Guardian restricts commentary on contentious topics
February 1, 2016 4:32 AM Subscribe

Going forward, the Guardian will refrain from allowing comments on articles discussing sensitive issues such as "race, immigration, and Islam". Per Mary Hamilton, executive editor, this move is necessary in order to address "a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site".
posted by nicolas léonard sadi carnot (128 comments total) 14 users marked this as a favorite

That's not exactly what Hamilton said. They're not closing comments on race/immigration/Islam issues forever, they're limiting them so they can moderate properly - something I think Mefites would agree with, given the positive effects of moderation here:

...it had been decided that comments would not be opened on pieces on those three topics unless the moderators knew they had the capacity to support the conversation and that they believed a positive debate was possible.

The policy would be worldwide, applying to our UK, US and Australia offices, as the issues were global. And, where they were open, it was likely that threads would close sooner than the typical three-day window. “We want to host conversations where there is a constructive debate, where our audience can help us broaden our journalism with their expertise, their knowledge, their considered thoughts and opinions, and where they can use our site as a platform to make connections with the world and with those around them,” added Hamilton.

This was not a retreat from commenting as a whole, she said; it was an acknowledgement, however, that some conversations had become toxic at an international level – “a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.

posted by adrianhon at 4:41 AM on February 1, 2016 [29 favorites]

Good for them. Giving xenophobic bullies an unrestricted platform on the Guardian website is completely unnecessary when they have the whole rest of the internet to ruin.
posted by tobascodagama at 4:50 AM on February 1, 2016 [54 favorites]

Haven't they already been disabling comments on some stories? My sense is that I've been seeing more and more Guardian stories without comments recently. And that's good, because their comments sections have seriously been a shit-show for a long time.
posted by ArbitraryAndCapricious at 5:08 AM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I'm not sure that there's a newspaper's website that wouldn't be improved by removing all of the comments.
posted by octothorpe at 5:13 AM on February 1, 2016 [39 favorites]

Yes, I think it's time to admit that it was a nice idea but it doesn't work.
posted by Segundus at 5:15 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Good. They could stop comments altogether - or restrict them to thoroughly registered, paid-for, readers - as far as I'm concerned. As could just about everywhere; if you don't have a business model that allows for strong moderation by proper moderators, you shouldn't pretend to be anything other than a bucket of manure left out for the flies.

Letters To The Editor used to be a genuine pleasure to read, a page that allowed a publication to foster debate, showcase diverging views and have fun with a bit more personality and urgency without shagging the donkey. That's because such things were properly edited. A very, very long time ago it became obvious that open comments would not carry on in that tradition, and I'm genuinely surprised that the lessons which became apparent before the turn of the century have taken so long to sink in. I guess - hell, I know - it's the whole clickbait dynamic at work, but please please please stop it now. Everyone, it's time to move on.
posted by Devonian at 5:20 AM on February 1, 2016 [28 favorites]

When I worked at the Guardian, I once went to a talk about the (then still relatively new) US online edition. One off the things raised there was the cultural difference between the UK and US concerning comments. In the UK, with its culture of understated polite hypocrisy and/or tough libel laws, people expect comments to not be open on contentious issues, and online comment sections are something one only takes for granted on innocuous pieces. In the US, with its First Amendment, the very idea of not having open comments on anything feels borderline un-American, unless there's a damned good reason for it.
posted by acb at 5:22 AM on February 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Anil Dash on why you shouldn't say "Don't Read the Comments":
posted by Auz at 5:23 AM on February 1, 2016 [12 favorites]

Haven't they already been disabling comments on some stories?

They've been doing that for a long time - a couple of years? Stories that have the potential for a really awful comments section tend not to have comments enabled at all.

I'm not sure why the Guardian has comments, really. Pretty much every comments section is a back-and-forth between right-wing trolls who just want to rubbish every article, and well-meaning people caught up in the need to respond to them. There's very little signal amidst all of that noise, and comments that actually add something on substance to the article are pretty thin on the ground.

Maybe they need a higher barrier to entry - make it paid subscribers only or something. People are less likely to throw food they've paid good money for.
posted by pipeski at 5:24 AM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Buzzfeed has had a two-pronged commenting system for a while; if it's something fairly innocuous like "is this not the cutest dog", just about anyone can comment, while heavy political/social posts require Facebook logins. Of course, we know that there are any number of people who will say the worst things under their own name and picture, but at least it's a recognition that there's some difference.
posted by Halloween Jack at 5:25 AM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Anil Dash on why you shouldn't say "Don't Read the Comments"

FWIW, he's basically saying to do what places like Metafilter do and what the Guardian sounds like it's doing: encourage and protect your site/app/etc's community through moderation and outreach.
posted by zombieflanders at 5:28 AM on February 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

Yeah they’d already been doing it especially on fresh announcement-type articles on those topics. To be honest I have been amazed they still allow comments at all in the political/news sections of the website, the hottest topics get hundreds, sometimes thousands of comments, and they try and moderate them all... even just from a business perspective in terms of costs and benefits of employing people to do that, I don’t see how that’s worth it in the long run.

It’s a pity because I do appreciate reading all sorts of comments, and I don’t actually like the idea of moderation that much but in the real world, that’s not sustainable for a news website. It impacts the quality of the content - you read a good piece and below it there’s a feast of rage and insults, it’s not fair to the writers really.

Their comment threads in the tv section and music and arts (and the crosswords!) are great though, generally a blissful area of fun and pleasantry (and puns, the cascading puns are the best thing).
posted by bitteschoen at 5:29 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

In a way it's been informative to see the Guardian comments threads about the refugee issue in Europe turn into outright fascism. It is helpful to understand how fascism starts.
posted by colie at 5:34 AM on February 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

they're limiting them so they can moderate properly - something I think Mefites would agree with, given the positive effects of moderation here:

Not me. I've been here long enough to miss Paris Paramus. (And his leftwing counterpart Delmoi). And I've had a few comments - moderated - that I think did not warrant removing.

"Properly" is a loaded word and leans a little too easily to "comments we like". Well, to hell with that. If you can't take the heat....

Put another way, you don't let people let off steam one way, they will find another. Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere.
posted by IndigoJones at 5:43 AM on February 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

Commenting is a mug's game anyway. Who's got time to waste posting their feeble thoughts that no-one is interested in?
posted by Segundus at 5:50 AM on February 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere.

You think if MetaFilter was not moderated, then Trump would not be running for President? Please explain. Also, please refrain from implying that Sanders is somehow equivalent to Trump.
posted by Kirth Gerson at 5:53 AM on February 1, 2016 [42 favorites]

People are not flocking to Bernie and Trump because they're dissatisfied with online comment section moderation policies. And where is the evidence that allowing people to "blow off steam" by ranting in comment sections leads them to adopt more moderate views? I think it's as least as likely that unmoderated comment sections encourage extremism by giving it a platform.
posted by burden at 5:54 AM on February 1, 2016 [23 favorites]

There's a clear mismatch in expectations between the Guardian wanting "to host conversations where there is a constructive debate, where our audience can help us broaden our journalism with their expertise, their knowledge, their considered thoughts and opinions, and where they can use our site as a platform to make connections with the world and with those around them" and commentators believing they are engaging in an internet discussion forum.
posted by walrus at 5:57 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Properly" is a loaded word and leans a little too easily to "comments we like". Well, to hell with that. If you can't take the heat....

Ah yes, the rallying cry of harassers and their enablers around the world. What's a little threat of physical harm/rape/death here, revocation of civil and human rights there? It's really just about ethics in blah blah blah.

People should be able to participate in conversations without the expectation that they shut up and go away for not wanting to deal with bigotry and abuse that has the potential to affect their offline lives.

Put another way, you don't let people let off steam one way, they will find another.

It's not as if there's a shortage of other places they can go. This kind of veiled threat that abuse won't stay online if you get rid of it has proven to be ignorant BS time and time again.

Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere.

They're not two sides of the same coin, though. This type of false equivalence is a major part of the problem, not coincidentally, because if you can compare raising the top marginal tax rates and single-payer health care to blatant bigotry and fascism, that Overton window will keep on moving rightward.
posted by zombieflanders at 5:58 AM on February 1, 2016 [49 favorites]

If you’ve ever read comments on the Washington Post, you’ll know that for a small but overwhelmingly prolific group of commenters, all articles are about race, immigration, or Islam—especially race. Even the ones about cute puppies.
posted by musicinmybrain at 5:59 AM on February 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

But what about my fuhreeedom of speeeech
posted by escape from the potato planet at 5:59 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I was happier before I knew how terrible most people are, and I have online comments to thank for that. Hey, did you know that if Hollywood excludes people of color for 80 years, that's not racism, but if they exclude an old white dude that hasn't made a movie in 30 years, it's ageism? I do, thanks to the thousands of white commenters that flood Hollywood Reporter and Variety's Facebook page.
posted by maxsparber at 6:08 AM on February 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

Haven't they already been disabling comments on some stories?

They've been doing that for a long time - a couple of years?

They have always had some kinds of stories where the Guardian comments section wasn't opened. The cultural & legal framework of the UK means that on-going court cases tend to be off limits since providing a forum for people to discuss whether someone is guilty is a court case waiting to happen.

I would be interested to hear whether UK newspapers would be open to issues like incitement to racial hatred via commenters.
posted by biffa at 6:14 AM on February 1, 2016

> Put another way, you don't let people let off steam one way, they will find another.

So if this comment of yours were deleted you'd go.... beat somebody up? Vote for a terrible candidate? I mean, what? Or would you complain about it on your own blog (a perfect place for one's own unmoderated commenting on things)?

And the "if you can't bring the heat" thing? Be serious.
posted by rtha at 6:18 AM on February 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

I used to work IT for a newspaper and would get pissed at how unresponsive the paper was to trends. I had a blog about 5 years before the reporters started blogging. I had comments on my blog for years before they did. I embraced social media way before they did. Then I switched my blog comments from anonymous moderated to Facebook, then deleted them entirely. They still have them and they still think Twitter and Facebook are king as far as social goes. It got frustrating. They did the same thing with technology. It was years before they bought anyone in IT or even on the webdev team an iPad because it didn't do Flash and all our ads were in Flash. I constantly watched the industry skate to where the puck had been. It was embarrassing.

