The Life of a Comment Moderator for a Right-Wing Website

March 3, 2019 10:18 AM

How many comments on a story about Africanized bees it would take before they started taking a racist turn?
posted by Pyrogenesis (41 comments total)

tl;dr: zero
posted by ryanrs at 10:35 AM on March 3, 2019 [31 favorites]

While I don't think the author intends it, there's probably a lot to be read from "I spent years immersed in far-right yelling, I hated it and hated them and also I'm not a liberal anymore."
posted by Simon! at 10:35 AM on March 3, 2019 [21 favorites]

DANGIT WHAT IS THE WEBSITE
posted by Going To Maine at 10:44 AM on March 3, 2019 [3 favorites]

I assume it's Breitbart because I can't think of many explicitly right wing news sites that are big enough to have paid moderators.
posted by fatbird at 10:51 AM on March 3, 2019 [9 favorites]

After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.

The final stage of Enlightenment.
posted by officer_fred at 10:52 AM on March 3, 2019 [66 favorites]

The comments on news sites are not there to make people better informed. Comments sections make articles stickier by poking at a couple of very specific buttons in our brains. The dopamine button gets pressed on the expression and further interactions with the other commenters, but that’s not the insidious part. The comments sections provide an immediate confirmation of personal bias, whether contextually relevant or just spouting racism on an article about honey bees. No matter what horrible thing a person believes, they will be able to find a reason to confirm that belief in the comments, regardless of how fact based, accurate, and provably true the original article may be.

It’s as if stupidity has more profit potential, so that’s what’s being encouraged.
posted by Revvy at 11:20 AM on March 3, 2019 [29 favorites]

Metafilter: The comments on news sites are not there to make people better informed. Comments sections make articles stickier by poking at a couple of very specific buttons in our brains. The dopamine button gets pressed on the expression and further interactions with the other commenters, but that’s not the insidious part. The comments sections provide an immediate confirmation of personal bias, whether contextually relevant or just spouting racism on an article about honey bees. No matter what horrible thing a person believes, they will be able to find a reason to confirm that belief in the comments, regardless of how fact based, accurate, and provably true the original article may be.
posted by kafziel at 11:25 AM on March 3, 2019 [27 favorites]

There's some abyss gazing back at you going on.
posted by zabuni at 11:32 AM on March 3, 2019 [11 favorites]

When personal computers were pitched to the masses, people would spend their idle hours learning ancient Greek and Latin.
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 11:36 AM on March 3, 2019 [18 favorites]

Uh, diolingo is real and has a large user base.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:37 AM on March 3, 2019 [8 favorites]

The comments on news sites are not there to make people better informed.

*Looks around the room*
posted by atoxyl at 12:03 PM on March 3, 2019 [15 favorites]

And this is not exclusive to "right" sites - or left, or any other political leaning. I left my dream job (at a local TV news site) just a few weeks ago after more than 10 years - due about 50% to the comment-moderating aspect of it. It really is sad.
posted by davidmsc at 12:12 PM on March 3, 2019 [12 favorites]

Foxnews.com being the worst. At least 3 comments in before someone makes a Hillary, Pelosi, dumb liberals, climate change is stupid, or don't take my guns comment. And definitely the racism, holy hell. On any topic-d article.
posted by agregoli at 12:17 PM on March 3, 2019

They're like the Total Perspective Vortex, but instead of the infinity of creation you're being shown the spectrum of human irrationality. (Present company excluded, of course, we're awesome and sublime down here)
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 12:24 PM on March 3, 2019 [7 favorites]

Well, author of the article confirmed my theory that the Trolls got their first President. Now if he and they could ALL fuck off to Trolland

i just talked to the ghosts of p t barnum and mark twain and they confirmed what i already knew - the USA is trolland and has been for centuries

this IS a good part of our country - it just is
posted by pyramid termite at 12:24 PM on March 3, 2019 [9 favorites]

I dug the illustration by Angus Grieg—a well-executed and rare triple visual pun.
posted by ejs at 12:33 PM on March 3, 2019 [10 favorites]

I assume it's Breitbart because I can't think of many explicitly right wing news sites that are big enough to have paid moderators.

