By D. J. Webb
To what extent blogs and media outlets ought to allow comment on their articles is a hotly debated topic. As is well-known, the Libertarian Alliance prefers not to censor comments, but may occasionally have little other choice than to ban a commenter or censor a posting. Typically, comments that could open the way to legal repercussions for a website, even a passive or reluctant host of such comments, can hardly be encouraged. These would include calls for violence.
For these reasons, no website can guarantee in advance to host any and every comment made. The principle might be: “I support your right to free speech, but in an age where blog space can be obtained for free, some of the most extreme comments will have to be on your own website”.
The media and blogs are different
However, I will argue that a libertarian blog and the electronic version of a newspaper are two very different things. Someone can blog here, and so insistently and repeatedly use the most controversial language, that there will be little choice other than to encourage the poster to use his own blog. But newspapers like The Daily Mail, The Guardian and The Telegraph, among others, are not blogs. They are part of a media that likes to regard itself as the Fourth Estate of the realm, often appearing to try to generate opinion and play a role as independent actors in our political life. If turfed off The Guardian, true, you can turn to your own blog, but it will not attract the traffic or attention of The Guardian‘s website, and cannot be considered a real equivalent of commenting on that newspaper’s site.
The greater social role of a great newspaper was referred by Charles Prestwich Scott, one-time editor of The Guardian, when he famously said:
A newspaper is of necessity something of a monopoly, and its first duty is to shun the temptations of monopoly. Its primary office is the gathering of news. At the peril of its soul it must see that the supply is not tainted. Neither in what it gives, nor in what it does not give, nor in the mode of presentation must the unclouded face of truth suffer wrong. Comment is free, but facts are sacred.
There are not many national newspapers, and, between them, they do hold an effective monopoly. I would include The Telegraph, The Times, The Guardian, The Independent and The Daily Mail in such an effective monopoly, even if there is more than one such outlet (purveying identical opinions). Outlets such as The Financial Times, The Economist and The Spectator are less vital to the functioning of our democracy and are more clearly “niche” in their identities. Lesser media outlets, such as The Sun, The Daily Express and The Daily Mirror make little or no attempts to market themselves as serious, cerebral commenters on daily affairs, and might therefore be held to be less crucial to the vicehold of bien pensant opinion in the UK.
I would add, however, that the BBC news website, which is reluctant to allow comments, plays a role in our democracy independent of the BBC’s broadcast output, a claim that cannot be made by similar, but less comprehensive and less well-funded, news websites operated by the ITV, Sky and Channel 4 networks.
The fact that these are our major news sources places a key burden on them to report the news—not just select facts supporting one point of view—and, where comment is allowed, to allow free comment, particularly on articles where an opinion is being peddled. C.P. Scott specifically recognized the need to report the news in untainted fashion: it seems clear that no media outlet in the UK today adheres to those principles. The Guardian and the BBC are among the worst in peddling jaundiced and biased versions of the news, stripped of many relevant facts, while, possibly, The Daily Mail (including its Sunday analogue, The Mail on Sunday), is one of the best in terms of reporting inconvenient items of news and allowing comment thereupon.
Comment is no longer Free
The Guardian used to allow comment on many of its articles, including the Comment is Free section, but employed a large phalanx of masturbatory deleters whose job it was to weed out “inappropriate” comment, and ban erring posters. I have found myself that commenting on The Daily Telegraph website along the lines that our beloved ethnic minorities are not really British results in the sudden disappearance of the comment: comment, meet the ether! However, The Guardian has a reputation all of its own for its insistence on an extreme interpretation of multiculturalism, thus requiring it to censor its legions of commenters.
On Sunday (January 31st) we read in The Observer (the Sunday version of The Guardian) that that newspaper has decided to restrict the ability of the public to comment on some of their articles. Apparently, the site attracts up to 65,000 comments a day. The problem is as follows:
But more concerning is the ever-rising level of abuse, trolling and “astroturfing” (propaganda posting – an artificial version of a grassroots campaign) currently polluting what are often illuminating and stimulating discussions.
