Critical Commentary

JA October 30

Blogging is just as much about creating healthy discussion and debate as it is about writing. As the ABC’s Irfan Yusuf points out, while once we may have taken the trouble to write a Letter to the Editor, now we have the luxury of the comment box. Our feedback is snappy and immediate, and responses can be equally fast-paced. This is largely a good thing – it keeps writers on their toes and gives readers a chance to add their knowledge to the issue at hand. Yet the change of writer/reader dynamics in the digital era does bring up issues of its own, namely whether comments can or should be regulated, and how.

Earlier this month, some of you may have read about Herald Sun columnist and blogger Andrew Bolt’s ‘moral dilemma’. Content aside, Bolt runs a very successful blog on the Herald website, with ‘more than one million hits a month’ and ‘as many as 13 000 comments in a week’. All comments are moderated, either by Bolt or News Ltd staff, and must be approved. Given the high numbers here, this is no small task (Bolt claims it takes up to 10 hours a week). On Tuesday 16 Oct, he posted this update on his forum page:

David Marr has alerted me to a comment which snuck through our moderation yesterday and which abuses him in homophobic terms. I am mortified it got through, and have instantly removed it. I apologise to David and have banned the person who put it up, as I have done with other readers who have made homophobic comments in the past.

A seemingly considerate gesture, until one probes deeper. Scott Bridges of Crikey makes this point:

There’s really only two possible explanations for how the comment “snuck through” if Bolt himself didn’t approve it: the site’s moderators willingly approved a homophobic and abusive email, or the moderators didn’t read it properly. One Bolt reader claims that another comment pointing out the inappropriate nature of the now-deleted comment was submitted and not approved, indicating (if true) that the moderators were at least aware of the homophobic abuse. No matter which way you look at the incident, it appears to be a failure of moderation due to inconsistent and poorly defined guidelines and practices.

Tobias Ziegler of Pure Poison and ABC’s The Hungry Beast also pointed out that while Bolt removed that comment, his blog is filled with hateful and intolerant sentiment, all of which is let through.

Bolt responded with a post on his own blog, in which he claimed that ‘critics are now deceitfully using the stranger comments of some reader to define my own views and to delegitimise the ones I in fact hold and express’ and that ‘my intention has been to allow on this blog a discussion that is as free as possible – freer, in fact, than you will find on virtually any other blog’.

There is much that has and could be said about Bolt and his views. His blog is rife with blatant stereotypes and divisive rhetoric, and the comments thread regularly and shockingly reflect that hatefulness and intolerance (see here and here). Yet there is also another question to be asked here, relating to moderation and how responsible admins are for what gets said on their sites.

Scott Bridges rightly pointed out that while bloggers cannot be said to endorse every comment let through on their sites, there is the question of how they react:

If only a couple of lone comments among thousands contain hate or intolerance, they can probably be safely ignored as their outlier status speaks for itself, but if strong themes of these attitudes develop across multiple long comment threads, a blogger’s silence can be deafening. (Again for the record, I’m not suggesting that Bolt’s silence indicates endorsement.)

Moreover, while Bolt seems to prefer to hide behind the banner of free speech, the situation is far more complex than ‘either/or’. I agree with Ziegler that the tone of Bolt’s posts (hostile and couched in the tenor of ‘us versus them’) sets the scene for particularly virulent comments:

Andrew Bolt seems to think that those are the only ways a site author can affect commentary – that there is a direct trade-off between freedom of speech and the risk of objectionable content. I disagree with that view – the site author sets the tone of debate through their own content, and can shape the tone of the debate by engaging with the site’s commenters, reinforcing good commentary and disagreeing with – and, where necessary, reining in – comments that are heading in an inappropriate direction. In short, even setting aside any questions of moderation the site authors can influence the culture of commentary on their blog.

Ziegler goes on to point out that while mistakes will understandably be made, ‘the best you can do is address the objectionable comment by removing or editing it and offering apologies to those affected, and then attempting to improve moderation practices so the problem doesn’t happen again.’

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