Fox News?
posted by Johnny Wallflower at 1:34 PM on March 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

this IS a good part of our country - it just is

I would agree with this but it seems like there is an implication that our country is exceptional here. Every country has a bunch of angry opinionated people who are wrong. Like, the history of humanity is people having opinions of things, and often those opinions are nuts. 2016 is exceptional because -for whatever reason you choose- we elected an angry, obvious grifter, and while we have elected liars and bad men the US has rarely (ever?) elected a dude that was apparently only in it for a buck and didn't want to win.
posted by Going To Maine at 1:34 PM on March 3, 2019 [8 favorites]

Color me mildly amazed that right wing trolls have time to comment on sites for their own target market, given how much time they devote to Twitter/Facebook stalking progressives, POC, women, and LGBTQIA people, stopping in in local news and general interest national sites to make sure prejudice and stupidity always check in louder than empathy and reason, and making the world's worst sorriest ass memes.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 1:41 PM on March 3, 2019 [27 favorites]

It seems amazing, but the population of the world is extremely large, drive by comments are fast to write, and it's not like MeFites aren't also commenting on Facebook, Twitter, and wherever else.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:09 PM on March 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

The site only had moderation during business hours?

I really don’t understand comments on news sites; I realize that there is a quest for engagement or something like that, but it’s engagement sort of like when people would pee on the alley wall of my bookstore — it wasn’t productive engagement for my business.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:10 PM on March 3, 2019 [8 favorites]

Even in the early days of the campaign, cultural conservatives, fiscal conservatives, the weirdos who talked only about chemtrails — they all had one thing in common. They wanted a president who would stick it to the liberals. They didn’t care that supporting him would mean changing their positions on any number of issues.

They really just wanted a dictator. And to be fair, everyone just wants a dictator if they see their side as righteous, which is to say, incapable of being wrong from being passionate.
posted by Brian B. at 2:24 PM on March 3, 2019 [5 favorites]

I really don’t understand comments on news sites; I realize that there is a quest for engagement or something like that, but it’s engagement sort of like when people would pee on the alley wall of my bookstore — it wasn’t productive engagement for my business.

Your bookstore wasn't making money every time somebody peed on that wall (every pageload is an ad impression, and probably a dozen ads) nor were people coming to your bookstore for the pee wall.
posted by Pope Guilty at 2:28 PM on March 3, 2019 [17 favorites]

I mean, I suppose, but I thought clickthroughs had replaced pageviews as the primary metric for ad revenue....
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:32 PM on March 3, 2019

I guess there’s a level of comparison between Metafilter and Breitbart, in that they both have comment sections and moderators for those comments, but the content selection, intent, and business model differences are huge and contribute to making a very different place.
posted by Revvy at 2:40 PM on March 3, 2019 [4 favorites]

Are we sure the author wasn't at NYT or NPR? If you read those comments, well, just imagine the ones that DIDN'T make it through.
posted by Anchorite_of_Palgrave at 3:04 PM on March 3, 2019 [5 favorites]

At this point, I hope we are living in a computer simulation and our reality is showing some other beings how not to act.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 3:21 PM on March 3, 2019 [3 favorites]

The frustrating this these days is, every web site is a right-wing web site unless moderators very diligently and deliberately work to prevent it from being one...and if they lapse even a little bit then new moderators will infiltrate it and make it so. This is especially frustrating on anonymous comment systems, for example several entire countries' default subreddits have been taken over and are also routinely brigaded now (and no, before someone with mefi-coloured glasses tries to claim anything on reddit has automatically always been trash, /r/Canada for one used to be quite interesting and well managed).
posted by trackofalljades at 3:45 PM on March 3, 2019 [27 favorites]

> I thought clickthroughs had replaced pageviews as the primary metric for ad revenue

Clickthroughs get you paid, but clickthroughs are a function of ad impressions: The more times the ads are displayed, the more likely a clickthrough will occur.

The clickthrough metric, somewhat ironically, has exacerbated page churning, ad volume, and dark UI patterns, all to increase the odds of a click occurring during a given timeframe.
posted by at by at 3:57 PM on March 3, 2019 [5 favorites]

There is an app which mimics Facebook. It’s a fake Facebook app though which means there are no actual friends or real articles there, but the idea is that you can like and click and scroll and enter in fake comments about fake articles. I think the intention is to get the same satisfaction you get from the real app without having any actual impact. Reading this, it’s occurred to me that we need something like this for the haters.