I say remove all comments.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:20 AM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

I've been here long enough to miss Paris Paramus. (And his leftwing counterpart Delmoi)

Also, it's pretty hilarious that you use delmoi as an example, because the final straw for him here was when another user suggested Trayvon Martin was the aggressor because he had made some sort of homebrew PCP using watermelon-flavored drink. Y'know, because black people sure do love them some watermelon!
posted by zombieflanders at 6:21 AM on February 1, 2016 [14 favorites]

If you’ve ever read comments on the Washington Post, you’ll know that for a small but overwhelmingly prolific group of commenters, all articles are about race, immigration, or Islam—especially race. Even the ones about cute puppies.

Sounds like the commenters on the (Australian) ABC website - except that there they see all articles as always about politics and immigration and climate change.

(The moderation there is abysmal though - I'm not sure if the long-term very-frequent commenters who seem to live there 24hrs/day get auto-moderated through, or if the mods are trolling the whole world by letting the dickheads straight through & delaying sensible comments until the last few minutes before closing comments off.

Either way, I've been much happier in the last couple of weeks since I Adblocked all the comments there out of existence…)
posted by Pinback at 6:22 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Put another way, you don't let people let off steam one way, they will find another. Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere.

It's not in a newspaper's mission, or even in its interests, to "let people let off steam." In fact, said steam often makes the credibility of the paper take a dive and alienates their customers. There's a reason the writers are paid and the commenters are not.
posted by cjorgensen at 6:23 AM on February 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

I've been an active member of online communities, in every role from anonymous lurker to in charge of the whole shooting match, since 1983. Here's what I've learned.

1. Open, anonymous, unmanaged comments are a guarantee of disaster. You will quickly lose anyone of worth and end up with a bottomless pit of bile. Unless you are assembling a corpus of shit to feed some sort of experiment and can't for some reason just use the infinite supply of same already available, do not do this.

2. If you are prepared to manage your comments, you must manage your commenters. There are various ways to do this, but they all need constant attention by humans who will commit.

3. You need strong, clear rules of behaviour and a very high expectation by users that they will be enforced. You do not need democracy, you do not need to follow 'freedom of speech', you can be as dictatorial as you like and set whatever rules you like, but you must enforce them. Every place I've experienced that has been successful for any length of time has structure, enforcers and consequences. If people don't like them, they are free to leave. Ambiguity, inconsistency, favouritism or lack of engagement are poisonous.

4. Your structure can - I would say should - have different rules for different areas, just as IRL. I've seen successful communities that have parts safe for the most precious of snowflakes alongside areas that would give Satan himself reason to send out for new asbestos underpants. But even those had strong rules for acceptable behaviour - cuss and yell as much as you like, but no ad hominens or dissing people's bona fides, for example.

5. A strong community encourages and trades on respect, and that respect is earned, is protected and can be lost. If it becomes apparent that someone is not operating in good faith, then sanctions should be public and effective - but that's a moderatorial decision, not one for the mob or vigilante policemen. It's often beneficial to promote users into different areas of responsibility, and the best places are self-policing, but the rules for that have to be even stricter than for run of the mill usage.

Managing all that is very hard and expensive - sock patrol alone is difficult enough.

6. Be very clear why your community exists, and why people might want to be a part of it. You can't over-communicate this.

In short: have rules, do whatever it takes to make sure they're known and followed, be very tolerant otherwise, and know what you're trying to achieve.

Metafilter is good at a lot of this, and that's why I'm still here. The Guardian is not, and I don't have any involvement with the 'community' there. There are a lot of other places I'm more or less engaged with, and each has its own take on things that varies according to the focus of the sites and the people behind them. But all have rules, and encourage those who follow them to benefit.
posted by Devonian at 6:24 AM on February 1, 2016 [32 favorites]

Put another way, you don't let people let off steam one way, they will find another. Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere.

What do you suppose is fueling the steam buildup?
posted by srboisvert at 6:26 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I had a comment on metafilter unfairly moderated once and now I am voting Trump to spite cortex!
posted by cjorgensen at 6:33 AM on February 1, 2016 [17 favorites]

> And the "if you can't bring the heat" thing? Be serious.

Comments should be moderated to keep me from making undercaffeinated typos. "Bring" should be "take," obv.
posted by rtha at 6:42 AM on February 1, 2016

Pretty much every comments section is a back-and-forth between right-wing trolls who just want to rubbish every article, and well-meaning people caught up in the need to respond to them.

You've been reading my relatives' Facebook posts again, haven't you?
posted by dances with hamsters at 6:45 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

My boyfriend made a typo the other day that made me laugh until I made myself sad, because that...that's what we have on YouTube and all the major media sites:

'Vomments.'
posted by sexyrobot at 6:47 AM on February 1, 2016 [42 favorites]

Anil Dash on why you shouldn't say "Don't Read the Comments

Yeah, we really need to stop pretending this is some mysterious force of nature and instead say about, say, YouTube, things like, "Remember, Google is one of those companies that doesn't give a shit about abusive comments."
posted by straight at 6:48 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Good. Now can they just get rid of comments entirely? I don't dare look at the comments on any article on the Guardian written by a woman or that's about gender in some way, because it's a sludge of the most thoughtless, vile, sexist rubbish you can imagine (and some you can't). I purposefully haven't looked at anything regarding immigration because I just know it'll be worse.

There's maybe three comments sections on the Guardian worth looking at - the weird kitchen gadget review column, the reviews on any tv show that has little or nothing to do with politics in living memory (War and Peace good, Deutschland '83 bad) and some of the advice column comments. That's it. And even the advice column comments can be bad - but fortunately people don't tend to clatter and foam at length there.
posted by Rissa at 6:56 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Put another way, you don't let people let off steam one way, they will find another. Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere.

I really don't think so. Unpleasant ideas aren't some kind of overpressure event and airing them doesn't somehow restore the person airing them to sane equilibrium.

Allowing hate to be expressed in respectable-seeming forums like newspaper comment sections normalises deviance and pushes the bounds of respectable ideas in an undesirable direction.

Obviously newspaper comment sections don't somehow cause racism or xenophobia to arise out of nowhere but it's absurd to think that making it easy for people to express these ideas works as a release valve.
posted by atrazine at 7:03 AM on February 1, 2016 [24 favorites]

Allowing hate to be expressed in respectable-seeming forums like newspaper comment sections normalises deviance and pushes the bounds of respectable ideas in an undesirable direction.

100% Agreed. See: 4chan, Reddit.

The idea that the internet is not real, a place for an innocuous ¨release¨ is positively dangerous. MRA groups, Gamergate and Roosh V didn't spawn out of thin air.
posted by _Synesthesia_ at 7:10 AM on February 1, 2016 [8 favorites]

It's pretty pathetic for the Guardian to say that they're are curtailing comments not because commenters are being jerks, but because commenters have stopped agreeing ("mainstream opinion") with the paper's editorial stance.

The NYT has, to its credit, continued to welcome a moderated-for-tone comment section on stories where the clear majority of commenters have moved against the paper's editorial stances in favor of (for example) unlimited immigrant competition for American workers, or Clinton over Sanders.
posted by MattD at 7:11 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

Oh noes. The chilling effects of not letting people howl into the void.

They should have just replaced the comments with echochamber.js and seen how long it took anyone to notice.
posted by tonycpsu at 7:18 AM on February 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's pretty pathetic for the Guardian to say that they're are curtailing comments not because commenters are being jerks, but because commenters have stopped agreeing ("mainstream opinion") with the paper's editorial stance.

If a significant portion of comments on my site started talking about how much fun it'd be to party like it's 1939, I'd rethink my position on freedom of speech, too.
posted by anifinder at 7:23 AM on February 1, 2016 [6 favorites]

It's pretty pathetic for the Guardian to say that they're are curtailing comments not because commenters are being jerks, but because commenters have stopped agreeing ("mainstream opinion") with the paper's editorial stance.

Remember, folks: RTFA. Because if you don't, you mistake the pullquote for the entirety of the article and miss context like this (emphasis mine):

Certain subjects – race, immigration and Islam in particular – attract an unacceptable level of toxic commentary, believes Mary Hamilton, our executive editor, audience. “The overwhelming majority of these comments tend towards racism, abuse of vulnerable subjects, author abuse and trolling, and the resulting conversations below the line bring very little value but cause consternation and concern among both our readers and our journalists,” she said last week.

As a result, it had been decided that comments would not be opened on pieces on those three topics unless the moderators knew they had the capacity to support the conversation and that they believed a positive debate was possible.

The policy would be worldwide, applying to our UK, US and Australia offices, as the issues were global. And, where they were open, it was likely that threads would close sooner than the typical three-day window. “We want to host conversations where there is a constructive debate, where our audience can help us broaden our journalism with their expertise, their knowledge, their considered thoughts and opinions, and where they can use our site as a platform to make connections with the world and with those around them,” added Hamilton.

This was not a retreat from commenting as a whole, she said; it was an acknowledgement, however, that some conversations had become toxic at an international level – “a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site”.

It’s a move that I’m sure will be welcomed, not only by journalists but by the many thousands of readers who already contribute constructively to positive debates, offering personal experience, considered opinion and, of course, constructive criticism of our journalism.

posted by zombieflanders at 7:39 AM on February 1, 2016 [15 favorites]

Bah, why let the facts get in the way of a good scolding?
posted by tonycpsu at 7:40 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I, at least, don't feel any special need to rethink my free-speech-wing-of-the-free-speech-party position on free speech to feel that comment sections are for the most part garbage and should be scrapped.

Last I checked, freedom of the press did not manifest primarily in an obligation for the owners of presses to reprint and distribute the vitriolic spew of any random asshole with a typewriter. I am at a loss as to why the advent of HTTP should have changed this.
posted by brennen at 7:49 AM on February 1, 2016 [16 favorites]

Reactionary line on race, immigration, and Islam: "Muslim immigrants are raping European women!"

BETTER reactionary line: "... And shitlibs won't even let you talk about it!"
posted by save alive nothing that breatheth at 8:23 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Should we do this for Metafilter?
posted by Liquidwolf at 8:24 AM on February 1, 2016

DON'T TEMPT ME
posted by cortex at 8:27 AM on February 1, 2016 [26 favorites]

As is often the case, XKCD sums up the free speech issue nicely.
posted by TedW at 8:32 AM on February 1, 2016 [13 favorites]

It's easy to be glib and say "don't read the comments" or "comments are a failed experiment." But the situation we have today is really, deeply distressing and depressing. The participatory nature of the Internet is the whole point. It's what made the web feel like a fucking utopian frontier in the 90s when I first got dial-up access, when the median web site was somebody's personal page written in HTML by hand and you could go weeks without visiting a site run by a major corporation. That's what made it interesting, that's what made it cool, that's what made it a community.

