Dennis Prager has a great article here regarding the destructive nature of anonymous Internet postings.
This is far more a problem on the left. A good example would be to peruse the comments of any random posting at horsesass.org. Most of the comments from both sides are anonymous, angry, and laced with profanity, ad hominem attacks, tirades, off topic rants, and just plain gibberish. It's not uncommon for a comment to be nothing more than a string of CAPITALS cut and pasted hundreds of times. Third grade behavior, and all anonymous. This is what passes for decent civil discourse on the left. Don't like the war, deface the Vietnam War Memorial, or go into a screaming tirade at a political speech until you get arrested. And go for broke if you are on a blog and behind the guise of a pseudonym.
Freedom of speech does not mean a failure to follow basic decency and respect in discourse. It's a shame that some bloggers take the attitude that they can't control what's in their comment threads. That is absolutely false, they can control it, both with technology and with human filtering, and such as excuse is cowardly. Here at Sound Politics, comments are mostly civil. You get an occasionally unhinged comment but usually not one filled with obscenity or outright hate. And my sense is that if such a bad comment was made, Stefan and the other bloggers would make every effort to clean up the filth and ban that commenter. Jim Miller is a good example blogger restraint as he often shuts down comments after posting to keep off-topic rants and other garbage off the blog.
So why is this so common on the lefty blogs? I suspect that Lefty Bloggers know that if they were to require more decency in their comments, they'd lose a lot of their readers and their appeal. And I think this is also the hallmark of the hedonism that is Progressivism today. In your face with attitude and piercings are looked at as positive values on the left. And, there's no end to anti-Bush rage on the left. Almost any topic is a new excuse to blame Bush. The Nutroots have capitalized on the resentment of the current administration and allowed all of that negative energy to foment. It's become sort of a badge of honor and a call to arms. It's gotten to the point, where if you are a Lefty blogger and you don't insert the occasional "F" word, you won't be taken seriously.
Dennis Prager is right on point, all too often anonymity becomes a cowardly shield for the worst in people. A good rule of thumb is to reread that comment one more time before you click "Submit." Are you sure that's how you want to come across? I'm always more impressed by people who are willing to use their real names and some basic restraint when they comment. And usually, those comments, and blogs where they are posted are the one's worth reading as well.
Imagine my glee when I headed over there to find THIS immediately after reading "Bloggers who don't police filth in their comment threads".
Who says the stars don't align?
Posted by: Ragnar Danneskjold on October 25, 2007 09:30 AMSecond, and more to the point: Freedom of speech does not mean a failure to follow basic decency and respect in discourse. It's a shame that some bloggers take the attitude that they can't control what's in their comment threads. That is absolutely false, they can control it, both with technology and with human filtering, and such as excuse is cowardly.
There's a fine line. I work for the number one geek discussion site on the planet, Slashdot. We have a policy to not delete comments. Period. And it works well for us, for discussions with thousands of comments. Of course, we have threading and moderation and many other ways to help people ignore the bad comments, and to punish those who consistently make bad comments.
It depends on the site. Some sites, like Slashdot, prefer to be more of a common carrier, where we allow anything (well, any text, except for a few comments that are prefiltered based on form, not content: ASCII art and so on). And that's fine! Sure, we can control it more than we do, but why should we? It's not cowardly at all. It's our principles: we believe that content-based restrictions stifle good discussions as well as bad. So we allow anything, and we have tools to minimize the negative effects of the bad stuff.
You're right that there is no right to free speech on private web sites. Absolutely. Sites can delete comments. I run use.perl.org, sortof a Perl version of Slashdot (and running the same software). And I do delete the occasional comment there, but only if it is spam. Flames or lack of decency or respect are not deleted. It's not out of cowardice: it's the reason why the site has continued to flourish with GOOD discussions, because we don't disallow the BAD.
The point is, there's no one way, and each site is different. But I've been doing this a long time, and I've seen far better discussions on sites that tend to NOT delete rude comments, as opposed to those that do. I think Sound Politics is a case in point: deleting comments is rare here, and that allows, in the long run, better discussions, even if it means some nasty comments get through (and stay there).
Posted by: pudge on October 25, 2007 12:34 PMI also have a lot of respect for Slashdot as a career UNIX SysAdmin and IT consultant. There's a time where anonymous comes in very handy. Like when someone gives honest but respectful criticism to a higher up in a corporate environment, fearing reprisal.
But that doesn't excuse the Bathroom Wall filth that most lefty blogs routinely allow in their comments. By not cleaning up the filth, or having any usage standards whatsoever, they encourage more people to post angry anonymous comments.
Pudge I don't believe for a second that if someone posted something particularly nasty, hateful and politically oriented for example on your use.perl.org site, that you would hesitate to delete the garbage. That's what I'm getting at.
And as everyone notes, neither of you are really anonymous anyway.
Check out Ragnar's link. It's a nice compromise between what pudge is saying, and what I'm saying. At least if there was a significant altering of a particularly rude, hateful, violent, etc. comment, it would sort of be rendered impotent. That would be a good start, but I doubt we'd ever see anything like that on the lefty political blogs, because as I point out, it's viewed as an asset and a call to Nutroots arms.
Posted by: Jeff B. on October 25, 2007 11:00 PMI am well-known as a conservative Republican in the Perl world. And use.perl often has political discussions in the journal space there. And if I started deleting content I found to be extremely offensive, people would stop using the site. I have had such accusations before, and it is only because it is known that I do not delete anything that an exodus didn't result.
The only time I would consider deleting posts for content is if the existence of the comments themselves constituted a personal threat. For example, posting someone's private information, social security numbers, phone numbers ... or worse, private information about their family. But saying something particularly vile about their family? No, I would not. I would moderate the comment down and ban that user account (and if warranted, their IP address), but I would not remove the content.
I have no serious problem with those who do delete content. Your site, your rules. Delete away. But I won't.
Posted by: pudge on October 26, 2007 12:11 AM