To be gutted the Guardian is censoring comments

[Babycham1979]

For a long time now, I've found the comments section to be at least as informative and interesting as many of the comment and news pieces, so I'm gutted to find out that the Guardian is abandoning the pricinple of (relatively) free comment.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/31/readers-editor-on-readers-comments-below-the-line#comments

They claim it's due to trolling, but the real reason appears to be the long-term culmination of amount of criticism the paper and its writers were getting for factual inaccuracies (such as the Poppy Project) very heavily biased reporting/comment (race/sex click-bait) and the complete avoidance of certain subjects (the Cologne sex attacks).

In reality, Comment is Free has remained for more civil and intelligent than the offensive (but entertaining) dregs that appear on the Indy, Telegraph and Mail websites.

I suspect this will backfire on them big-time.

Now I only have MN to come to for stimulating and robust debate!

I'm a Guardian member, in fact, and I still read the paper version. I don't agree with everything in the paper, but I think their reporting is still very good. I read comments pieces less and less but think Jonathan Freedland, Michael White, Gary Younge and a few others are always interesting and considered.

But what are they supposed to do? Readership of all newspapers is going through the floor - because everyone apparently thinks news should be free on the internet - so they have to change their business model. I'd rather go back to the days of hot metal and everything on paper and news being king, but I don't think it's going to happen.

The Guardian online site is huge and the costs of maintaining it are also huge. If people want to be part of a "comment community" then perhaps they'd like to pay for the privilege?

In a way, I prefer a "we're censoring you" statement to a false pretense of free speech. Precisely because we can then vote with our feet. We're censored here, too, but in a different way.

I prefer to get my "news" from Twitter by following those whom I find interesting and relatively trustworthy (at the time). No one's without bias, but certain journalists appear to have more integrity and to be less beholden to the establishment. Glenn Greenwald is one example.

The volume of postings to support Putin and Russian policies was absolutely astounding. Then you read about The Agency mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html?referer=&_r=0

Sadly they're not just targetting that type of commentor but anybody not on message

YouGotta why is it solely the guardian's responsibility to foster "free speech on the Internet"? Why not Times International's, or the Telegraph's?

Allowing comments has a cost - not just the financial cost of moderation, but the loss of sensible debate on some issues (esp anything to do with Russia or immigration), because the paid spammers and the deranged simply drown out everyone else.

The point is that free speech on the internet means there is always somewhere else to go and post. Private businesses have no obligation to provide you with a soap box. Just vote with your feet.

The volume of postings supporting British/American foreign policy (on numerous news sites and elsewhere) is equally astounding. And don't think there are no Western equivalents of "The Agency". Everyone's at it.

I'd just add that I am convinced that most of the moderation issues on CiF are simply down to moderators being completely overwhelmed by the volume of comments. This means that if enough people report a post, it gets deleted; if people don't complain, it remains up, even if it objectively breaks the T&Cs.

I can well imagine that in trans issues, a post might get repeatedly reported by people with a vested interest - leading to unfair moderation. So reducing the volume of comments may well improve the fairness of moderation, by giving moderators more time and space to make decisions - and might thereby allow a wider variety of opinions.

Personally I would find being a moderator on CiF completely dispiriting. Having to wade through all that rubbish!

niminy I can't even read the comments on Europe any more (half of them are barely comprehensible anyway - if the new regime improves the standard of reading comprehension and grammar among the commentariat that will be a win. I once got moderated for observing, politely, that reading comprehension wasn't a particular commentor's strong point .)

That said, the comments on the Guardian's US articles are consistently entertaining - you get an amusing back and forth between the dedicated Trumpers and the earnest Sandersites, and lots of well-informed but usually cynical and often funny comments from a core of CiF regulars.

Well, it's good to know there is intelligent life out there

YouGottaKeepEmSeparated - I agree with the "Thank God for MN" comment. I can find intelligent debate here. I hear from right and left, rich and poor, highly - educated and not so educated. Sometimes some not very nice posts are made but it is relatively free. I do leave threads which enrage me - but they are rarely deleted.

The problem is that as others have said if a site gets totally spammed or deluged in posts it is impossible to keep it open and reasonable.

YouGotta you didn't answer my question as to why the guardian is required to provide a free soap box for opinions however vitriolic, deranged or badly expressed - but the Telegraph and the Times are not.

