LFP Hits New Lows

[Stevo26]

Originally Posted by manny_santos

Good move by the Free Press and other Sun papers. Sometimes there would be one or two good, well thought out comments on an article, but most of the comments fit one of the following categories:

- Blaming unions for everything
- Blaming Kathleen Wynne
- Blaming Stephen Harper
- Dismissing a comment for being from a "liberal" or a "CON" (never a "conservative") no matter how intelligent or well thought out the comment is
- Blaming immigrants/refugees/TFWs for everything
- Blaming organized religion for everything (particularly Christians and Muslims)
- General paranoia and conspiracy theories (particularly relating to 9/11)
- Spam ("That's a great comment but let me tell you about how I make $9000 every day sitting on my ass surfing the Internet while raising 7 children")
- Blaming all students at Western or Fanshawe
- General infighting between regulars, completely off topic from the article at hand

Additionally, *any* article that mentioned a Catholic school was always filled with a ton of comments about the need to defund Catholic schools, no matter how off topic it was.

News stories will still get posted to Facebook and Twitter, and people can still comment there. It's much harder to hide behind a cloak of anonymity on Facebook.

As an advertising manager I have an issue with my clients' ads appearing alongside the garbage comments. Why? People get tired of the comments and start avoiding the website, so the ads are less likely to get exposed.

I think that CBC got online commenting right very early on when they started allowing comments 7-8 years ago. They moderated every single comment, and anything off-topic, spammy, or inflammatory wasn't posted, or was often deleted if reported. They do a lot less moderation nowadays but the quality of the discussion there is definitely much better than what passed on the London Free Press, Toronto Sun, National Post, and other sites (all of whom use Disqus).

The same negative shit surfaces on Facebook, too, with lots of ignorant, wilfully blind and wilfully under-informed people spewing their hatred and vitriol over everything.

A relative of mine, who happens to be one of those right-wing Negative Nellies, had the nerve to censure me for a political comment I posted to Facebook, arguing that social media should be for social material only and not a venue for political discussion. Well, politics *is* a social behaviour, so political comment is fair game. I think the reason why he reacted the way he did was that my comment must have hit a pro-Conservative nerve and he didn't like it.

People like him are the first to complain about comments they don't like, but hypocritically proclaim that their comments should not be censured or challenged.

[manny_santos]

Originally Posted by Stevo26

The same negative shit surfaces on Facebook, too, with lots of ignorant, wilfully blind and wilfully under-informed people spewing their hatred and vitriol over everything.

A relative of mine, who happens to be one of those right-wing Negative Nellies, had the nerve to censure me for a political comment I posted to Facebook, arguing that social media should be for social material only and not a venue for political discussion. Well, politics *is* a social behaviour, so political comment is fair game. I think the reason why he reacted the way he did was that my comment must have hit a pro-Conservative nerve and he didn't like it.

People like him are the first to complain about comments they don't like, but hypocritically proclaim that their comments should not be censured or challenged.

That's a syndrome I see not just with social media but all public discourse, when it comes to extremists on both the right and the left. They both believe in free speech, as long as it's their own free speech or they agree with it. On the right they're the ones who complain about "liberal" media and wish that only media that agrees with them exists. They spend their days complaining about the Toronto Star and about how much money the CBC receives. On the left they're the ones who declare war on free speech on university campuses and believe anything they don't agree with should be censored, and use buzzwords like "neo-Nazis" to describe people who don't agree with them.

As I've alluded to in another thread I have some right-wing conservative Christian friends, and a problem some of them run into is that if they share a news article that supports their viewpoint on a particular issue, their "friends" go swinging with virtrol and hate, and say they shouldn't have to be exposed to viewpoints they don't agree with. Geez, if you don't want to see stuff you don't agree with, don't go on Facebook or at least unfollow the person. I don't agree with everything they post but I don't let it bother me. Likewise I have friends who post some very left-wing stuff I don't agree with either, but it's not worth getting annoyed about.