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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Online, Churls Gone Vile |
| 2007-03-26 |
| By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer One of the unique qualities of Internet discourse is its freewheeling, no-holds-barred nature, where passionate arguments are often accompanied by some choice expletives and a virtual finger in the eye. But what happens when the talk turns ugly, racist and violent? We drop 'em into the sinktrap here. Very occasionally they get flushed outright, but not often, and that's still too often for my taste. In recent weeks, some of those who post comments on the conservative blog Little Green Footballs have said they wished that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had succeeded in what the Gitmo prisoner says was a plot to kill Jimmy Carter. And some who posted comments on the liberal Huffington Post have expressed regret that the suicide bomber at a military base in Afghanistan failed to take out the visiting Dick Cheney. We all get dipshits. We had one here last night. The question kinda revolves on what you do with them, though. If you dump them, then they've got nothing to do with you. If you use them for chew toys, then they can be kinda fun. If you clutch them to your bosom and whisper sweet nothings to them then you become one with them. People assume they're your friends and companions, that you hang around together, maybe even belong to the same bowling league. Pregnancy's always a danger, and you could find yourself alone, raising a passle of nasty little bastard offspring, destined for the Juvenile Court of Public Opinion system. No corner of the Net is safe from this bile. The Washington Post's Web site has been grappling with a surge in offensive and incendiary comments. Get yourself a sinktrap. I'll be happy to design one for you, for a moderate fee. The really gruesome stuff represents a tiny minority of those online. But is there a way of policing the worst stuff without shutting down robust debate? Of course there is, though you have to give it a bit of thought. But that's always the problem, isn't it? I keep thinking about the CB radio phenomenon of the 70s, where suddenly millions of honest citizens were using CBs because of the national 55 mph speed limit. Beside performing the valuable service of keeping points off citizens' licenses and dollars in their wallets, CB also allowed people to chat while eating up the miles, thereby keeping them awake and reducing the accident rate. CB died when the anonymity of it all brought out the foul-mouthed and abusive, who proceded to poop in the common punch bowl. The same happened with email, once a valuable tool for communication, now a tiresome chore that means wading through spam until we find the occasional nugget of message from someone we want to hear from. Blogs, with their comment sections, make a target just as tempting for those pushing herbal viagra, various types of sluts, financial schemes designed to separate us from our earnings and/or identities, and fraud, which is why the 'Burg has devolved from a thoughtful, weighted spam filtration system to a brute force arrangement that doesn't need any subtlety. The comments about Cheney at the Huffington Post included: "You can't kill pure evil." "If at first you don't succeed . . . " "Dr. Evil escapes again . . . damn." Founder Arianna Huffington wrote that "no one at HuffPost is defending these comments -- they are unacceptable and were treated as such by being removed." I'll set aside political antagonism and sympathize for a moment... Okay. Time's up. The comments about Mohammed and Carter at Little Green Footballs included: "Can we furlough him -- just so he can realize the Carter plot? Please?" and "Even this schmuck had some good ideas." The site's founder, Charles Johnson, wrote on Little Green Footballs that such comments "reflect only the opinions of the individuals who posted them" and doubted that they "rise to the level of hatred that showed up in Arianna's readers' Cheney-related comments." Usually I agree with Charles, but in this case I don't. Those comments would have been sinktrapped. Feel free to wish the Carter will keel over in the near future from natural causes. That's your right. Advocating murder isn't. Some conservatives and liberals seized on the incidents to denounce the other side, but no conclusions should be drawn from wack jobs on the fringe. You can't stop the dipshits from showing up without banning their IP addresses at the server, and it's easy enough to change or cloak your IP address. All you can do is dispose of them, whether discretely or publicly. I'm in favor of publicly, because if you dump them without fanfare often people have noticed their presence, assumed they're associated with you, and don't notice when you take out the garbage. Since last summer, washingtonpost.com has allowed registered users to post comments on any news story. A recent