Last month, I wrote about the Arizona Daily Star‘s switch to a Facebook-only platform for its online comment feature and took the paper to the woodshed for its failure to effectively monitor comments. This generated an interesting discussion on the Weekly‘s comment thread about anonymity and responsibility in the context of online comments.
Well, let’s continue that discussion and drop the other shoe. Not only has Facebook failed to fix the problem, as I predicted—I’ve already seen naughty words and very personal tit-for-tat squabbles that surely would have been deleted in the past, so apparently the Star has abandoned moderating its comment threads altogether—Facebook is really just part of a larger problem.
Before anyone can say “gotcha,” I’ll acknowledge that the Weekly’s comments also include Facebook. The difference is, we don’t mandate that you use Facebook exclusively. You can choose to leave a comment with nothing but an email address to identify you—which is to say, anonymously.
Anonymity has inherent value in public discourse. Reporters sometimes get interesting information and good stories from anonymous tips. There are all sorts of reasons why people choose anonymity, and only one of them involves getting away with being a troll. Whistle-blowers, people in vulnerable demographic groups that could be targeted for harassment (or worse), employees who want to avoid complicating or compromising their job situations and many others have perfectly good reasons to post anonymously. Moreover, their perspectives should not be excluded just because they’re not willing to use Facebook.
While the Facebook-only format may succeed in chasing away some trolls, it also has the pernicious effect of limiting the quantity and scope of comments. (Personally, I miss the trolls. In spirited debate, there is learning, as a Weekly reader pointed out in last month’s comments.) Radical viewpoints are far less likely to be expressed in the Facebook format, and the overall effect in the case of the Star has been a 90 percent crash in the number of comments. Even hot-button issues like immigration, which used to generate comments by the hundreds, struggle to make it into the dozens now.
So why do publications like it so much? For one thing, as I mentioned earlier, with Facebook they can choose to forgo moderating, which saves them money. But the real plum is the commodifying effect Facebook has on every communication. Facebook can create lots of referrals that greatly increase audience and corresponding advertising revenue. And every single piece of information that passes through Facebook is mined, profiled, categorized and used to make money.
I’ve seen more than one business-minded analyst crow about the incredible opportunities this provides to shape public opinion and market products. As one put it, “How valuable would it be to chime in to the comment stream amidst the rumors and speculation and correct facts on the fly?” Let me translate that for you: “How valuable would it be to use the branding power of Facebook to attack critical stories and comments and douse their facts and conclusions with your own marketing spin?”
Sadly, in the process of switching over, the Star apparently has consigned years of reader comments to the dustbin of history. Google a story dated prior to the switch—it will show that there are zero comments, even though that story may have had hundreds of comments previously. This is an indefensible destruction of the public record.
Providing a public forum is one of the bedrock principles of journalism. Limiting the voices and perspectives that participate in that forum—whether through Facebook, corporate consolidation of media or other dynamics—is an egregious blow to this fundamental facet of democracy.
And that’s the crux of it. Most media aren’t about journalism anymore—they’re about making money, and if the exigencies of profit demand it, the exclusion of good journalism. In that context, Facelessbook fits perfectly. It’s not really about enhanced communication—it’s about replacing real communication (you remember, the kind that involves actual faces and voices) with carefully constructed and managed facades.
Taken together, these twin towers of obfuscation are making it increasingly difficult for us 21st-century humans to communicate with each other—exactly the opposite of their stated purposes. When every utterance is modulated through a text, tweet, or tyrannical profit-making empire, not only does our society suffer a breakdown of clear communication, but we as individuals also suffer a profoundly disturbing erosion of our humanity.
This article appears in Aug 1-7, 2013.
Great article, Randy. I participated in the Star’s comment section until they switched to Facebook. I valued a forum that allowed one to speak freely without “sharing” the thoughts with all the family members and others on Facebook. Some ideas and opinions are best not said to some family members and friends. Anonymity is a form of privacy that enables free expression that social circles tend to inhibit to keep the peace. Anonymous forums are not as peaceful, but you hear how and what people really, really think. The Star blew it!
