regular poster increase before most comments essentially became write-only like they are at the really large discussion sites.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.