I'm linking to the article to which you refer so that others can see that you are completely misrepresenting the extent to which dissenting voices are silenced. There are a fair few deleted comments, sure, but also many unmoderated comments that take issue with the journalists' viewpoint.

www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/jan/08/cologne-attacks-hard-questions-new-years-eve

"Journalist's" that should read (before the grammar police arrive)

I read about the first fifty comments on that article and I can't see any evidence that criticism of the article's viewpoint were not allowed to be voiced. Certainly all the comments left standing seemed to me to be critical. (Whether they were sensible is another matter.)

YouGotta but if you don't think that the Guardian is under any obligation to provide you with a free soapbox, why are you accusing it of censorship?

You can't have it both ways. That isn't a straw man in any way whatsoever; you're throwing around accusations of "censorship" and yet you're not prepared to explain why you think that the guardian's decision to limit comments is censorship, while at the same time, other websites which impose restrictions on commenting are not guilty of censorship.

Perhaps in yougottaland, there is a special definition of "censorship" which only applies to newspapers whose editorial positions you do not agree with - but if that is the case, then you need to spell it out.

I can't speak to the issue of disappearing comments, but assuming a very high volume of simultaneous posting activity, it could simply be IT issues rather than a nefarious guardian plot to deny free speech (Occam's razor and all that). However, would you concede that on that article - to which I have linked so that neither of us can throw around unsupported claims - the majority of the comments are critical of the Guardian journalist's POV? If they're trying to censor critical views, the mods are doing a terrible job of it.

yougotta if you want to claim that they "vaporise comments they don't like", then you have to explain why they didn't delete any of the overwhelmingly critical comments that remain visible on that thread, two weeks after it was published. The guardian mods may be overworked, but they don't take that long to nuke unwanted comments.

Most internet sites rightly place limits on free speech, because they have legal responsibility for the content they publish.

Anyway, support your arguments with some evidence and we can continue this debate.

The Guardian has always moderated comments. I think the current issue is that they've twisted themselves into knots over trying to avoid reporting certain issues because of ideological reasons, and "below the line" is calling them out over it, time and time again.

The paper is in a mess and, personally, considering the way it has treated its staff over the last six years, I do not believe it has the right to consider itself as a voice of the left anymore.

That's a other debate entirely though werks ... If this were a thread about "what the fuck's happened to Britain's only credible left of centre newspaper" then I would certain join in the grauniad-bashing.

But the comments section is a mess and needed sorting out. The Brexit threads in particular attract thousands of barely-literate commenters bleating nonsensically about the EUSSR and it's become impossible to have any sort of debate at all (I don't think these are paid spammers - a lot of them are just disgruntled fugitives from the telegraph paywall). The same is true, for different reasons, of a lot of threads on world affairs, where the Putinbots and other paid spammers both right and left are more noticeable.

Mistigri

Hmmm ... your enthusiasm for the Guardian's censorship wouldn't have anything to do with the fact that you agree with their line on those topics and disagree with the comments they're suppressing, would it?

I don't buy this narrative that there's some organised conspiracy/organisation that's filling all newspaper comment threads with views from a particular agenda. I read all the Graun, Indy, Telegraph, Mail, Spectator and Spiked online on a daily basis, and the Graun consistently has the most thghoutful and independently-minded comments.

The general hatred of US and Israeli foreign policy, the admiration for Putin and the anger surrounding immigration are genuine mainstream beliefs among large sections of British society, from left to right. The relative success of Corbyn and Farage (whos views overlap on many of these issues) demonstrates that.

To dismiss these views as fringe or extreme is insulting to the majority of the British people, and naive to say the least. In this, the Graun editorial team are at least consistent with the political class. It's this kind of sneering, patronising elitism that is driving so many people towards 'anti-politics' (Trump, Sanders, Pegida, Syriza, Podemos, Le Pen etc etc), and it will backfire.

The Graun has decided Comment isn't Free, not becuase of resources, but because the vast majority of commenters were consistently making a fool of the newspaper and its feebler contributors. There was nothing inappropriate about commeters calling out people like Jessica Valenti for writing poorly researched, factually inaccurate and outright obnoxious articles. That doesn't make the rag look very good though.

It's a real shame, as it's a paper I grew up with and loved.