Publications
Partners
A quote attributed to author Anaïs Nin dropped presciently into my Twitter timeline this week. “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are,” it read.
If there was ever a group of people who would appreciate the profundity of this statement, it would be online community managers and editors who grapple daily with the phenomenon of online comments.
The digital space demonstrates the phenomenon of our self-reinforcing tendencies like no other. This space, still vaunted for its potential for participatory democracy and fuel for free expression, also seems to amplify our darkest thoughts and extremity of views.
This is partly why 24.com implemented a decision this week to turn off comments on its articles as a default position, a decision hailed by some and denounced by others.
The fact is we translate the truth through the spectacles of our world view. We see it not as it is, but as we are. It’s media sociology 101. We believe what we want to believe. And in online worlds, we say it as we see it.
William Bird of Media Monitoring Africa put his finger on it in commenting, largely negatively, on our decision on Radio 702.
He said News24 could publish an article about chickens being hatched on a farm and the comments would degenerate into a race debate.
And he is right. That is the nub of it.
News24 has been at the coalface of the online comment debate for years. Embracing freedom of speech as a core value, we have implemented various methods to open our platform for a range of views.
We have also attempted to practically monitor and moderate comments to comply with our policies, the law and the very limited constraints on freedom of speech contained in our Constitution. Despite all reasonable efforts, the comments on our platform align themselves inextricably with the extremes of South African discourse.
But why should this be so? Critics have said we are closing off a barometer of our society. Comments, they argue, tell us where we are at.
But they are wrong. News24 comments as they are now, and have been for some time, are no more a barometer of social mores than violent road rage is a barometer of our driving habits.
Social psychologists have a name for it. It’s called deindividuation and it’s what happens when some people lose it behind the steering wheel of a car and when sane dads go mental at a soccer game. It’s also what happens online; we call it trolling.
It’s a phenomenon not unique to South Africa. Increasingly, publishers globally are switching comments off, citing similar concerns. Even material that would seem by its very nature to be benign has drawn extremes of online commentary, forcing Popular Science magazine to switch off comments two years ago.
In announcing the decision, it cited research that showed readers exposed to negative comments had a generally downbeat view on the news they were reading. “If you carry out those results to their logical end – commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded – you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the ‘off’ switch,” it wrote.
It seems that is amplified in more general content. In societies where deep fractures exist, such as ours, online commentary appears to exaggerate the extreme and drown out the “middle”, where most of us live.
Even in the permissive society of the Dutch, academics are trying to wrap their theories around rising racist speech online.
But why should this be?
No one can deny that in South Africa today there is much that polarises us, yet walk into a restaurant, a pub, a church, an office and you don’t see us standing there screaming abuse at each other. It does not happen. Our society would fall over. In physical reality, social mores hold us in line. We respect, or at least pretend to respect, the other humans in our vicinity. In the digital world, the rules change.
The Observer newspaper called it the age of rage in describing how the online environment provides a sense of anonymity separate from our identity that compels sane and well-adjusted people to say things in pixels they would never say in person.
And that is why News24 has taken the decision it has. We will keep avenues open for user commentary – some articles will be opened to more carefully moderated contributions and users can share their views on our MyNews24 platform.
But for us, the era of the “drive-by” comment has ended. We need to mitigate this age of rage.
Trench is News24 editor in chief