report about New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin, who said the slow recovery of his city was part of a plan to change its racial makeup and leadership, led to a number of offensive or inflammatory remarks: "Some Black politicians are [expletive] idiots." Not too sure why that one's "offensive or inflammatory," unless there's an implication what white or otherwise other than black pols aren't. Nagin's a blackbelt bufoon. "IF a white MAN were to speak as you do, you'd look for a lynching party." One person described Nagin as a racist and a women's sanitary product. I consider him a racist. I'm not sure he's a tampon. Washingtonpost.com Executive Editor Jim Brady says he does not have the resources to screen the roughly 2,000 daily comments in advance. That's why God created software, isn't it? He has one staffer deleting offensive comments after the fact, and banning the authors from further feedback, based on complaints from readers. Cumbersome, isn't it? Brady plans to devote more staff to the process and to use new filtering technology. "The medium allows for readers and journalists to engage in conversation, and to say we're not going to take advantage of that doesn't make a lot of sense to me," he says. "I'd rather figure out a way to do it better than not to do it at all." Gimme a call, Jim. I promise we won't discuss Ray Nagin or ladies' sanitary products. But Post reporter Darryl Fears is among those in the newsroom who believe the comments should be junked if offensive postings can't be filtered out in advance. I guess that's why Darryl's not the executive editor, isn't it? Perhaps someday he'll have the wisdom not to toss the baby with the bathwater. "If you're an African American and you read about someone being called a porch monkey, that overrides any positive thing that you would read in the comments," he says. If that particular phrase was used seriously in Rantburg comments it'd go on the list and future comments containing it would disappear and perhaps earn the commentors a trip to visit Muffler Man. Assuming no sink trap, a reference to porch monkeys in one comment could very well be balanced by a few references to the presence of subnormal intellects in the comments section overall and perhaps an invitation here or there to the porch monkey poster to go have sex with himself. It sounds like Darryl's still trying to work out the relative amounts of damage involved in sticks and stones versus words. "You're starting to see some of the language you see on neo-Nazi sites, and that's not good for The Washington Post or for the subjects in those stories." Does anyone have the mother wit to suggest the "neo-Nazi" maroons get bent? Or are you too busy swooning? Perhaps a whiff of smelling salts or asafoetida would help? After Post reporter Darragh Johnson wrote in February about a Northeast Washington teenager who was fatally shot while being chased by police, some readers posted comments, including racist comments, criticizing the boy. Johnson says the 17-year-old's father cited the comments in declining to answer most questions about his son. What is spreading this Web pollution is the widespread practice of allowing posters to spew their venom anonymously. If people's full names were required -- even though some might resort to aliases -- it would go a long way toward cleaning up the neighborhood. I like the sink trap. It turns their venom against them by putting them on display. |
| Posted by:Fred |
| #6 I agree KBK. Sinktrap is a totally efficacious solution. Great job with the in-line comments as well Fred - informative, humorous and chock full o' common sense. |
| Posted by: ryuge 2007-03-26 23:44 |
| #5 newsgroups Naggum on comp.lang.lisp ("Crap, did he really say that? Now, where's that screen cleaner?") Usenet was/is an interesting sociological exercise in controlling a discussion by sheer force of intellect. Nice idea, but it doesn't work if there's no intellect. A race to the bottom follows shortly. I've got to congratulate Fred on striking a successful balance. Rantburg works, and his previous experience shows through. HP, LGF, and WaPo are years behind. I hope they all read Fred's comments / instruction manual. |
| Posted by: KBK 2007-03-26 22:22 |
| #4 newsgroups Oh yeah. Remember alt.syntax.tactical? |
| Posted by: eLarson 2007-03-26 16:14 |
| #3 CB died when the anonymity of it all brought out the foul-mouthed and abusive, who proceded to poop in the common punch bowl. Same thing happened to newsgroups, where I think the people who are fouling up blogs learned their trade. And their spelling. |
| Posted by: Steve 2007-03-26 14:49 |
| #2 In that case, I take it all back. He is a douchebag. |
| Posted by: Fred 2007-03-26 14:00 |
| #1 women's sanitary product. I'm think it was more of a douche-bag, as that's the only one I've seen used to refer to a person. (C.F. Lord and Lady D, Saturday Night Live skit from the early 80s, IIRC.) |
| Posted by: eLarson 2007-03-26 13:10 |