The article goes on—in a parody of a media outlet meant to be supplying “news”—to interview their own put-upon journalists on the upsetting tone of the comments received on their articles. The people meant to be doing interviewing were the ones being interviewed! The company considered abandoning comments (like Reuters) or pre-moderating all comments (like The New York Times, an equally extreme, pro-elite newspaper that deletes most comment on immigration). The Guardian found out that articles touching on race, immigration and Islam are most likely to attract hostile reader comments. I wonder why?
The result is that articles on race, immigration and Islam will not be available for comment, unless extra moderators are in place “to support the conversation”. It is worth adding that other sites such as The Daily Telegraph have greatly restricted their former large blogging operation for very similar reasons: the Telegraph blogs were becoming a forum for the real right to win support for their views, and much less a forum for The Telegraph to influence their readers’ views.
At no point do the journalists at The Guardian (and The Telegraph) seem to have considered whether their pushing of an extreme agenda lies behind the large volume of angry comments. Neither do they appear to have considered that they are not a blog, but the website of a national newspaper. They appear to be trying to conceal the overwhelming opposition in this country to their political agenda, which does, however, find favour throughout the political elite.
My own view is that a newspaper that is privately owned and not dependent on state subsidy (including the huge subsidy formerly available to The Guardian via public-sector job listings) should be free to delete comments or not to allow comments. The simplest way would be to remove the state from the news operation entirely. This implies privatising the BBC, allowing no subsidies at all, including disguised subsidies, to news outlets, and sacking the army of press officers in government whose job it is to feed these organizations with press releases and other information to type up. We should consider whether the government ought to host any press conferences. Shouldn’t key announcements be made to Parliament?
What about blogs?
It seems odd that the very next day after The Guardian announced their restrictions, the Order-Order blog also announced that its formerly more liberal approach towards comments moderation was to be cancelled. Order-Order is run by Paul Staines, who has a reputation for libertarianism or liberalism of some kind. However, I believe that reputation has not been hard-earned. The fact that the blog focuses on the Westminster bubble so closely meant that it was always suspect to me. Who cares who says what to whom in the political elite? Order-Order loves to publish revelations of affairs of politicians, or run stories about politicians or their advisers caught in “gay” bars, and such things. Any real libertarian would not be interested in such tripe. Its political coverage is entirely devoted to the party political scene and not to the wider defence of liberty.
Paul Staines writes:
This is a good time to update readers on our periodical jihad against toxic, boring repetitive comments from people who would not want to be sat next to in a pub. We want the comments to be like a fun pub with a good atmosphere and friendly banter….
There is a website that is almost entirely focused on immigration and Islam – the issues that motivate comment bores most. 2014’s “Islamophobe of the Year“, Raheem Kassam, confirms that he has no intention of blocking anyone. Breitbart is the place for you to bang on repetitively in a forum that welcomes you.
The jihad is on, apparently, and Staines is on the wrong side. I will admit that as a blog, Order-Order is not in the same league as The Guardian, and the moral onus (a moral onus only, unfortunately) on newspapers not to censor their readers hardly applies to a weblog. To that extent, I would say that whereas The Guardian ought to allow comment on all of its opinion articles, deleting only comments that credibly threaten violence (few such comments are made), Order-Order is on firmer ground controlling its readership.
However, one thing that Order-Order can’t do is to engage in jihad against readers, and then claim to be libertarian. Also, Staines’ indication that immigration and Islam are the chief topics of dissent reveals that he is no longer part of the right in any recognizable fashion. The last article on his site tagged with Immigration was in September, and Staines appears in 2015 to have made the point a number of times that immigration cannot be tackled within the EU. While this is true as far as it goes, it doesn’t address the much-larger inflow of migrants from outside the EU. It seems clear that Order-Order is only interested in occasional discussion of immigration from a standpoint that is well within the official range of views permitted within the Conservative Party. Preventing English people from becoming a minority in England or repealing the Race Relations Act would be off that radar. Staines is actually on the left, and thus opposed to liberty, politically, culturally and economically, because that is what hosting a large ethnic-minority population of “fellow citizens” means. He rightly points readers to Breitbart London, which is a good read most days, particularly when the UK-focused pages are found and not Breitbart’s US coverage.