Now it's fashionable to resist all community engagement because it's "too hard" to do the work of moderating against toxicity. Fuck that shit. Nobody fell in love with the web because we thought, "man, wouldn't it be awesome if there were something exactly like a newspaper, except expensive, heavy, and glowing?" The value of the web comes from participation. In the article linked above, Anil Dash said it better than I can:

There’s a grave cost to assuming online interactivity is always awful. The burden is felt most acutely in denying opportunity to those for whom connecting to a community online may be the only way to get a foot in the door. Those underrepresented, unheard voices are the most valuable ones we lose when we throw the baby out with the bathwater and assume online comments are necessarily bad.

But more seriously, this is a good move and is the sort of move I hope a whole lot more media sites that aren't specifically in the business of fostering good conversation will look into.

Because it is, in retrospect, bizarre how much the terribleness of unmoderated or poorly moderated comments has been accepted as just some sort of unhappy fact of nature rather than as a crappy, and totally mitigable, by-product of a bunch of changes in the social and technological landscape over the last twenty years as the internet grew from academic side-channel to all-pervasive daily appliance.

Comments are awful in so many places because it turns out that when you give people a new venue for talking about random whatever and don't build in a culture of non-shittiness as part of that, you get a lot of people talking shit about random whatever. Which is bad enough when the random whatever is something with no stakes or heat to it, but you get into politics and economics and race and class and gender and so on and you've got a real boiler room of mind-melting awfulness on display.

The weird thing is not that this happened at all; the internet's a great big grand experiment, and when you experiment you try new things and see what happens. And some of the stuff that happens is a wonderful surprise, and some of it's a terrible surprise. Which: okay! We learned some new things about how people interact on this new medium. Learning is a process.

The weird thing is how slow the move has been to recognize the terrible surprises as something that can be routed around, discouraged, mitigated. The weird thing is that we've been collectively saying "oof, don't read the comments" for so goddam long while the guy next door is busy hammering together another comment box. The weird thing is half the time, that guy agrees but is trapped in this cultural resignation to the apparent natural fact of awful comments to the point where he just keeps hammering away anyway. Comments are terrible, but you gotta, for some murky reason, have comments, so a steady influx of new homes for terrible comments it is.

The weird thing is how the next step in the learning process hasn't much happened. We've ended up collectively treating it like an everlasting moment of dawning horror instead of a process, stopping and staring at the grotesquerie instead of saying, nope, that didn't work out, let's try something else that doesn't reflexively create purposeless homes for febrile shitfuckery.

This topic gets rapidly abstracted a lot, away from the practical realities of terrible comment sections and toward broad philosophical ideas. Practice gets shoved out of the way in favor of a discussion of principle. And I think discussions of principles are good and important, but I think they're also easy and often outright lazy.

Philosophically? I believe in freedom of speech as a guiding principle for government and as a necessary component of a healthy society.

Practically? I also believe that people are often pretty terrible about what they want to say, and when and how and where and why they want to say it.

And I think the mistake that's often made is treating these two ideas as irreconcilable, as something one has to choose between—that to recognize the awfulness of much speech in practice and to say we need to think about how to mitigate that is is to deny the importance of freedom of speech as a principle. Or, more idealistic but no less toxic in its results, to be so dedicated to the abstract principle of freedom of speech that you don't want to put the idea of restricting terrible speech on the table at all out of fear that it'll compromise that valuable ideal.

The reality is that both ideas are important, and it does the abstract principle of freedom of speech no good to saddle it with all the baggage that comes along with trying to insist that all speech everywhere be an unfettered free-for-all. There is a yawning canyon that separates "maybe we should rethink un- or under-moderated comment boxes as an immanent part of news sites" and "free speech isn't a priority", and somewhere down in that valley is any number of workable compromises that will yield up plenty of opportunities for online discussion of all sorts, great and gross, thoughtful and steam-venting.

When "the Guardian is being more selective about which articles to include comments sections on, because the comments are often really fucking terrible and take a lot of attention just to keep halfway managable" is treated in knee-jerk fashion as "free speech is bad", the party in error is not the Guardian.
posted by cortex at 9:02 AM on February 1, 2016 [34 favorites]

My feeling is that the best solution is to keep comments disabled all together and not bother with moderators.

Too often what passes as "good moderation" is really more along the lines of an instant shutdown of any train of thought or opinion that doesn't line up with the prevailing community sentiment. It happens here, it happens everywhere that is strictly moderated. It's acceptable on a site like this, I suppose, because it's a more of a themed community with a set of prevailing ideologies and people seem to understand that.

Taking that approach on a news site seems farcical, but then again letting hateful/dangerous commentary stand unchecked also seems farcical, which is why removing the ability to comment seems correct.
posted by dreamlanding at 9:03 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have really mixed feelings about this. I think I prefer moderation in any forum that I regularly spend time in, and that's why I spend time on meta-filter, but at the same time I think it's useful for us to have a window into what the general public thinks. Because as someone who has been certain for months based on viewing the conservatives in my own feeds that no one would actually vote for Trump, I have been having a very rude awakening that perhaps might not of been such a shock if I was actually reading these comments sections.
posted by corb at 9:04 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I was happier before I knew how terrible most people are, and I have online comments to thank for that.

Yes, that's the value of unmoderated comment sections; you are faced with the reality that there are serious numbers of really horrible people who are just dying to let you know just how horrible they are.

It's not much compared to harm done by vicious commenting, which chases other people away from the conversation, but it is worth remembering that when you shut people up, that's all you've done. You haven't really made them go away.
posted by layceepee at 9:09 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Commenting on a newspaper article in ye olden days meant paying for a stamp, and there was still no guarantee of publication. A UK first-class stamp now costs 63p, second-class 54p. They could bring in a 50p charge to submit each comment, and use it to fund a moderation team - still with no guarantee of publication - and see how that goes.
posted by rory at 9:14 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

You haven't even shut them up - if you had, they would, you know, shut up.
posted by rtha at 9:14 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The reality is that both ideas are important, and it does the abstract principle of freedom of speech no good to saddle it with all the baggage that comes along with trying to insist that all speech everywhere be an unfettered free-for-all. There is a yawning canyon that separates "maybe we should rethink un- or under-moderated comment boxes as an immanent part of news sites" and "free speech isn't a priority", and somewhere down in that valley is any number of workable compromises that will yield up plenty of opportunities for online discussion of all sorts, great and gross, thoughtful and steam-venting.

Yeah.

I think part of what we are actually wrestling with here is just that comments, specifically, became a technical and social norm.

I think that's an easy evolutionary path to understand in retrospect. We're all here right now in these comments after all. But I'm not sure that's the same as an architectural inevitability, is it? There are other ways to do online discourse. You can see some of them in big-scale social networks, old-school pre-giant-corporations-own-everything protocols like IRC or NNTP, mailing lists, wikis, instant messaging, so on and so forth. I can write just about anything I like on my own blog or random website full of random pages. I understand (do I ever) that those things each have their own structural problems to contend with, and I think real human effort has to be expended at keeping things decent just about anywhere. It just seems like "this site hosts a database of comments on any chunk of content" doesn't have to be the model for how we have conversations on the internet just because it's easy to hack together and everybody else does it.

It is ridiculously limiting to just roll with an unexamined equivalence between comments on articles and a newspaper-style outlet respecting free speech or dialog with its readers. But it seems to happen a lot.
posted by brennen at 9:39 AM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I've also been noticing the trend of websites doing away with the comments section and it makes me glad. People grossly abused their commenting privileges and, in the process, confirmed that most of their opinions are best kept to themselves. A "comments to the editor" section is better, because it's curated. It doesn't matter if there's bias in the comment selection, because when you're reading content from any website, you're already seeing their point of view expressed, anyway. Some outlets will be more fair and balanced, others will be Fox News. And, as it turns out, unrestricted public participation isn't all that great.
posted by 0cm at 9:46 AM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

I also felt the utopian vibes of the web in 1994-1995, but during that time, most of the person-to-person communication was still happening out-of-band over email, USENET, and IRC. Very few sites were running CGI scripts to allow people to add content to other peoples' sites. Web pages were still mostly "documents" that you'd update with things you wanted to say, but if someone wanted to say something in response, you generally weren't getting that response over port 80.

I say this just to note that there's a big difference between supporting wide-open communication between people in a peer-to-peer-ish fashion vs. posting content on the pages of someone else's web site. Yes, the line between platform and channel begins to get fuzzy with things like Disqus, Facebook comments, Twitter, etc. that are hosted elsewhere and embedded within another site, but the presentation is what matters -- when the response is showing up alongside the content (something that was never true of letters to the editor, incidentally) the response becomes something that has to be actively managed by the publisher of the original content.

At that point, your rights to free expression are what the site owner says they are, based on how much they want to spend moderating things, and demands for anything beyond that are actually contrary to free expression, because as we've learned, it ain't cheap to do even the bare minimum amount of moderation required to clean up the trolls, harassers, etc. Furthermore, as the Wired article notes, the costs of it are often hidden, pushed off to low-paid workers who have to spend their days looking at shock images / hateful speech all day, for what seems to me to have very little benefit. There are plenty of places where people can express their opinion on something they read and link to it, and I haven't seen a compelling argument that free expression is significantly harmed by not allowing that opinion to show up alongside (or, more at it, by scrolling down 300 pages) on the original article.
posted by tonycpsu at 10:17 AM on February 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I was happier before I knew how terrible most people are, and I have online comments to thank for that.

Online comments have destroyed my ability to pretend to myself that the vast majority of the men around me think of me as a human being. That hasn't made me happier. It may possibly have made me safer--to know, for instance, how many men would not only not believe me if I were raped, but would consider me monstrous for reporting it, and how many more men value their relationships with other men more than protecting women in their own communities, and to modify my conduct accordingly. But I'm not even sure about that.
posted by praemunire at 10:24 AM on February 1, 2016 [9 favorites]

But what about my fuhreeedom of speeeech

Take note Guardian editors, this is the quality of commenting you should be aiming for.
posted by MikeMc at 10:25 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

Comments work fine if you get moderation right.

