The “blogosphere” is a haven for the cowardly, the vicious and the ignorant.
Every now and then you get a bunch of racists and general idiots commenting on your site. It’s my own fault for using profanity in a previous post. (Oh, but Garth Turner is such an assh*le!)
But you use the gutter talk and you get the gutter tripe, and I’ve had a bunch of it. So let me explain the comments policy with some background.
I believe in Free Speech – everyone has a right to say almost anything they want. But where they do it, that’s something else. You don’t have a right to be heard, respected, or taken seriously. That’s something you need to earn – which is pretty easy to do.
- Don’t be an ass
- Don’t use profanity (too much)
- Don’t be willfully obtuse
- Try and be clear
I also believe in deleting comments that are too racist, advocate most forms of violence, or who post in a language I can’t read [and thus can't check for the aforementioned racism and violence].
I don’t see that as a violation of free speech. As long as the government isn’t coming in and banning what you say – then your rights aren’t effected by any one individual choosing not to publish your materials. You rights remain intact and you can shop your lunacy around, and certainly someone will publish it, or you can give up and do it yourself.
This website has my name on it. And the content comes close to reflecting what I think. The comments I allow on this site, whether I like it or not (and I don’t), can be interpreted by others as also reflecting what I think. If I allow a commenter to come on my site and say ’string up them Elbonians’, then it reflects on me – and not well. All the 10-clause conditional sentences and German terminology in the world can’t make up for the impactfulness of allowing a hateful comment on my site.
So, generally I don’t.
When I delete something, I do it in plain site. Example.
This is what I’ve been doing on the site for the last year, and it works for me.
I found a fortuitously timed blog post from Martin Bright today which helps make my point. It calls for the same type of censorship that I’m advocating above. Bright is the politics editor for the left-wing New Statesman Magazine in Britain. It’s all in a British context, but change Polly Toynbee to Andrew Coyne, and the Guardian to the Globe and Mail or the CBC, and it works.
The “blogosphere” is a haven for the cowardly, the vicious and the ignorant. There is a lot of guff talked about the “blogosphere”. In reality, it is neither a utopia of free speech nor is it entirely given over to conspiracy theorists and whackos. I didn’t agree with all of Polly Toynbee’s column this morning. [but] It was a proper, thoughtful column…
But this is the response from a poster on Paul Staines’s Guido Fawkes website:
Josef K said…Anyone got a chainsaw and we’ll cut the miserable bitch’s hands off.
It’s the least we could do to create a fairer, less shrill, future with fewer bleeding hearts.
June 24, 2008 10:00 AM
I am increasingly of the view that reputable publications should heavily edit their posts to save readers from this kind of venom. The New Statesman is not innocent in all this and the Guardian’s Comment is Free site is in danger of terminally poisoning the newspaper’s brand with its torrents of abuse.
The same argument does not apply to Guido, whose brand depends on people being as nasty as they like on his site. But the anonymity is still a problem.
On the face of it “Josef K” is issuing a serious threat of violence. Perhaps Josef K is being ironic and is subtley sending up the kind of puerile mysogyny he seems to be expressing. Or maybe he is just a coward. It’s my experience of the blogosphere that it’s likely to be the latter. At the very least his mother should have a word with him.
I’d have deleted Josef K. Leaving that on my site would make me look, I don’t know, crummy, miserable, maybe.
Here are some comments from a single story on the Globe and Mail’s site. I would delete every single one of them because of how they would make me look.
John Smith from Ottawa, Canada writes: A close look at the picture shows Bernier smiling and Coulliards lips tightly closed. HMMMMM. Looks like someone had a nice car ride.
Jeff Neely from Elora, Canada writes: 2 heads, one blood supply. Do the math.
Expert Eel from Canada writes: I guess that Max is dating Rosey Palms now.
Comments Deleted from Tirana, Albania writes:
Who cares what he said, where’d the booberage go?
City Pig from Toronto, Canada writes: I wonder if the G&M has any other pictures of her, maybe something in a swimsuit?
So, a few questions to bloggers, where do you draw the line? Would you let any of the above stand? Do you think the Globe and Mail is improving or defending its brand image by allowing this material to published under its masthead? Do commenters have a “right” to be published?
Hi Robert,
Of course no one has a right to publish on your site. But if you are inviting comments, you should tolerate everything beyond a line that will always be hard to draw. Personally, I have least tolerance for off-topic comments and those that rely heavily on ad hominem.