Simple solution, Have a Facebook acct under an alias.
Works for me when I want to remind people how much power racism and ignorance hold over Arizonans.
Welcome to the new Mississippi.
As said previously, the ADS lost control of commenting, and, I think, they gave up and out-sourced the job of moderating to Facebook.
I agree with the gist of this opinion piece: it is not so much about the name a commenter uses as it is about the owner of the website’s willingness to moderate comments.
Kudos to the Tucson Weekly for its willingness to moderate comments to its articles!
Just another reason not to read the Arizona Daily Star. Wonder how the sponsors feel about so few people reading the ads with the comment section. The comments were also part of the entertainment! The Ariz Republic is also doing the same. few comments. Is it censorship of just plain stupidity? Hard to tell in Tucson. I wish the Star all the bad luck they deserve. We get the Sunday paper. Four pounds of ads and very little new. Except for the massive article on how college students are collecting and studying the trash of illegal aliens. Thank you Debbie Kornmiller! Keep your resume fresh the paper has little time left.
If I’m understanding Serraglio’s point, or at least one of them, Facebook is a sort of evil empire bent on monetizing (I hate this word) all communications flowing across and within its network. Yeah, that’s why they exist or as the French would have it their raison d’etre. Serraglio’s point is true but trivial. That the federal government, we’ve learned, has ready access to all communications on Facebook (and other social media site) is also true but deeply troubling; being an electronic massive data dump and NSA storage facility was not a primary goal of Facebook’s founders.
So to many of us Facebook haters, the move by the Daily Star was a bridge too far, an inedible meal. You can be a liberal, libertarian or conservative and find adequate reason to opt out of the Facebook “community.” You’d probably find common cause in your reasons including crude attempts at monetization, privacy concerns, or an overflow of unfiltered information from friends and relatives with too much time on their hands.
The ADS took the path of least resistance and the decision was probably made outside of Tucson; part of a corporate directive intended save money or generate additional revenues as the scrubbed up new commentaries somehow become interesting and palatable to a broad population of readers …and go viral. Serraglio is correct, the new ADS online comments direction appears to be a massive failure with few bothering to bother and much of the same vitriol flowing (only much less of it). But that said, the Weekly comments section is also a pale shadow of the former ADS site even with its affording anonymity to posters. Maybe it’s a trend, folks deciding not to contribute to the electronic noise.
I think his point about anonymous comments is relevant. Here’s the thing: I don’t want my comments to be easily accessibly to anyone casually searching on my name such as a future employer. Not that I’m ashamed of anything I say, I just don’t want to spend that much time thinking about comments to say, hm, how will this look in 10 years and is there a chance that it will tick someone off. I’d prefer that tying comments to me personally at least require finding my personal email and likely getting a warrant (or not if you’re the NSA).
Who knows what facebook will do with them, but anything tied to facebook is tied to my name and personal account.
Thus I don’t comment at ADS at all anymore (and the people rejoiced) and I’ve virtually stopped reading it (virtually, ha ha). Which is too bad since it’s the only significant source of local news outside of the TV stations and if you ignored the trolls there were some good comments and some real information in them occasionally. It seems strange that a newspaper would be afraid of the statements of their readers, even if they disagreed with them.
But the ADS is not much more in depth or useful than the TV news anymore so maybe it’s time for it to die.
One can find the face book thing a joke, you give up so much personal data opening one up to potential hackers, identity thieves and face book will deny any culpability when their records are compromised, but racism, hatred is rampant on the internet and print news papers especially in certain counties like Mohave County where if one is anti-Obama, anti-democrat nothing is off limits in content one can print whether it be lies or libel!
http://kingmandailyminer.com/main.asp?Sect…
I have never used face book, will never use it, if that is a requirement to post on any site they will never have to worry about me visiting and posting let alone reading their advertisements!;-)