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March 7, 2009
We've come a long way since the bad old days when The Australian got stuck into bloggers and completely overlooked the criticism from commenters in its own pages. It's becoming fashionable to deplore the antics of the hoi polloi in comments, who are apparently eroding the quality of public debate.
Last week Crikey published Peter Faris explaining why he doesn't want a Crikey blog:
I have changed my mind -- I do not think is "useful" for me to do a Crikey blog. This change of mind is propelled by the comments on the Crikey pages in response to my Henson piece.
The two or three serious, on-topic comments are swamped by a deluge of personal abuse. A good number of comments are hate comments.
I am as thick-skinned as the next commentator, probably more so, but there is no point in having dialogue with people who have a visceral hatred for you personally.
And another one from Clive Hamilton:
An ugly culture of dogmatic and belligerent interventions now dominates social and political debate on the Internet. Comment sections on Internet forums are blighted by a kind of cyber-rage that drowns out debate with table-thumping assertion and a style of personal engagement that owes more to Gordon Ramsay than Socrates.
A new vocabulary has developed to describe the variety of offenses, with neologisms such as "flames", "trolls", "snarks" and "sock puppets". Moderators of blog and comment sites do their best to control the rage by setting rules against racism, sexism, coarse language and ad hominem attacks.
Note that Faris and Hamilton both have privileged access to media and both enjoy being controversial and getting stuck into groups of people they don't like. On the topics of Henson (Faris) and internet filtering (Hamilton), both whipped out the paedophilia card to suggest that the groups of people they don't like in relation to those issues have unhealthy ideas about kiddies, which is pretty low, yet both complain about personal abuse.
If a commenter said photographers or internet users are into child sexual abuse, say, 'artists are a bunch of fag peddos', they'd likely be moderated. But apparently it's not what you say but the way that you say it that counts. Faris and Hamilton have plausible deniability on their side.
Via Trevor Cook at Corporate Engagement, Judith Timson at Globe and Mail on bad behaviour among commenters, quoting from David Denby's Snark, which apparently sunk after a bunch of snarky reviews from commentators, not commenters. One such review in the New York Times has Denby sorting his snark from his hate speech. Irony doesn't count as snark,
But “hate speech” isn’t snark either, Denby writes, because it aims to “incite,” not get chuckles, and because it’s “directed at groups,” not individuals.
Snark is a kind of humour used to ridicule individuals, mostly high profile ones, so it's a kind of levelling mechanism in the toolkit of tall poppy syndrome.
So on one hand we have high profile individuals politely suggesting that groups, photographers, internet users and commenters are bad, but hate speech is bad because it's directed at groups and aims to incite. On the other hand it's bad for members of the groups in question to personally abuse said high profile individuals because that's playing the man and not the ball, so doesn't count as proper debate.
I liked Henson's photos, use the internet and enjoy snark. I resent the implication that that makes me a kiddy fiddler and unfit to participate in debate. Groups may be suggesting these things about people like me and so might commenters, but commenters don't expect to get away with it unchallenged just because they're articulate public figures. You say it, you own it, no matter how multi-syllabic or plausibly deniable your argument.
Faris and Hamilton both have a case when it comes to the worst kinds of personal abuse, and to be fair, Faris does point out that that's his major concern, but the broader argument about the erosion of quality in public debate now that the masses can join in needs a bit more thought.
What is being said can't realistically be corralled off from who is saying it, which is at the heart of the dog whistle and man/ball arguments. 'I have a dream' wouldn't be at all significant if some blog commenter said it. Neither would 'art galleries and the internet are brimming with paedophiles and commenters are mindless scum'. We could not have had our sad approximation of the culture wars, a series of brawls between a handful of public figures, if things were otherwise.
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I actually believe there have been fewer problems in comments threads recently, mainly because blog owners got so sick of them and took advantage of the tools available to block persistent offenders and/or force commenters to register. The result is that the people who get their jollies by making offensively personal one-liners all congregate with like-minded souls at Catallaxy or Bolt or Blair or wherever (there might be some 'left' equivalents but none springs to mind although some LP threads go close) where they can insult those they don't like in side-splittingly hilarious fashion without anyone else even noticing.
As a lawyer Faris is especially sensitive to the defamation implications and I have to say I'm amazed that there haven't been more writs flying around the place. Perhaps the comparatively small readership of blogs and the difficulty of getting reliable data about it means it would be hard to prove significant loss of either reputation or income from libel, while the MSM would be free to puiblish it for all the world to read. Nevertheless I'm surprised more thin-skinned individuals haven't gone to see a lawyer when they read what others have written about them.