Simple rule of thumb: bad commenters drive out everyone else. So the instant they show up, nuke them from orbit.

I have never seen a newspaper put in the effort to get moderation right, and they wonder why they get raw sewage from a fire-hose?
posted by cstross at 10:39 AM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

Because as someone who has been certain for months based on viewing the conservatives in my own feeds that no one would actually vote for Trump, I have been having a very rude awakening that perhaps might not of been such a shock if I was actually reading these comments sections.

One of the missions of the media is indeed an informed electorate, and I am friends with a lot of journalists, and when you look at who these people associate with, who their friends are, and what kind of access they get they do sometimes fall into a bubble. This is why they are sometimes taken by surprise at the popularity of a candidate or why they sometimes allow one candidate to dominate news cycles. This said, I would suggest that the comments section of a paper isn't where alternative opinion belongs (face it, the comments in these sections are often barely cogent). I would suggest that letters to the editor or well thought-out opinion pieces are where dissenting commentary belongs. But most because I've given up on newspaper comments as having any value.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:43 AM on February 1, 2016

One of the idealized interpretations of comment sections, broadly, is that they provide equal time to different points of view, and that through reasoned disagreement, we may come to a better understanding of our own stances on issues as well as the stances of others. The vision of a comments section was that of a democratized information commons. (Yes, I said this was an idealized point of view.)

Unfortunately, idealism meets reality in the "democratized information commons". Average people aren't very smart, can't put a reasoned argument together, and don't write very well. And half of people are below average. Furthermore, even those who are otherwise above average in writing or debating ability aren't immune to cognitive biases, prejudices, arguing from emotion, and a million other influences that mess with communication.

Given all of this, the Guardian is probably right to shut down comments on any and all of its articles. Moderation is a relatively expensive service and it scales and automates very poorly. What this decision says to me is that the ROI on having a comment section is just not high enough to justify the inevitable headaches. Commenters still have the option of tweeting out links or writing their own blog posts, as they always did.

I've always found that the best online conversations are to be had in the absence of significant disagreement on the fundamentals. Given a substantial common ground (whatever ground that happens to be - left wing, right wing, video game enthusiasts, etc) and an intelligent user base, good discussions and debates can be had. Noisy disagreement on fundamental issues just creates noise and persuades no one.
posted by theorique at 10:45 AM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

They're right to do this, and right in thinking why they should do it. Comments at the Guardian are mostly the same as everywhere: aggressive and thoughtless; and the Guardian has no obligation to extend freedom of speech in their own domain. But the statement recognizes that these kinds of comments come from “a change in mainstream public opinion and language”, which is very true. The majority of people simply don't hold the same beliefs as Guardian readers and, in my experience, online comments are pretty representative of comments people around me make offline.
posted by Emma May Smith at 10:46 AM on February 1, 2016

But the statement recognizes that these kinds of comments come from “a change in mainstream public opinion and language”, which is very true.

To my mind, this was the most problematic part of the article. Shutting down comments because many of them contain threats of violence, or because they are poor quality writing and add nothing to the discussion, or similar reasons - this makes sense.

But this reads something like: "many of the comments disagree with us, therefore we won't allow them". Which, I think, does a disservice to what they are actually trying to do.
posted by theorique at 11:01 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

To my mind, this was the most problematic part of the article. Shutting down comments because many of them contain threats of violence, or because they are poor quality writing and add nothing to the discussion, or similar reasons - this makes sense.

But this reads something like: "many of the comments disagree with us, therefore we won't allow them". Which, I think, does a disservice to what they are actually trying to do.

It really doesn't. When you actually see it in context, it very much reads as mainstream public opinion and language actually being bigoted, abusive/harassing, of poor quality, etc.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:10 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

One amazing aspect of all this to me is how much it resembles the zombie apocalypse, only the hordes of ravening comment zombies don't so much want to eat your brain as to make it possible for whatever ate their brain to eat yours too.

I see the big unanswered question as being whether unmoderated comment sections actually work to propagate hate, or not.

If they do, then great: close them.

If they don't, then closing comment sections is akin to holing up in our castles, great or small, as the Black Death rages abroad, telling each other our favorite stories and imagining that we're safe because it can't touch us if we never venture outside -- but we have to eventually, and contagion tends to find ways of breaching walls regardless.
posted by jamjam at 11:44 AM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

The quote from the article is, literally: "a change in mainstream public opinion and language that we do not wish to see reflected or supported on the site".

Language is one thing - removing comments for profanity maintains the tone of debate at a high level. But reference to "mainstream public opinion" suggests that they would actually remove otherwise well-formed comments due to expression of certain "disallowed" opinions. Again, this is their right, as the owners and controllers of the platform. But it also suggest that the holders of contrarian opinions are unwelcome at the Guardian site, and that to discuss and debate alternative viewpoints they must go elsewhere. Which I am sure they will.
posted by theorique at 11:45 AM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

Simple rule of thumb: bad commenters drive out everyone else. So the instant they show up, nuke them from orbit.

If there's one thing that a dozen years of Metatalks have shown us that it's identifying the bad commenters which is the problem. Oh, sure, there are some obvious or fairly obvious cases. And I suppose those make up a large part of the problematic commenters on newspaper sites. Now I'm talking myself out of the point I was making. Which is that Metafilter is a land of contrasts or something.
posted by Justinian at 11:45 AM on February 1, 2016

I was happier before I knew how terrible most people are, and I have online comments to thank for that.

This should be "how terrible most people who post comments on the internet are". Looking at the comments sections of most newspapers, the overrepresentation of trolls is really obvious: the Guardian is a left-wing paper, still there are a huge amount of detestable extreme rightwing comments. Just by limiting comments to their actual subscribers, they would get a whole different discussion. And it is the same on conservative sites - the trolls are skewing the discussion far further out into anti-democratic and racist opinion than the general readership supports. The idea that this is a window into what the majority, or even a plurality of citizens think is totally off the mark.

What the un-moderated comments-sections do are give journalists and politicians a false image of the popular opinion, which gets them running after this trolliverse of idiocy. And when the journalists and politicians begin treating the extreme as something normal, the segment of the population who follow leaders will do so as well. It is an evil spiral of ignorance and populism (and one which I believe has repeated itself every time a powerful new medium has appeared, from print over film to now the internet).
posted by mumimor at 11:52 AM on February 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I already posted the entire portion where the author added context from the person being quoted that does a pretty good job of refuting this "but they just don't want to hear disagreement" strawman. Hint: it has a lot more to do than simply being "contrarian opinions."
posted by zombieflanders at 11:58 AM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

One thing I've found strange is that a large number of comments on the Guardian site just make fun of Guardian readers... and you do have to register in order to comment.

So people are actually taking the time to register on the Guardian website in order to make fun of Guardian readers and troll them in various ways. Would it even make a difference if they had to pay a fee?

At one point it did seem as though they were genuinely trying to build a community, but there is no shortage of places for people to express their particular contrarian opinions... twitter, reddit, 4chan. In fact, I generally much prefer discussing Guardian articles on metafilter.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:11 PM on February 1, 2016

When I say I prefer discussing Guardian articles on metafilter, it's not so much because of similar views shared by mefites, but because people here will take the article seriously.
posted by maggiemaggie at 12:13 PM on February 1, 2016 [3 favorites]

This should be "how terrible most people who post comments on the internet are".

And people who don't care when horrible comments are posted, or might find them objectionable but not enough to justify anyone's actually objecting to them.

And people who are indifferent to the general damage done when horrible comments drive people off sites/out of communities.

And people who don't take threats of offline harm arising from online interactions seriously.

I mean, you may wish to call these groups something less harsh than "terrible"--it's a fair point--but indifference in the face of terribleness is not a neutral thing. As I mentioned above, dudes: I see how you act, or don't act, in the face of online gender-based violence, and it tells me what I need to know. At a certain point, it doesn't matter if you personally wouldn't call me "someone who needs a good deep-d*cking" or whatever, if you're not willing to do anything about it (or support me in doing something about it) when it happens.

As another person whose Internet involvement antedates the web, I've found shedding the illusions of the glorious possibilities of mass participation in media to be truly painful.
posted by praemunire at 12:51 PM on February 1, 2016 [5 favorites]

I believe strongly in comment systems on websites. When I see something interesting, I like being able to leave a note on it, either a word of appreciation, or an extra piece of information, or links to interesting relevant sites, etc. Largely doing what I do here.

I think in the long run the growing rumblings that internet comment systems are bad are mistaken. I think the problem with, say, YouTube comments, are a combination of site size, lack of internet savvy (no one ever talks about netiquette anymore), and a number of harmful memes that have yet to run their course but will abate, eventually.

This said, that doesn't mean that those memes aren't still out there right now, and persecuted people shouldn't ever feel bad about restricting or turning off comments on their sites. But it's important for news organizations, especially, to offer commenting, even if most of those comments at this time and place are going to be from a handful of 65-year-old white male retirees demanding that all those job-stealing Mexican commie-muslims go back to Africa. Moderation is one solution. It works fairly well here.
posted by JHarris at 12:55 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

> Not me. I've been here long enough to miss Paris Paramus.

I've been visiting this site long enough that I remember consciously refraining from signing up as a member until well after the site discourse norms shifted away from tolerance for ParisParamus/StrasbourgSecaucus's "edgy" style of argumentation, so uh yeah ymmv wrt that guy.
posted by You Can't Tip a Buick at 12:56 PM on February 1, 2016 [10 favorites]

Stop letting media outlets use the shittiness of completely unmoderated commenting systems with no accountability to justify their failure to spend the money on moderation and accountability that could transform them.

I'd rather newspapers spent their money on investigation and reporting, and leave moderation and conversation to other outlets. Other than tiny "letter to the editor" sections, community conversation was never a goal or job for newspapers, I don't see why it needs to be that now.

Metafilter is good at moderation. Some other sites presumably are too. I don't want newspapers to waste time and money trying to add a whole new dimension to their skillsets.
posted by thefoxgod at 1:05 PM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

So has any other site adopted Metafilter's $5 flat fee for commenting? It's weird that this site has been using that model for a decade now but no one (that I know of) has tried it out.
posted by octothorpe at 1:12 PM on February 1, 2016 [7 favorites]

Too often what passes as "good moderation" is really more along the lines of an instant shutdown of any train of thought or opinion that doesn't line up with the prevailing community sentiment.