I would look at it like this: even ugly language does some good in allowing the angry person to blow off steam: all language serves the originary purpose of language: to defer violence by substituting words for things. Words are infinite, unlike the material things we compete over. (This understanding of language comes from the discipline of Generative Anthropology)
But, paradoxically, while all language defers violence, it can also unfortunately encourage it. If I am ranting, say, full of racial epithets, I am deferring my desire to do violence to my other – I’m talking not punching – but I may be also promoting a resentful desire for others to emulate. And it will not be easy to sum up if I am doing more good or evil.
We are all resentful beings, to some degree, and all of our writing serves to mediate this. We need to remember this and police against all Utopian instincts when it comes to censorship. However, as a personal ethic, I would suggest that in our daily work of mediating our resentments we seek to defer more resentment than we create. It will never be all one or the other, but we have to give some reflection to our overall contribution, not that there is any sure way to sum it up.
For example, we should say to someone who is promoting resentments of such a scope and scale that could never be redeemed by the economic and political systems of which we are a part to learn to donate his resentment, to give it away (to God, or a secular equivalent) because there is no other way to redeem it.
One might be, say, a Palestinian who resents something Israel has done to one’s family; it may be rational to ask for some kind of compensation; but when that resentment has blossomed to a scope and scale where it can only be redeemed by “destroying the Zionist entity”, it’s time to learn to give away some of your resentment, because nothing positive can be done by destroying a productive society. If Israel is destroyed, the Palestinians will have candy for a day but they will wake up soon enough and discover they are still full of resentment and need a new “jew” to scapegoat. This is because there is no quick fix to overcoming our resentment: we have to work through it through a serious reflection into our common humanity and the nature of resentment. And to do that we need, among other things, a lot of free and frank talk.
truepeers
June 26, 2008 at 4:32 pm
The rights of commenters has been a popular topic on the web recently. My personal take is that while ugly language may have a place, there’s nothing that dictates that that place must be my blog. I reserve all rights to the display and management of comments, full stop. I allow commenters reasonable leeway for the sake of discussion and expression, but will delete or edit objectionable material without a qualm.
In writing on this a couple of weeks ago, I agreed with Jeff Chandler at Weblog Tools Collection when he said:
“I don’t believe a commenting bill of rights needs to be created in which all blogs should follow. However, I do think that each blogger should create and make publicly accessible a commenting policy. This policy should clearly explain what you as the blog author will do with comments posted on your site, who retains ownership of those comments and explain circumstances which would require you to edit an end user’s comment.”
Have a policy; make it clear; make it visible. What that policy states is up to the individual blogger, of course.
Phil Barron
June 26, 2008 at 6:04 pm
[...] of Internet part of Canada’s “human rights” problem? Jago: “The “blogosphere” is a haven for the cowardly, the vicious and the ignorant.” …. (post-darwinist.blog, [...]
Steynianism 180 « Free Mark Steyn!
June 27, 2008 at 12:32 am
Having exchanged flames with Garth many times, some of which he made libelous claims about my personal linage, I can attest to the fact flame talk is universal, we all use it when we’re heated…we gotta suck it back if we want to lay it out…POT – KETTLE – BLACK ‘k. Drawing the line at criminal acts like threats or violent racism or obvious slander is a legal and moral requirement and about as free a policy as you can get…anything else is fair play…however most people who whine about being banned or edited on this blog or that blog fail to realize they are guests on someone else’s private property….you don’t shit on the rug when your invited into someone’s home so why would you do on a personal blog?
And in the fair comment department I have to reaffirm my last comment on Garth’s accomplishments as a “Canadian statesman”…which was to say that in the overall scope of Canada’s political evolution Garth Turner’s contribution might be compared metaphorically to the dripping discharge from a sick goat’s dick.
WL Mackenzie Redux
June 27, 2008 at 1:23 am
I’ve never had to delete any comments that I can remember, except for one which I think called for the murder of Muslims. I generally let the comments stand, but I reproach the author if they are willfully ignorant. It’s your site, and your name, so it’s better to err on the side of job security than get caught with a google search of Robert Jago + Muslims must [insert insult].
By the way Robert, the closer you tread to absolute free speechism, the more fervent the fanatics become attracted to you. They test your allegiance with subtle hints and before you know it… bam… smalldeadanimals.
Raphael Alexander
June 27, 2008 at 4:59 am
I’d expect a paper to delete the comment examples given… both for the sake of their less jaded readers, and also to leave blogs with the more racy and obscene content. Most of those comments I would either let stand and rebuke the commenter for being so callous, and if it became clear they were not coming back to see a response, I’d probably delete the comment eventually if I encountered it again.
saskboy
June 30, 2008 at 9:25 pm