Someone should make an app that just has a bunch of click bait articles for trolls where they can spew their horrible hatred and scream into a void where no one else has to read it or get hurt by it.
posted by Jubey at 4:12 PM on March 3, 2019 [6 favorites]

That pattern sort of already exists. It's called Ghosting. You let them access the real site and post to their black heart's content but nobody else ever sees what they post.

So you can get the ad revenue from them and you also suck up their time and make the entire internet a better place.
posted by srboisvert at 5:02 PM on March 3, 2019 [9 favorites]

I thought that was called shadowbanning, and ghosting is when you just quit calling someone you were dating.
posted by snowmentality at 5:20 PM on March 3, 2019 [20 favorites]

Your bookstore wasn't making money every time somebody peed on that wall (every pageload is an ad impression, and probably a dozen ads) nor were people coming to your bookstore for the pee wall.

So, basically, in today's economy/internet, a news web site can either have a paywall or a peewall?

Seriously, though. Blah blah if you're not buying the product then you are the product blah - I think calling it a peewall gets the point across much more directly and clearly than most other descriptions or analyses that I've read.
posted by eviemath at 5:23 PM on March 3, 2019 [9 favorites]

There is an app which mimics Facebook. It’s a fake Facebook app though which means there are no actual friends or real articles there, but the idea is that you can like and click and scroll and enter in fake comments about fake articles. I think the intention is to get the same satisfaction you get from the real app without having any actual impact. Reading this, it’s occurred to me that we need something like this for the haters.

Sort of an Alzheimer's village for the problem posters?
posted by ricochet biscuit at 6:41 PM on March 3, 2019 [6 favorites]

Sisyphus
On a hill
with a Drink's cart.
posted by clavdivs at 7:02 PM on March 3, 2019 [2 favorites]

"As a news blog, we were covering stories featuring a man running for president saying things that I would have deleted his account for had he been just another troll on the site. " Sigh.
posted by nnethercote at 7:23 PM on March 3, 2019 [1 favorite]

(... /r/Canada for one used to be quite interesting and well managed).
posted by trackofalljades at 3:45 PM on March 3

Yeah, r/Canada has morphed from a nice section of reddit to a what I imagine the goatee-wearing alternate universe of r/Canada would be like.
posted by Vindaloo at 8:04 AM on March 4, 2019

There is an app which mimics Facebook. It’s a fake Facebook app though which means there are no actual friends or real articles there, but the idea is that you can like and click and scroll and enter in fake comments about fake articles. I think the intention is to get the same satisfaction you get from the real app without having any actual impact.

That would be Binky
posted by motdiem2 at 8:24 AM on March 4, 2019 [2 favorites]

Binky previously: television interview with the creator Dan Kurtz starting at 7:45.
posted by XMLicious at 2:19 PM on March 4, 2019

After doing the job for a while, I wasn’t liberal anymore. I certainly wasn’t conservative. I just resented everyone with opinions and an internet connection.

The final stage of Enlightenment.

Oddly, also the objective of many paid trolls. Resentful people don't vote or engage in politics, leaving a smaller field full of less thoughtful people to influence.

Some trolling is just there to get the endorphin rush of making someone react in a way you wanted them to. Some trolling is meant to exhaust public engagement. What nice is that some people with the impulse for the former get to make a bit of money for people who have a vested interest in the latter.

Plus, constant trolling can work to get into someone's head, force them to spend time preemptively rebutting troll talking points, meaning there's less time to engage on issues of substance. The individual troll doesn't need to have that as the motive, just the person who gives them orders or even a meme to play with. Just like an individual soldier need not have any geopolitical objective in mind other than "hold this base and protect my buddies," but acheives that larger geopolitical objective on behalf of the general.
posted by pykrete jungle at 5:50 PM on March 4, 2019 [4 favorites]

It's a DDOS attack against political discourse.
posted by Zalzidrax at 4:39 AM on March 5, 2019 [1 favorite]