What about libertarians?
Another example is Spiked Online, which has a reputation for supporting free speech and plays an important role in highlighting the tendency for politely and mildly-worded comments with which you disagree to be regarded as upsetting and even threatening. Spiked’s campaign against “safe spaces” in universities where students can be shielded from views they disagree with and that “make them feel unsafe” is a case in point. As far as I can tell, Spiked does not moderate comments. However, Spiked does agree with free immigration, and so to a large extent agrees with the state in its attempts to foist an unwelcome multiculture on society; they merely argue that opposing arguments can be taken on without banning them. Such an approach is confused, to say the least.
Finally, the issue affects this website. Clearly the LA is under no duty, moral or otherwise, to publish or allow the publication of unpleasant diatribes. It is not a news agency, and has no duty to publish all the news in a way that a newspaper has, in accordance with C.P. Scott’s views. Like Order-Order, the LA retains the right to prevent trolls from spoiling its website. As the LA is not a large media outlet, the fact that all trolls can find space to host their views elsewhere is not an unreasonable one to make.
However, the LA is committed to the promotion of free speech as a positive good in society. The latitude allowed here must be wider than elsewhere in order to promote the LA’s principles insofar as that is consonant with the legal duties of a registered charity. We need to adhere to that in order to criticize The Guardian in particular for its frenetic censoring of comments, including politely-worded screeds that just don’t happen to cleave to The Guardian‘s editorial line.
In appraising the increasing attacks on free speech as a problem, we need to recognize, too, that the advance of multiculturalism is likely to see much deeper inroads into freedom of expression than we have hitherto seen. We are still in the majority in our European-descended countries, but this is likely to change quickly in the US, followed by similar demographic shifts during out lifetimes in Europe too. As the liberal elite—and it is largely they, and not the immigrants themselves, who promote this agenda—sense victory, final and complete victory from which no recovery will be possible for conservatives, so their intolerance will grow more intense. It seems to me that a full understanding of this is only available to the LA, as the only libertarian organization in the UK that sees the role played by the demographic shift in removing our liberties.
This gives us an important role to play: we need to fulfil it by encouraging libertarians to talk about race, culture, immigration, and indeed Islam, but without personalizing any disputes or becoming ill-tempered in a way that plays into the hands of those who simply wish to close down dissent.
Discover more from The Libertarian Alliance
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Related posts:
The silencing of Andrew Bridgen MP
The stupidest “commercial” move in history
What is Happening in Britain?
Powered by YARPP.
The problem about the “Liberal elite” is that they now have all the guns. ACPO’s Common-Purpose-Trolls have “taken care of” the Armed Forces via “human rights lawyers”, because the Army might have refused Home Office Orders to fire upon British People, understandably. Angry but also peaceful demonstrations by the surviving Bourgeoisie will not any more cut any cakes, and will be fired upon without compunction when the time is right.
ChIndoBrazilia might be a last best hope but I doubt it.
It’s really sad and irritating, but I think we just now have to batten down, armour our libraries against fire, and wait a few hundred years to see if this blows over. I do not think it will, which is why we seem to be alone in the Universe. I now think that this stage that we are going through comes upon any civilization that becomes sentient, because Evil clearly pre-existed before Good, and Evil therefore will always triumph, as Good is a temporary reversal of inevitability.
Evil lost a few tricks in the 17th/18th/19th centuries, but has never forgiven us.
There are no “space-aliens”, because all those beings that might have become these things have been pre-slaughtered.