Taking that approach on a news site seems farcical

I'm curious whether you feel the same about Letters to the Editor pages in newspapers. I doubt the Guardian shutting down in their moderated comment sections anything they would have printed as a letter to the editor.
posted by straight at 2:18 PM on February 1, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don't see why [community conversation] needs to be [a goal of newspapers] now.

It needs to be a goal of newspapers because all the interesting conversations about their work will be turning up in other places, and all the things that they inspire will spread out across the web so that their hard work doing the investigative things that need the time and effort will turn out not to be rewarded with the engagement that they deserve.

And personally, I get my views formed much more on Twitter and here than from newspapers. The Guardian's not so bad for poor quality commenters as some (notably for me, The Economist, which despite the high bar of a heavily metered paywall has 5 or 10 ignoramus commenters who totally ruin it), but the fact that its agenda is set by the need for a more controlled version of the news (e.g. its reactionary stance against Jeremy Corbyn) certainly is. And I do think part of its resistance to grassroots movements is the desire not to cede ground to any narrative which is shaped by a community, because it's scared of the mob that is the community it knows the best, its own below the line.
posted by ambrosen at 3:29 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm curious whether you feel the same about Letters to the Editor pages in newspapers.

Letters to editor? What is this 1963? Print newspapers are dying, I'm not sure they're a good model for 21st Century media.
posted by MikeMc at 3:33 PM on February 1, 2016 [1 favorite]

So has any other site adopted Metafilter's $5 flat fee for commenting?

The Tablet adopted $2 ... per day. It's worked really well, they hardly ever get comments. Here's what they say about their program:

I NEED TO BE HEARD! BUT I DONT WANT TO PAY.
Readers can still interact with us free of charge via Facebook, Twitter, and our other social media channels, or write to us at letters@tabletmag.com. Each week, we’ll select the best letters and publish them in a new letters to the editor feature on the Scroll.

We hope this new largely symbolic measure will help us create a more pleasant and cultivated environment for all of our readers, and, as always, we thank you deeply for your support.

posted by Joe in Australia at 4:33 PM on February 1, 2016 [4 favorites]

What I don't get is why as step one news organizations don't restrict commenting to subscribers only. The paywall keeps out some of the random idiots and shrinks the base of commentators down enough that maybe moderation will be feasible.
posted by Drinky Die at 12:06 AM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Something Awful isn't quite a "comments" section since it's a forum, but its various forums are surprisingly readable (as per certain values for readable, but the gun forum is one of the few not overrun by complete lunatics, for example). The $10 registration fee at least means when someone goes on a shitposting meltdown, they are paying for each new account they sign up to shitpost with.
posted by Ghostride The Whip at 1:37 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

I have never been a member of SA, but one of the things that I found interesting about it is that it seemed to spawn a lot of other forums and cultures across the political and ideological spectrum. (IIRC, SRS/"Shit Reddit Says" came out of there, and some right-wing forums as well.)
posted by theorique at 5:42 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

It needs to be a goal of newspapers because all the interesting conversations about their work will be turning up in other places...

Implying that any interesting conversations are happening in newspaper comment sections to begin with.
posted by tobascodagama at 5:59 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Happy to see I could let y'all let off a little steam! I'm a little surprised at how literal minded some of you are. I suppose I shouldn't be.

I stand by my point. "Don't read the comments" to me sounds like "My mind's made up, don't confuse me with other points of view", and worse, "My mind's made up, don't confuse other people with other points of view".

Well, to hell with that. The whole promise of the internet was that it would give voice to masses. Which apparently was nice until the masses proved not to be People Like Us.

(I wasn't thinking of US political candidates, not sure why you think I was. As the Guardian was referencing issues like Islam, I was thinking of what's currently going on in Europe re migrants. Germany in particular seems to be, shall we say, moderating comments. The people seem not to like that and are beginning to get restless. It will get uglier.)
posted by IndigoJones at 6:15 AM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

I stand by my point. "Don't read the comments" to me sounds like "My mind's made up, don't confuse me with other points of view", and worse, "My mind's made up, don't confuse other people with other points of view".

This is a transparently post-facto justification. You were responding to the moderation of comments, not avoiding them. The person you quoted specifically pointed that out:

They're not closing comments on race/immigration/Islam issues forever, they're limiting them so they can moderate properly - something I think Mefites would agree with, given the positive effects of moderation here

Also, given how factually wrong and off-base your original comments and justifications were, if anyone's proven that their mind is made up and that they'd rather not confuse themselves or anyone else, it's you.

Well, to hell with that. The whole promise of the internet was that it would give voice to masses. Which apparently was nice until the masses proved not to be People Like Us.

Ironically enough, that's exactly how your point comes across. The idea of the article and the point of most people in this thread is that bigots and harassers were taking over comments sections to attack women and LGBT people and PoC (who are not People Like Us to them). You just pretended like said bigots and harassers were the aggrieved party with stuff like "[i]f you can't take the heat..." which is pretty much the mantra of them and their supporters when their targets speak up. You're also ignoring the voices of the women and LGBT people and PoC in this very thread who have pointed out to you how messed up unmoderated forums are, and who are the masses that are trying to be heard.

I wasn't thinking of US political candidates, not sure why you think I was. As the Guardian was referencing issues like Islam, I was thinking of what's currently going on in Europe re migrants.

"Trump and Bernie didn't come out of nowhere" are your exact words. You didn't so much as mention Europe or migrants or Islam.

The people seem not to like that and are beginning to get restless. It will get uglier.

Yeah, we know, because actual fascists are the ones getting restless and ugly. These dire warnings that not letting bigots (in this case racists and Islamophobes) dominate conversations means that they'll get violent because apparently they just can't help it does more to undercut your point than support it. You're just pointing out that the problem is entirely with uncontrollably violent people being uncontrollably violent (accurately, as it turns out), but preemptively explaining away their actions as being somehow justifiable.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:52 AM on February 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

Moderated forums have their own issues. Can lead to a lot of groupthink and removing content because the opinion is wrong with offensiveness being an excuse. It's a situation where you just have to rely on a benevolent dictator. It's fine, until the Overton Window shifts somewhere where your opinions are considered worthy of deletion.

For the most part, that's fine, there are a billion other places to go online. For a newspaper or other general interest site though, you should aim for as general interest an audience as you can achieve. I think erring towards lesser moderation than a place like Metafilter is a good bet, but you do need to do more and better than they currently do.
posted by Drinky Die at 7:01 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

"Don't read the comments" to me sounds like "My mind's made up, don't confuse me with other points of view", and worse, "My mind's made up, don't confuse other people with other points of view".

Real world example I read last week.

Article in local paper about a refugee family from Syria that is movie to a local neighborhood. (Happens to be a few doors down from my sister which is super cool). Article talks about what happened to them and how they got to come to Canada. Included living in a small town, house they had save 18 years for got bombed after month, fled from the bombing by walking several days with nothing by what they had on them when the bombing started, 4 years in a refugee camp, chronic illness with little medical care and interviews with the parents and kids where they talked about how incredibly grateful they were to be give help and a chance in Canada and how they are profoundly happy that their kids are now safe. The kids are excited about going to school again.

The comments: A few comments from people who have already met the family. A few general comments referring to their specific situation and how what's going on in Syria sucks and is horrible. A comment about how it's cool that people like this are helped but how we must in general be concerned about security around refugees. A comment about how large influx of Muslims is making them nervous and they don't like it so much. All and all not so bad and offering different opinions.

We also got: We don't need more honor killings in Canada eleventy!! A comment about jihadi animals. Comment calling the 11 and 12 year old future rapists. More on this family raping people in the neighborhood. The 15 year looks like a suicide bomber. Comment about how the local area is now unsafe. These people will bring down property values. Comment about how this family will be watched carefully because 'terrorists.' obviously.And if the law won't do it we will. Canada is going to be destroyed by these people cause they're only coming to make us all Muslim because ISIS told them too. Bunch of other hateful and racist comments.

Once that shyte started all other types commenting stopped. These comments were eventually deleted and comments closed.

Please explain how me thinking while they were up 'yowsa don't read the comments' and I sure as hell hope that the family doesn't read them is me just not wanting myself and others with our 'made up minds' being confused by 'others points of view.' I'm supposed to consider these types of viewpoints? I'm supposed to consider the viewpoint that entail calling 11 and 12 year old rapists and terrorists as having some merit to the discussion about this families story and situation?

This is the type of commenting that's being talked about here. At some levels it's not about a difference of opinion or viewpoint. It's about hate and racism, sexism misogyny. I seriously need to be considering viewpoints that say women are useless cunts etc, feminazis, that we just need a good fucking etc, rape jokes when reading comments connected to an article about issues with women in tech or anything about women and gaming?

Equating 'don't read the comments' as having a made up mind is total horse pucky.
posted by Jalliah at 7:42 AM on February 2, 2016 [10 favorites]

These dire warnings that not letting bigots (in this case racists and Islamophobes) dominate conversations means that they'll get violent because apparently they just can't help it does more to undercut your point than support it.

The question is, who decides which commenter is a "racist" or "Islamophobe", and which one is debating in a fair manner about the issue? Some instances are pretty clear cut - e.g. if a person is using racial/ethnic slurs or calling for violence, they can be banned without losing much value. It's pretty much the same as removing comments in ALL CAPS or comments that lack both paragraphs and punctuation.

But then there are other cut-off points. Let's look at the "migrants in Europe" example: Is a person arguing for deportation of migrants being "racist"? Is a person arguing for receiving no more migrants into Europe being "racist"? At what precise point does a point of view cross over from being a mere political stance (and presumably acceptable for debate), and reach the level of "hatred" or "racism"? (That's a somewhat facetious question - I don't think a bright line can be drawn, and human moderators are always going to be asked to evaluate nuance and make judgment calls.)
posted by theorique at 9:46 AM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Implying that any interesting conversations are happening in newspaper comment sections

I was saying that newspapers cover interesting topics. Given that, they should be trying pretty hard to get the benefit of the fact that their readers might want to engage constructively with them
posted by ambrosen at 11:19 AM on February 2, 2016

The question is, who decides which commenter is a "racist" or "Islamophobe", and which one is debating in a fair manner about the issue?

Once again, I'll refer you to the actual article from the FPP where they make this very clear. And as several others have said, it's up to the website's discretion.
posted by zombieflanders at 11:52 AM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Not me. I've been here long enough to miss Paris Paramus.

