CBC turning off comments is good idea

Free speech on places such as Facebook isn’t necessarily better speech

The CBC is running an experiment that, to some anyway, seems counter to the mission of a public broadcaster: it is turning off comments on its Facebook page for a month.

The reasoning? “If public discourse is a litmus test of the health of a society, the conversation on social media suggests we have a problem,” reads the explanatory blog post on the CBC website. “As the conversation has degraded on these platforms, we find ourselves limiting what we post there.”

Citing the desire to both protect its journalists, and not expose other readers to comments full of hate and xenophobia, it is turning them off for one month.

Predictably, it elicited cries of censorship. A #defundthecbc hashtag trended on Twitter. Canadian media gadfly Jesse Brown stated it more clearly: that the CBC saying “‘the pub- lic should pay us to tell stories but should not be allowed to publicly comment on them’ is not a position consistent with the basic notion of public broadcasting.”

At issue here is what role a news organization, and in particular a public one, has in offering a platform for public reader feedback. And despite Brown’s and others’ reasonable complaints, the social media era has upended some of our most cherished ideas around speech — and that guaranteeing someone a platform for their feedback isn’t just unnecessary, it’s actively harmful.

It does, however, pain me to say that.

It would only slightly exaggerate things to say that I grew up in the comment section. What seems like a lifetime ago, I wrote, explored ideas and made friends in the little comment boxes under blog posts, both on my own little blog and on other more prominent ones.

That experience both enriched my life and eventually led to my career as a writer. It also spoke to the potential of the internet: that it gave ordinary people a voice, exposed them to more ideas and offered a pathway for recognition and success.

It’s more than that, though. That kind of model of more speech making for a better world is a treasured ideal of democratic systems. And in particular, the idea of being able to speak back to power — to push back against official narratives or to give a megaphone to once-silenced voices — is supposed to be the liberal democratic ideal at its very best.

How, then, can one argue in good faith for less speech?

At its ideal, the comment section under a story can correct mistakes, challenge assumptions and give voice to what was not depicted or described.

That does indeed happen on Facebook sometimes, even today. But what you also get in those same comment boxes are wild conspiracy theories, baseless ravings, misogyny, racism and other forms of hatred, both subtle and outright, and more. It is in short a toxic stew, one in which the beneficial aspects of comments come with considerable costs.

The debate over comment sections is a long one. As it became apparent that unmoderated comments were an invitation for the very worst to shoot off their mouths, the ideal shifted to moderation: that someone should both remove offensive comments, but also work to cultivate community.

That ideal seems mostly dead on Facebook. The people who comment under a CBC story are not a community in any meaningful sense of the word; they are mostly drive-by commenters, and certainly not loyal to one another. There is also the taxing work of actually moderating hate-filled comments — the draining, sometimes trau- matic effort of trawling through comments filled with slurs and backwards xenophobia in order to keep a comment section clean.

While the CBC could indeed pay someone to do that work, they shouldn’t. Not only is the CBC’S budget forever constrained and better put to producing news from overlooked communities, there are countless ways for people to react to the CBC’S stories if they so wish: their own Facebook pages, Twitter, social news sites like Reddit — or, for that matter, their own blogs.

And that is sort of the point. When you kill comments on Facebook, there is additional work to be done if you want to spit vitriol at a journalist or proclaim your racism and general lack of intellect to the world. That is a feature, not a bug: putting up barriers to easy commenting filters out the fluff and cuts down on the spread of hatred and misinformation.

Liberal societies are predicated on free speech. That much is still true.

The tension of well-argued, oppositional ideas still drives us toward what is better.

But when you give a platform to anyone, you won’t necessarily get better speech; in fact, everything we have seen thus far is that the discourse you get is much worse.

We find ourselves at a paradoxical crossroads, one that free speech absolutists and bigots will find absolutely infuriating: to save speech and public discourse, we need less of it, not more.

Bring on the Facebook comment ban — it can only make social media and the lives of journalists of better.