Yes, it is sad that we seem to be hitting the Great Filter of intelligent civilisations. Just as we were about to begin our journey into the universe (guided by the best and most-maligned minds of our people, the “nerds”) we are being violently dragged back into an earlier epoch in our intellectual development. If humans do make it into space after the fall of Western man, it will be as a kind of Klingon/Reaver race, warlike and parasitical. And to think that the leftist foot soldiers of the new ideology seem to idolise ‘Star Trek: the Next Generation’ as their desired utopia, when in fact all the social issues care about will be swept aside by the new post-European cultures that will dominate Earth after the West has fallen.
My hope is that the media outlets that censor comments will sink into irrelevance, like flat earth believers. The media are no longer a one-way conduit of news and opinion, with a few carefully vetted alternative views aired on the Letters to the Editor page (“The views expressed in our Letters Page do not necessarily reflect…”). Feedback from – and between – readers is now an essential part of any thriving news site. People will often skim the main article and jump straight to the comment section. Fewer and fewer people will bother reading these threads when they know that they’ve been sanitised to parrot the views of the site’s owners.
I think there are two sides to this as it is difficult to determine if these media groups have the right to stop people from commenting on their sites.
1) You have to remember that these media groups are privately owned so it is important that they have the right to run their businesses however they want whether or not we agree or disagree with them. The only media that is not privately owned is the BBC and Channel 4 so in theory, they should automatically allow us our right to free speech to express views unless you say something that is somewhat threatening which is unacceptable.
2) I can understand why we believe these media groups are behaving like hypocrites as they are proclaiming to be something they are not. But instead of protesting to bring back their comment sections, a detailed explanation would be reasonable to ask for so we can understand why they have done this and it would give the public a choice on whether to stay with the media companies or go somewhere else.
What they will realise in the long term is that censoring free speech will have one very nasty backlash and it will be terminal pain for those who enforce the censoring.
You have to remember that these media groups are privately owned so it is important that they have the right to run their businesses however they want whether or not we agree or disagree with them.
It’s more complicated than that, as DJ pointed out. Some of them were making millions from government advertisements such as notices of public sector job vacancies. I’m not sure how much the Internet has changed that, since all the advertisers have to do now is run their own websites and cut out the middle man. Under the old newspaper system, papers running these ads were the beneficiaries of a large government subsidy.
A first class piece of writing. Even if newspapers should have the legal right to ban comments, their moral obligation, given what they are, and what they claim to be, is to allow the free access that DW says ought to be the case.
As a British Nationalist of some 15+ years now, the pace and scale of how immigration, Islam, multiculturalism etc is brewing and bubbling away on the established news outlets is somewhat astonishing.
When I first started to realise and and understand that there was something seriously wrong with what was happening – and the messages we were told – it was pretty fringe. You’d have the occasional grumbler here and there, but they were pretty tame and still clinging to the teat of the established order.
So absent was it of discussions of this sort, I found myself having to sign up to some rather fruity websites and secretive / hidden forums just to be able to express an opinion and pose questions about it all.
Now, the sentiments that were considered fringe and extreme 15 years ago are ever present all over comment sections – to the point where the exasperation, anger, bitterness of some people is causing site after site to shut down commentary on these subjects.
They think that they will somehow control the situation – but I am willing to suspect that, by closing down expressions of these sorts, it will just increase the anger and resentment of what people see as the “controlled media”. It simply reinforces that they are in on this – even the so-called “right wing press”.
When people have no means to turn things around, not even the right to express themselves to an audience that matters, it may well send people to even more extremes in order to be able to do so.
The Daily Mail is cited as being one of the better ones, but it is just the same as the others in the way it controls a narrative. It channels people into certain prisms or prisons of thought about subject matters. Also, it vary rarely allows through comments which break apart this controlled narrative.
Many people I know write comments in the Mail – and very rarely are they passed through the moderation, even when the articles claim that the article is not moderated. Yet, funnily enough, they allow through hundreds of what are effectively the same comment – whether it be “right” or “left”. They also allow through some of the most crude and nasty comments that are not well argued at all.