I remember a lot of things, too. This place is much, much better now.
posted by Dark Messiah at 12:48 PM on February 2, 2016 [4 favorites]

The people who own the site decide what constitutes racist or Islamophobic language. They exercise judgment, sort of like how they exercise editorial judgment when they decide what they will publish in their papers. I understand that it is very upsetting to some people that there are no scientific rules governing this judgment, but I think you're just going to have to live with it.

I took the question less as a literal inquiry into the mechanics of banning racist and Islamophobic language and more a reminder that a proposition that seems clearly praiseworthy when it's stated that way may be more problematic depending on how it is carried out.

Few people are likely to say, "I'm in favor of racists comments." However, more people might see a comment that was banned as racist and say "I disagree with that, but I think it's within the range of reasonable discussion." (And a signficant number might say "I agree with that, and I don't think I'm a racist.") I think that point is worth bearing in mind.
posted by layceepee at 3:30 PM on February 2, 2016 [2 favorites]

Is a person arguing for deportation of migrants being "racist"

Almost without exception.
posted by maxsparber at 4:27 PM on February 2, 2016 [5 favorites]

I don't think anyone here would argue that moderation of comment sections is a problem-free land of delight. It is also, to me, very clear that what happens on most unmoderated forums and comment sections is moderation by mob. That is demonstrably not problem-free either. I also think it's the worst option.
posted by rtha at 5:02 PM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Few people are likely to say, "I'm in favor of racists comments." However, more people might see a comment that was banned as racist and say "I disagree with that, but I think it's within the range of reasonable discussion." (And a signficant number might say "I agree with that, and I don't think I'm a racist.") I think that point is worth bearing in mind.

Yes, those people may not feel they're being racist, but it is tremendously tiring and disheartening to read yet another comment that says something like "I used to have a lot of sympathy for Jews, until I saw XXX." Or "people wouldn't dislike Jews so much if not for YYY". Or "Jews complain about racism too much", or "play the anti-Semitism card" or whatever. It just drains the energy from you.¹

So if you really do want a level playing field then you have to make it one that doesn't discriminate against some of the players; and that means moderating dog-whistles and passive-aggression and the other things that are perhaps only equivocally racist. Even those equivocally-racist comments create a toxic atmosphere for minority posters; one that weakens or eliminates one group of voices and is much more harmful to debate than even heavy moderation.

¹ People from other minority groups often say similar things when the topic comes up in Metafilter, but I'm speaking from my own experience here: I read a bunch of things like that in my local paper this morning.
posted by Joe in Australia at 8:58 PM on February 2, 2016 [1 favorite]

Is a person arguing for deportation of migrants being "racist"

Almost without exception.

Deportation is contemplated in laws, though - at least, for migrants not qualifying for asylum/refugee status. Just saying... (And even right now deportations of unsuccessful asylum seekers have been or are being announced at government level in several countries in Europe, including Germany, and Sweden, the two countries that took in most people in past years. Denmark is even calling for a revision of the UN convention...)

So that’s a tricky one itself, of course you can argue those laws are racist themselves but that’s a different argument than the one about opinions.

Anyhow that’s all kind of irrelevant to the issue of the Guardian reducing comments on those topics! Anyone with some degree of familiarity with their comment sections on those topics in past months knows the problem went far beyond mere "opinions" that were not aligned with the Guardian position, it’d be unfair to describe their decision in those terms. The problematic comments were at a level of overt incitement to hatred and violence, and insults and awfulness of an unequivocal level, not just a matter of "different" political stances.
posted by bitteschoen at 6:29 AM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I mean, again: this so often wanders into abstracts that are appealingly complicated and subtle. Is it possible to have an opinion about immigration law and deportation that is not racist? Absolutely! In all sorts of ways, on all kinds of details! The concept of immigration law is not some fundamental evil. There are many other things we can also say about the subject, if we're having an abstract discussion.

But the Guardian isn't removing comments sections from articles because of an abstract aversion to people having deep, complicated discussions of the nuance of immigration law and the methods and motives of deportation. That should be obvious to anyone who has been reading the internet. Like, painfully obvious. Personally-embarrassing-to-keep-tacking-to-that-abstract-Yeah-But-What-If obvious, in the present context.

The Guardian is removing comments sections from articles because blatant, galling racism. They're doing it because people show up in numbers to be really plainly racist. This is not a subtle point. This isn't difficult territory. It's just gross, vile bullshit, in volume, all the time.

Figuring out where and how to draw the line on the genuinely tricky grey areas of divisive conversation is a hard problem that no one mediating online conversation will ever be done solving, and it'd be right to view any declaration that e.g. "it's as simple as doing x" with deep suspicion. No one will have unambiguously and definitively solved the problem of sorting out difficult conversations at large with any simple rule. Absolutely.

But some things aren't tricky, or ambiguous. "People are posting a lot of really nakedly racist bullshit on our website" isn't a subtle wrinkle. It's something for which a simple solution—like declining to provide the forum for that on articles that are especially likely to be a honeypot for it—will do a world of good. No amount of Yes But changes that, and responding to that, to an actual simple solution to an unambiguous problem, with a bunch of philosophical faff about scenarios that don't apply, is exactly the kind of abstracted worry-warting that won't improve the current and massively awful problem of terrible comments in undermoderated places. It's a good way to give cover to the actual nattering horde of racists, but not much else.
posted by cortex at 7:09 AM on February 3, 2016 [9 favorites]

There was a huge amount of trolling too, a lot of those articles involving migration/Islam/etc. were being trolled by people writing unreadable stuff, poorly written quick outbursts adding nothing, and then other commenters would respond and it would degenerate into reciprocal insults, and in the end it was all useless. So it is also a very practical decision. What’s the point if the discussion is not even a discussion but a trollfest?

You did stumble on decent commentary too, but it wasn’t a lot of fun to go through all that troll-level shit to find the readable stuff.

(and this is also because the comment function on the Guardian SUCKS, it makes it hard to browse and keep track)

And they had trolls from all over the world, since they went more and more international-oriented, it was noticeable.

I’ve been reading comments sections in German media for a while on a regular basis on the topic of migration and I have to say I’m impressed by the average efficiency of moderation (and self-moderation?) there. Like, on the Welt website, they get tons of comments (they use Disqus which helps navigate the comments), the newspaper is conservative and very critical of the no-upper-limit immigration policy, they are publishing a lot of articles on problems arising out of the recent situation, probably 90% of their commenters want Merkel gone tomorrow and are worried about catastrophical scenarios for the country, but a part of them also express valid concerns, and the paper is also very critical of the far right, and also has decent thoughtful commentary on the issue, and all in all in the comments, despite the current climate, there isn’t the amount of trolling and bile and shit that used to ruin Guardian comment sections on the same topics. The numbers are also lower and of course it’s not in English so you don’t get trolls from all over the world. So those discussion threads are actually (generally) interesting to browse through, no matter what your opinion on those issues - NOT something you could say of the Guardian threads on migration, really.
posted by bitteschoen at 9:56 AM on February 3, 2016 [1 favorite]

What’s the point if the discussion is not even a discussion but a trollfest?

The difficulty is figuring out what exactly is a troll. Some people seem to have a cognitive bias towards assuming disagreement with the majority at a venue of discussion is trolling or devil's advocacy or something.

Often, it's just disagreement. Majorities in some venues are often bubbles that are actually holding views that are contrarian to the majority of society, sometimes even just reflexively contrarian as a way to signal the community being special and unique and more progressive or conservative. When somebody enters such a venue with more mainstream views, they can end up being the ones accused of holding their views just to be contrary. Weirdly backwards. Someone with moderate Republican views could end up banned on Free Republic for saying just one thing not conservative enough so quickly it would make their head spin.

There is no credible way to deny The Guardian made the right move in the face of the massive outpouring of unquestionably racist content speaking the views of organized right wing extremist movements, but the fact that police in Europe also covered up crimes for fear of being perceived as racist is also something that can't be ignored. If you make people so scared of being offensive that they won't tell the truth, you went too far. If you end up permanently removing comments when you are supposed to be an organization working for and with the community , you went too far. You need to develop a good moderator and community based solution to finding the right middle ground for the venue in question.

So, that's why I say that newspapers specifically (more community or city newspapers than worldwide organizations like The Guardian) should have lighter moderation standards than somewhere like Metafilter. Newspapers are defacto town halls. Their judgement calls should err on the side of less censorship in situations where deletion isn't most obvious or they run the risk of having legitimate, truthful views being removed for being indistinct from trolling from the perspective of the moderator. In a lot of places, the local paper is the only media voice speaking to local issues at all. The comment section is the only place where random community member can say something and know people will read it. It has to be a good platform for free discussion or the community will suffer.

I've found that well moderated city or local subreddits are actually generally pretty good models. The dumb borderline stuff gets downvoted, the clearly unacceptable stuff deleted by mods. You have two different standards. Community disapproval and deletion. You get a diversity of feedback. On the borderline stuff the community signals disapproval and with the clearly not appropriate stuff the moderators take action and delete. Personally, I think the idea of the "dislike" button gets a really bad rep just because brigades killed Digg. I like the idea of a way to signal disagreement without having to respond directly and potentially start a contentious back and forth.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:08 PM on February 4, 2016 [1 favorite]

You seem to want lighter moderation than MeFi, but heavier moderation than, say, the Philly.com comments, which are maybe a half a click above Youtube in terms of civility. It costs money to make that happen, and newspapers are already dying. Do you think free speech is improved by media outlets taking away from their actual responsibility to report the news so that Steve in Bensalem can talk about how our gene pool is being watered down by those people that voted for Obama?
posted by tonycpsu at 9:15 PM on February 4, 2016 [4 favorites]

You seem to want lighter moderation than MeFi, but heavier moderation than, say, the Philly.com comments, which are maybe a half a click above Youtube in terms of civility.

Might even be half a click below or more, lol.

It costs money to make that happen, and newspapers are already dying. Do you think free speech is improved by media outlets taking away from their actual responsibility to report the news so that Steve in Bensalem can talk about how our gene pool is being watered down by those people that voted for Obama?

As I said above, make commenting only available to subscribers as a start. That eliminates the most common drive by trolling, or at least bans the perpetrators after a few attempts. Local papers were community entities, switch them over to being online community entities that serve the needs of their paying communities. I don't know if, and in fact doubt if, enough people are going to do that for the Philadelphia Inquirer. But I do think that if newspapers disappear...very quickly people would start being willing to do it because they do provide an essential public service.

