The contracting space for free speech

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.