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!

OneWing and your keenness to whinge about censorship wouldn't have anything to do with your own antipathy for the guardian's editorial position?

Where is the evidence that the guardian is suppressing dissenting views? The link I posted above suggests overwise, but feel free to post evidence of your own.

FWIW I agree with some of the guardian's editorial positions but not all (increasingly few these days ... have come close to deleting the app on occasion).

Misti, the Graun has a long history of supressing dissenting views in the CIF section. Clearly, they're so overwhelmed by numbers, they've pretty much given up and taken their ball home now though.

The Cologne attacks are case in point. I find it hard to believe none of their reporters would be keen to cover this story as soon as it came to light. However, there must have been daily editorial meetings between 1st and 8th January where a decision was made not to report or even mention this story. That's not a coincidence, it's a deliberate refusal to address a difficult story; not the conduct of a grown-up newspaper.

BabyCham so people keep saying - but no one has provided any evidence. There are enormous quantities of "dissenting posts" on that link I posted earlier (in fact almost all the posts were dissenting).

I've had posts deleted on the Graun - as it happens these were mainly posts which broadly agree with the graun's own position, but in which I obviously crossed the line in terms of personal criticism and got reported (kippers are very sensitive fish).

The fact that some papers failed to report on a major news story is lamentable, but has nothing to do with the question of whether reader comments should be restricted or not.

Mistigri

I'll take that as a 'yes'.

"It's either exceptionally naive, or you have another motive."

Paranoia, much?

onewing I replied to your question (I support the guardian editorial position on some but not all issues), I note that you didn't respond to mine ...

yougotta the guardian deletes many comments. It's not possible to know the reasons unless you've seen the post, or written it yourself, - but I've seen many posts disappear that were in obvious breach of the terms and conditions, and had a few of my own nuked too. If you plant your soap box in someone else's back garden, they have the right to tell you to shut up or fuck off.

Look, I'm perfectly prepared to accept that the guardian suppresses dissenting views but I kind of like to rely on that old fashioned concept of evidence before I make my mind up. The evidence suggests that virtually all guardian comment threads contain dissenting views, many expressed in virulent and even obnoxious ones (these days you don't even get deleted for celebrating the death by drowning of Syrian children).

If they really are routinely suppressing dissenting views, they are doing a pretty bad job of it - no?

Mistigri

'I replied to your question (I support the guardian editorial position on some but not all issues)'

But it just so happens that on those specific issues on which they have chosen to suppress comments, you agree with their line wholeheartedly, right?

'and your keenness to whinge about censorship wouldn't have anything to do with your own antipathy for the guardian's editorial position?'

I certainly do despise their editorial position. But you seem to be drawing a false moral equivalence between our positions - in a free society, freedom of speech does not need explicit justification, and I am not asking for positions that contradict my own to be suppressed. Whereas you seem to think that censorship is cool as long as opinions you don't like are excluded?

onewing I disagree strongly with censorship (I've lived and worked in France most of my adult life, and on this side of the channel we have a much more robust attitude to free speech and the freedom to offend - see Charlie hebdo, et al).

We're not talking about free speech or censorship here, though. We're talking about a private business deciding what it will or will not publish on its website. Funnily enough as a working economist I am broadly in favour of businesses being allowed to determine their own conditions of business (within the law, of course).

The guardian deletes a lot of comments and it's not possible to know what's in them all, but of the ones that I've personally seen deleted, I'd say that the vast majority were nuked on the grounds of personal abuse. That's not to say that dissenting opinions aren't being zapped too, of course, but the evidence suggests to me that dissenting views get a fair airing - in fact the guardian provides more opportunities to debate, and more space for dissent, than its mainstream UK rivals which operate paywalls and therefore attract a readership which is broadly in agreement with its editorial positions

Yiu can still discuss things freely with your pals down the pub.

the guardian isn't the only route to self expression

YouGotta you already admitted on page 1 of this thread that you got done for posting under multiple accounts in breach of the site's terms and conditions. Do you not think that might have something to do with your posts getting deleted?

This is getting a bit repetitive, but FWIW they have their house rules, you can abide by them or go elsewhere. Personally I find your posts less objectionable than the ones cheering about drowned Syrian babies that don't get deleted - but it's not my decision to make.

Moderators are damned if they do and damned if they don't ... Still don't see any evidence for systematic bias.

Mistigri, you are incredibly naive that you don't think there was any agenda. The Guardian's reporting and treatment of the Cologne assaults was disgraceful.

It's a newspaper - of course there's a fucking agenda ...

You wanna talk about naivety?! lol

Lol indeed. You're the one trying to handwave people's concerns away.

Who gives a toss? Really? It's just a newspaper.

I really don't understand what the problem is.

It's a newspaper which takes an infuriatingly holier than thou line on these matters. While shockingly misrepresenting the facts. You are perfectly free to be ostentatiously unconcerned about that. What's it to you if other people don't share your personal view on it? You seem rather bothered!