I can get worldwide news for free anywhere, but somebody local is going to have to pay to make sure local news is thoroughly and competently reported. Ads aren't enough.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:23 PM on February 4, 2016

(of course, in a city with a lot of poverty like Philadelphia putting up a paywall on public discussion has it's own drawbacks. It's more important that commentators have a unique identity so bans are real bans than that they pay.)
posted by Drinky Die at 9:32 PM on February 4, 2016

I'm not really sure how you get a unique identity without a paywall and/or violating the anonymity of the posters.

I'm ambivalent about closing things off to subscribers -- if the alternative is no comments then it sounds like allowing subscribers to comment would be a free speech victory, except as you imply, it would skew the population in unfortunate ways, and you also can imagine the resources tied up in resolving disputes with subscribers about why their comments were deleted when they weren't actually being racist, they just don't think people should marry outside their race or have children with other races. The volume of the really bad stuff will go down, but do we really need "I can't say for certainty this being said with racist intent, but it's functionally the same as if it were" type of comments to be hosted by newspapers in order to preserve freedom of expression?
posted by tonycpsu at 9:41 PM on February 4, 2016 [3 favorites]

I'm not really sure how you get a unique identity without a paywall and/or violating the anonymity of the posters.

Yeah, you have to violate the anonymity if you want real perma bans. There isn't any way around it. That doesn't mean you require real name posting, you can still do pseudonyms like on Mefi. If you tie it to an address like physical newspaper delivery, even if you don't require payment for it, you can do this without things like demanding a credit card or bank account which would eliminate a lot of low income people. Just tie it to current mailing address and you will be much more (though not perfectly) inclusive.

but do we really need "I can't say for certainty this being said with racist intent, but it's functionally the same as if it were" type of comments to be hosted by newspapers in order to preserve freedom of expression?

I dunno. The history of comments to newspapers in America was very carefully moderated public comment via letters to the editor to usually very biased editorial staffs. Free speech and democracy didn't fall apart. It flourished and grew and we are still here saying mostly whatever we want. In fact, we have a much wider range of acceptable expression in 2016 than we have at any time in the past despite any concerns (that I share) about things that limit that range.

But I feel like comments are more like the talking on the stoop with the neighbors about the news of the day than the opinion page. You can't keep the crazy guy down the street from saying what he wants, half of the people are chugging beers, you have no guarantee anybody is staying on topic, etc. It's digesting the news more than making it. I think that ideally (though I'm not claiming in practice, so like The Guardian did shut it all down when you need to) these conversations can be greater agents for change when they include borderline views than when they are deleted because the people with the borderline views have them challenged and get a chance to evolve. I think disagreement with that is entirely reasonable as well. Not a hill I would die on.
posted by Drinky Die at 10:13 PM on February 4, 2016

There is no credible way to deny The Guardian made the right move in the face of the massive outpouring of unquestionably racist content speaking the views of organized right wing extremist movements, but the fact that police in Europe also covered up crimes for fear of being perceived as racist is also something that can't be ignored.

But those two things are not connected! Not in the real world of European politics.

And incidentally - big digression - despite the easy headlines and opinionating on the matter, it’s not entirely correct to say it’s a “fact” that the police "covered up crimes”, or rather attempted to cover up. In the Cologne incident specifically, which I assume you are referring to, there was certainly a mess of rushed denial about the involvement of asylum seekers in official statements at the start, but it’s still not clear who, which authority, gave the order to that effect, if there was a specific order at all. In the end, it may have been less a matter of a specific order of censorship from above (the police management? the mayor? the regional interior minister? the regional governor? higher up? who the fuck knows? ah, German federalism) than a matter of miscommunicated extra caution while charges were still being filed - and they kept trickling in for weeks, from other police stations across the country, filed by those who had been passing by Cologne on NYE but live elsewhere - and the matter investigated.

In any case, the intent in that initial caution/censorship whatever it was, was most surely not the police’s own "fear of being perceived as racist”, but fear of INCITING racist reactions and even violence.

And indeed, there were violent reactions against foreigners in the wake of those Cologne events, and there had already been hundreds of attacks against refugee centres all throughout last year in Germany. Germany has to deal with a far-right on a spectrum from "Pegida concerned citizens" to "active known neo-nazis", and the latter tend to smash things and attack people and create trouble for the police too.

None of this is to justify that mess of botched communications and lack of political accountability in the first few days after NYE, but just saying, for the sake of attempting to extract some basic accuracy from a messy situation that stirred all sorts of opinionating worldwide, it was not as clearcut as a "police coverup".

/End digression.

That’s entirely unrelated to the Guardian comment sections anyway. That happened in Germany and if anything it has to do with German politics and media, and that’s a whole different scenario.

The difficulty is figuring out what exactly is a troll.

Really, having read a lot of pieces on the Guardian and browsed through a lot of the comments on those "hot" topics in past months, and years, no, there was no such difficulty there!

The problem was not some theoretical issue of freedom of speech, or censorship, or defining what exactly is a racist opinion or not. It was a clearcut problem with a HUGE amount of pointless trolling - useless comments with no substance other than to attack and insult either the author of the piece, or other commenters, and that’s what I mean by it degenerating into a trollfest.

Possibly because the Guardian’s editorial line is well known, there was clearly an effect of trigger reactions by people who’d go on the comments just to say “ah, typical Guardian bullshit” and more colourful variations thereof, just like in their pieces on feminism you see a lot of “ah typical femininazi bullshit, what a lot of crap”, and more colourful (and poorly written, barely readable) variations thereof… all adding exactly zero to the discussion. It was devaluing the whole point of the comment section really.

Also, keep in mind the Guardian seem to attract the largest global amount of commenters than any other online publication in English. The numbers were in the range of up to 3,000 and more comments for the hottest pieces on those topics, and with a window of just 3 days of the comment function open on each piece.

If you stumbled on the piece fresh and just published, the first comments were still readable, there may have been a discussion worth following there, or even personal experiences and contributions integrating the piece, but if you came to it after the second day, it had become pointless to browse through ALL comments, it was a waste of time, a waste of bandwidth. By then, a lot of it was just like in the worst examples of long political threads on Usenet in the old days, where once the trolls were in and doing their work of disruption, anyone with a reasonable interest in discussing the topic had left the thread.

I don’t know how to describe it in better terms, but that’s my experience and anyone familiar with those 3,000+ comment threads will know what I mean.

And I’m saying this as someone who does not come from a liberal background or bubble-like environment, quite the opposite. Where I come from at least I’m quite used to hearing opinions on the spectrum of the French Front National supporters when it comes to immigration and Islam, and I don’t automatically go “ah you racist/xenophobic scum!”. I am interested in understanding what is increasingly becoming a mainstream position across Europe, and interested in disentangling what may be the more valid concerns even behind the most reactionary/populist positions. Because there are valid concerns mixed up in there, and the tragedy is that the left and liberal forces in Europe have not been addressing them (just as they’ve given up caring for the working classes in general) and that’s one reason you find votes shifting increasingly towards those populist forces, who are a bit too happy to incite the worst sentiments along the way, making the more valid reasonable concerns disappear in the background, poisoning the debate and pushing it all further into a stalemate, in a nutshell.

That is a sad state of affairs and its causes go WAY beyond the logical, reasonable choices of any major online publication in how to manage more effectively its own money and resources to provide readers with something useful.
posted by bitteschoen at 1:36 AM on February 5, 2016 [5 favorites]

By the way, there are still plenty of articles with comments still open, and a lot of comments are very critical of the Guardian editorial line, and they aren’t being censored - they’re not trolls, they are readable clearly argued commentary with a point, one you may agree or disagree with, one you may find more or less provocative or extreme, but clearly different from trollfest-like crap.

In fact, it seems most of the comments on the topics of migration are increasingly critical of the Guardian line anyway, and here’s an interesting answer as to why that is:

- Why do so many people evidently read the Guardian while apparently completely disagreeing with its political point of view and taking every chance to say so? Masochism? Nothing better to do? Very odd!

Well, speaking only for myself: I read the Guardian because I consider myself left wing. I believe in nationalisation of natural monopolies, workers rights, strong unions, fair taxes. Socially, I believe strongly in animal rights, women's rights and gay rights, and dislike racism. I think religions should be opposed and have no sway over a secular society. I strongly support the NHS and think that society should take care of its members who cannot support themselves.

All of which means I get so very, very frustrated and bemused at the illogical stance taken by my favourite newspaper, in favour of opening doors to hordes of people utterly, fundamentally, opposed to most of the above.

On articles (and there are a never ending amount of them) about immigration and (lets face it - one kind of) religion I dive to the comments for a dash of sanity. To reassure myself that most left wing people are not the illogical, virtue signalling, pillocks that dominate the 'left' debate.

posted by bitteschoen at 2:27 AM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

But those two things are not connected! Not in the real world of European politics.

And incidentally - big digression - despite the easy headlines and opinionating on the matter, it’s not entirely correct to say it’s a “fact” that the police "covered up crimes”, or rather attempted to cover up.

I was talking about this. Though you are right to point out "fact" is an inappropriate word choice for a situation that is still under investigation.
posted by Drinky Die at 6:53 AM on February 5, 2016 [2 favorites]

bitteschoen: that comment certainly demonstrates that a reasoned opposition to immigration can be made that is (1) not racist (2) from the Left (3) respectful.
posted by theorique at 7:26 AM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I mean, but it's polite racism, though, and isn't politeness really the important thing?
posted by tobascodagama at 8:53 AM on February 5, 2016 [4 favorites]

I would argue that the idea that there is a progressive European hegemony that would be trampled by an open immigration policy, especially when the immigrants being discussed are almost certain people of color, is racist, especially when signaled by the use of the word "horde."

Does this mean you think it would improve the Guardian's comment section if they banned the post bittechoen shared as being racist? And do you think it should be banned from metafilter as racist? Or banned if it was posted as a comment, but allowed if it were posted as bitteschoen used it, as a quote meant to provide information about the opinions of a third party?
posted by layceepee at 9:33 AM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

I think that the phrasing is histrionic enough that you can make a valid case that it is racist. But importing millions of new voters can change things in a democracy. Commentators have widely stated that immigration to the US is going to benefit the Democratic party, for example, and turn states like Texas blue.