It is a stitch up all along the line, but the BBC is one of the worst. What the media in this country “decide” to report “for the day” is often absurd compared to the “real news” that people are actually interested in. What they DO NOT choose to make “topics” is just as insightful to me as what they DO choose.
Maybe I am wrong, but I see things getting pretty nasty. The media and the elites are vastly out of step on matters of race, Islam, immigration, and indeed transgenderism, their new pet project. They have got themselves into such a position where they genuinely believe that opponents to these things are absolute evil and are people who can have no basis at all for their positions.
In turn, because these things are never really properly discussed – not in sane and sensible ways – people lack the skills and vocabulary to do so. Which is why you get a lot of trolling, crude, nasty, stupid comments.
Behind all that affront do lay issues – but they are not expressed properly. Yet people ought to at least make the effort to argue points to counter them – not just close people off from commenting at all.
It is getting to be an “us and them” situation with mainstream institutions and online activities.
The commenting system “disqus” recently repealed the right of a website to use their system. Other companies could follow suit, if pressured enough or if “leftwing” enough. Twitter now has monitors, as does Facebook in Germany. Some former Stasi woman is heading it.
I read that in Denmark (maybe Sweden) last week, the police were entering the workplaces and homes of twitter and facebook users, warning them that their anti-immigration comments (which were apparently quite mild) were being monitored and that they should basically desist from making any more, if they know what is good for them.
The answer people seem to have, is to just shut it all down. Services, social media groups, comment sections…. where terms and conditions get ever tighter, where things are more monitored, more flagged up to authorities for potential “hate crimes”.
I do worry myself that the police will come knocking for me one day. I never advocate violence or aim things at any individuals, but I do worry about being accosted with the law – and I should not have to feel this way.
They will all say that they are private entities, companies, that they have the right to shut people off – but then, you get back to the position of arguing that “you can have free speech, nobody is stopping you, but go and do it somewhere else, somewhere where nobody will ever read it or hear it”.
The Telegraph, Guardian, etc have lost the debates and the “control” over some subjects. They can’t seem to handle it, so they wish by removing it all, all the problems will also go away. The problems are only just starting though!
I’m more optimistic about the Mail than you. I notice a huge spike in immigration-related articles in the last few weeks. The comment sections seem accommodating enough to me, though I haven’t tested them to the limit. Those media outlets don’t have absolute control over their content either, because they have advertisers to think of, and they’ll face pressure from various quarters if they rebel outright against the ruling class consensus.
“the sentiments that were considered fringe and extreme 15 years ago are ever present all over comment sections – to the point where the exasperation, anger, bitterness of some people is causing site after site to shut down commentary on these subjects.”
I have noticed this too. The natural point of view really is more widespread than the average person would have thought ten years ago. Even non-political videos on YouTube about the past have comments filled with dark commentary on the present and its future implications. The hostile elite cannot pretend that the rational view is the minority view any more. When the tyranny is so obvious and unjust, even decent folk can be pushed into contemplating active rebellion.
CB, you are right on all of this. Newspapers are not really civil society any more, but part of the state. However, the media’s status as part of the elite is not really one of state ownership, but rather one where the managerial elite, including in the private sector, support all the same views as the state. Another thing we should do is to reduce access to universities. There are few jobs that require a university education, and the universities inculcate the elite’s views in people who have gone to study “Public policy” and “Sociology” and “Journalism”, none of which are really university subjects. We have to got to stop feeding the private-sector part of the managerial elite too, but this is a wider question.
I have been demanding the shut-down of all but about 25 of the 4,285,697 British universities for some years now. twenty-five (or so) universities, consisting of hard-science, engineering, maths, classics, medical and a few history departments, is more than enough for a country with a population of 75-million-and-fast-growing.
There are many different ways to further the libertarian agenda. One is to hold up MPs to justified ridicule and contempt. Staines specialises in precisely that (and good for him).
You say “It seems clear that Order-Order is only interested in occasional discussion of immigration”.
Why does that surprise you on a website that has nothing to do with immigration? If I wrote a libertarian blog on (say) medical regulation, I would not welcome such discussions either (quite irrespective of my views).