There is a lot of social conservatism in the countries migrants to Europe are coming from, it's not impossible a shift to more conservative government would occur if you brought in enough voters from those areas. However, the open racism of the right is a major roadblock to that process.
posted by Drinky Die at 9:36 AM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Does this mean you think it would improve the Guardian's comment section if they banned the post bittechoen shared as being racist? And do you think it should be banned from metafilter as racist? Or banned if it was posted as a comment, but allowed if it were posted as bitteschoen used it, as a quote meant to provide information about the opinions of a third party?

Um, no. What? Can I now ask you a series of aggressive questions that cannot possibly be inferred from anything you said?

Are you saying you think the comments section would be better if written by cryptids? Must every article somehow relate to Authurian legends? Is this a fiendish plan by occult forces?
posted by maxsparber at 9:38 AM on February 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

I didn't intend the question to be aggressive, and it's easy to accept that your answer is no--I wasn't asking the questions as a way to imply that "Well, this must be what you believe."

However, "yes" would be just a legitimate as an answer. If someone thinks the Guardian should ban racist comments and thinks that the idea proposed in the comment is racist, it would be consistent to support banning that comment. If one thinks that comment is racist but that it shouldn't be banned, I think it's fair to conclude that they only support banning some racist comments, while allowing others.

Which just seems to me to be an illustration that comment moderation is not particularly straightforward.
posted by layceepee at 10:09 AM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Suppose we were human comment moderators on the Guardian web site.

We've discussed the example cited by bitteschoen and come to the conclusion that either it's racist, it's not racist, or we're not sure, and we've made a remove/don't remove decision.

In the interim, 200 more comments have been posted on that article. Oh, and there are 100 other highly active articles and blogs on which people are actively commenting.

No wonder they choose to avoid the issue and shut down comments on popular subjects. The cost involved in using human labor to perform filtering must be quite high.
posted by theorique at 10:40 AM on February 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

For what it’s worth, I posted that comment as an example of a comment that was not deleted, precisely because - evidently - it’s an example that the moderators are not, as some implied, censoring and deleting any and all comments that disagree with the Guardian’s own editorial line on migration, or that may arguably be verging on racist/catastrophic/populist/le-pen-ish etc., or however you want to describe it.

That’s not their concern, and rightly so. The actual content of comments, the opinions they represent, and the finer points of what can be considered racist or not in the current context depending on point of view are not the issue for moderators. They do want some discussion, clearly. They don’t want a chorus of cheerleaders. They just don’t want trolls!
And that comment is not a useless troll provocation of the kind that can infest comment sections. It does sound like a genuine expression of a reader’s beliefs, no matter what you think of those beliefs. That is the difference, and it seems the moderators are perfectly capable of telling that difference.

And by the way, I’ve noticed they still have comments on several articles touching on the topic, so it is as they said - "comments would not be opened on pieces on those three topics unless the moderators knew they had the capacity to support the conversation and that they believed a positive debate was possible" - they’re not closing off every single comment section on every single article on "troublesome" topics.

It makes sense from a pratical/numerical point of view too - there are increasingly MANY more articles on those topics than there used to be, and it’d be an insane amount of work for them to have moderators work on every single one of them.

In short: I think they’re doing a good job of it overall, and that comment is a perfect testimonial to that.
posted by bitteschoen at 11:37 AM on February 5, 2016 [3 favorites]

"Obvious troll" comments are pretty fast and easy to remove - minimal effort or thought to add, minimal effort or thought to remove. The challenging ones are in the grey area.

It's very similar to any kind of process of selection, such as college admissions: there are some "yes, obvious admit", some "no chance at all". The ones that take the most time and most discussion are the ones where we could go either way.
posted by theorique at 1:04 PM on February 5, 2016 [1 favorite]

Yes, absolutely, there is a wider "grey area" - in theory - but not in practice...
Or rather, at least in my experience navigating those comment sections, the grey area in Guardian comments is something that the moderators seem to be in favour of allowing.

There are several other examples in recent articles that are even more critical than the comment I posted - one is mercilessly mocking a report about the Cologne carnival and ends with "It's like reading an article from bloody Pravda!" - a comment that has 102 recommends, incidentally.

Or just enjoy browsing through the 1612 comments to this piece from January 31 (same day of their announcement to not leave all articles on migration open to comments) - the top comment in the "most recommended" view starts off with "There is so much wrong with this piece I don't know where to start". From other top recommended posts:

"You can only take the piss for so long before people start to realise. Preaching that there are only positive effects of immigration and anyone who questions this is a bigot will inevitably cause a backlash"

"The gist of this piece seems to be that (a) people can't see the benefits of uncontrolled mass immigration because they are pig ignorant, and thus (b) if we talk to them slowly, patiently and often enough, they will eventually see the light and decide that letting in hundreds of millions of (mostly economic) migrants from the Global South is a truly wonderful thing."

"Thats what i took from the article too. Condescending bastards they are in matters like this."

(That’s arguably a bit more on the abusive side, you know, directly insulting the author of the article, and yet! not deleted!)

"Many journalists (particularly of the Guardian persuasion) seem to assume that unlimited immigration is the only morally justified view. Well I have news for them - it is not. Unlimited immigration will lead to massive social problems and unrest, damage the civilised European culture built up over hundreds of years, and could eventually bankrupt us. I would sooner trust the man in the street than narrow minded journalists such as Kenan Malik."

There are also a lot of comments appreciating the article and agreeing with all or parts of it, but they ARE getting increasing criticism from a good portion of their own readers and supporters - criticism that represents what is becoming a mainstream opinion all across Europe (and not only). They’re not censoring that. They have so much already of the non-grey area obvious-troll-like stuff (and often you could see those comments before they got deleted, it wasn’t instant, they also have a "Report" link below every comment so that users can flag abusive stuff).

The editor’s observation in the linked article about "a change in mainstream public opinion and language", that they don’t want to see reflected on the website, was very specifically referring to the more "toxic" level of conversation, not to criticism and mainstream opinion per se. There is no doubt in my mind that they are talking about the most obvious forms of abusive commentary - I’ve seen their moderation in action, I’ve seen what they delete and what they allow, and I’d say they do prefer to err on the side of allowing grey areas, rather than censoring.

(Sorry, this wasn’t supposed to turn into a defense of the Guardian moderators! I’m simply not surprised by their decision, but I am surprised by any mischaracterization of it as arbitrary or too close to censorship of "mainstream opinion". That’s not what’s happening.)
posted by bitteschoen at 1:36 AM on February 6, 2016

One last observation, sorry for multiple posts and length - I have to admit that a contributing factor in drawing all that criticism (if not in drawing trolls, those are motivated by other reasons) seems to be that, especially since they took a clearer and clearer stance on the issue of migration (and I think it was last summer, during the highest point of the refugee crisis, that they even published editorials making their position blatantly clear), they have been sort of one-dimensional on the issue. And an increasing number of readers seem to be resenting that.

Sometimes the one-dimensionality goes to the detriment of accuracy of the wider picture they’re painting. I remember an article from last year comparing the UK and Germany’s approach to the refugee crisis. And they made it sound like everything in Germany was going great! Sure that was at the beginning of the German government policy to take in all refugees and of the outpouring of solidarity from citizens, but there were already so many issues with the asylum process, and with right-wing violence, and with the infrastructure struggling. There has been so much in German media and public debate that isn’t reflected in English-language coverage in general, and the Guardian used to be so much better than other English-language publications at doing that, giving you a wider overview of what’s going on. They have sometimes sacrificed that in favour of their commitment to the cause of anti-racism, anti-bigotry, anti-far-right populism. It’s a noble cause but journalistically speaking, it does leave some holes in your reporting...

So to be fair, it’s a bit their own fault that they’re getting so much criticism for that in comments. They’re not giving as much representation in their own content to more problematic aspects of the situation and to more reasonable concerns of that mainstream opinion.
Not that they are required to, but their tradition has always been to host different points of view from different contributors, especially in their opinion pieces, and they’re not really doing that much these days when it comes to these topics. A legitimate choice, especially once you do take a clear political stance as a publication - and taking clear political stances also belongs to their tradition - but it’s having a bigger backlash effect than they expected, clearly.

(This is a much wider problem with the liberal left in general, of course, not just the media or the Guardian specifically, but it’s getting noticeable)
posted by bitteschoen at 2:11 AM on February 6, 2016 [1 favorite]

these conversations can be greater agents for change when they include borderline views than when they are deleted because the people with the borderline views have them challenged and get a chance to evolve

That could possibly happen in a smaller forum although in my experience that's not what happens. That's not what was happening in The Guardian, though: there was nothing like a conversation going on because "contentious" issues would quickly have hundreds or thousands of comments that were either abuse or expressed the grossest sort of prejudice. They weren't necessarily even responsive to the article itself: the fact that an article was about Israel (or Islam, or refugees, or whatever) would be enough to bring them out. I mean, an article about bike paths in Tel Aviv immediately got people saying that the bike paths were built on stolen land, or that they were reserved for Jewish settlers, or that the article was funded by "the Rockerfeller Foundation".¹ Go look at the comments there; I'd estimate that two thirds of the total were deleted, but some nutters still snuck through. Nobody with any sense will waste their time with nonsense like that anyway, so the comment section may as well not exist.

¹ I'm not sure what that was meant to imply, but apparently it's a conspiracy theory of some sort.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:49 AM on February 6, 2016 [2 favorites]

This just in...my local paper is going to limit its, currently sub-Yahoo level, comments section to paid subscribers only.
posted by MikeMc at 9:55 AM on February 7, 2016 [4 favorites]

MikeMc, that announcement is gold - there’s something to be said for American "straight talk" really, or whatever you can call it, it says what the Guardian should have said, tons better - at least, applied to selective closing off of comment sections, not subscribers-only comments, but I mean, doesn’t it sound so much clearer and to the point:

... I expect some of our critics to proclaim that we are somehow violating their First Amendment rights against government censorship by insisting they follow the rules they agreed to before commenting. We are merely exercising our rights to limit our forums to known customers who wish to contribute to civil discussions.

Anyone blocked from writing on JSOnline is still free to take their opinions elsewhere — from digital platforms with looser rules to their corner tavern. At least there, they might be answered with a well-deserved punch in the nose.
posted by bitteschoen at 3:16 PM on February 8, 2016 [3 favorites]

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