Because immigration is the main issue in British politics. The “National Question”, if I can call it that, is changing this country utterly, and all other issues are subordinate in importance to that. If Order-Order occasionally cover immigration – mainly to suggest we need to leave the EU, and not to suggest, eg, that we need to stop Muslim family reunification visas – and then resent a more detailed commenting on the immigration issue below the line, that tells me that Order-Order is only interested in immigration in the narrowly party political sense.
I agree that this is a fine piece of writing.
The problem, as I see it, is that all the mainstream media are part of the establishment. Some (the Mail in particular) will occasionally buck the “official” line, but not often for long. The main issue is that the media aren’t interested in truth or objectivity any more; only in getting out their propaganda message of the day, whatever it may be.
Look, for example, at the “human emissions of carbon dioxide cause catastrophic global warming” scam. David Rose at the Mail seems to be able to get away with telling the truth; but he’s in a tiny minority. Even James Delingpole had to leave the Telegraph and go to Breitbart.
The establishment is the enemy. The enemy is the establishment.
I’m sure a lot of the “toxic” comments are people on the left stirring up trouble, though some of the genuine “toxicity” does offer interesting glimpses into the psychopathology of some on the right.
Staines is behaving exactly as I would expect. Whatever happened to his plan for a private prosecution of Lord Levy?
Speaking of Levy: thanks G-d that we’ve seen an end to all that New Labour corruption and behind-the-scenes manipulation. Lord Feldman is clearly a quite different kettle of gefilte fish.
cc. NSA, GCHQ, Unit 8200, et al.
A good article.
Regarding Staines, he may have been a libertarian of some stripe once but hasn’t been for a long time. His desperation to be some kind of Bubble insider is palpable.
Regarding the newspaper sites, I think they do have a right to moderate as they wish. Nobody obliges them to have comment sections at all. Prior to the internet, all they had was a letters section where Angry Of Tunbridge Wells might get an edited version of his letter published, but probably not. The Guardian’s CIF has always been a joke anyway, and let’s be honest is mostly opponents slagging them off, since the Left is such a monolithic intellectual (sic) culture that all they have to say is “I agree”. This is why they like Twitter so much and largely failed as a force in the blogosphere and other prior forms of internet dicussion. Twitter, which just collates “I agrees” is their type of medium.
But I think we should address the question of Britain’s supposed great tradition of free speech. I’m a bit sceptical frankly about it; in fact we have a tradition of freedom of sufficiently polite political speech, and sort of a tradition of religious freedom, but we’ve never had a general tradition of free speech, with blasphemy laws and obscene publications acts and so on, and some of the world’s worst libel laws. Every medium bar the newspapers has been officially censored and even nationalised (with the broadcast media). The newspapers escaped because they were usually relied upon to be gatekeepers, being mostly run by Establishment Insiders like Beaverbrook.
As to the Daily Mail, I think they play both sides against each other, with one article being apparently politically incorrect, then the next being politically correct. Dacre is a bit of a genius in that regard. I suspect it’ll fall apart when he goes.
I don’t think the grand tradition of liberty and freedom is entirely mythic, though. We do have a stronger tradition of liberty than comparable societies. However, I don’t think ‘freedom’ can exist as a ‘thing’ to be externalised from a given particular and then used as a universal benchmark to assess other cultures comparably. Freedom is just a transient state of being that arises from the struggles and characteristics of a given society. What is experienced as ‘freedom’ in one culture could be seen differently in another, and what we see as ‘freedom’ now will change in the future, especially if we continue to multi-culturalise our society.
The reason we have what we recognise to be ‘freedom of speech’ and ‘freedom of the press’ and certain other liberties is because we have evolved a certain type of society in which scepticism and inquiry were valued. The factors that brought this about are particular to us: genetic, geographic, economic. We can’t roll-back modernity and restore the liberties of the past, even if a rose-tinted era existed, because what we experience as ‘free’ is a result of material conditions in society.