Moderation is not censorship

Sometimes, you have to keep the discussion on track and not bring in distracting items.  In this case, I am referring to PopularScience.com's decision to stop taking comments.

It wasn't a decision we made lightly. As the news arm of a 141-year-old science and technology magazine, we are as committed to fostering lively, intellectual debate as we are to spreading the word of science far and wide. The problem is when trolls and spambots overwhelm the former, diminishing our ability to do the latter.

Some people want to cut short rational discussion.  There is the 50 Cent Party and it's right wing US equivalent that sees the words "Second Amendment" and comes to argue gun rights--even if its a second amendment to a community dog park proposal in Effing Sodbury. 

Anyway, the Popular Science post pointed out that:

But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests. In one study led by University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Dominique Brossard, 1,183 Americans read a fake blog post on nanotechnology and revealed in survey questions how they felt about the subject (are they wary of the benefits or supportive?). Then, through a randomly assigned condition, they read either epithet- and insult-laden comments ("If you don't see the benefits of using nanotechnology in these kinds of products, you're an idiot" ) or civil comments. The results, as Brossard and coauthor Dietram A. Scheufele wrote in a New York Times op-ed:

Uncivil comments not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant's interpretation of the news story itself.

In the civil group, those who initially did or did not support the technology — whom we identified with preliminary survey questions — continued to feel the same way after reading the comments. Those exposed to rude comments, however, ended up with a much more polarized understanding of the risks connected with the technology.

Simply including an ad hominem attack in a reader comment was enough to make study participants think the downside of the reported technology was greater than they'd previously thought.

Another, similarly designed study found that even just firmly worded (but not uncivil) disagreements between commenters impacted readers' perception of science.
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.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to "debate" on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.

Reading comment threads on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there’s little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.

Articles about the environment and gun control are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it’s a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard the opposition with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often it has been discredited. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which appears to be the point.

The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and traditional progressives tend be more willing to discuss an issue than these right-wing libertarians, many of whom seek instead to shut down debate.

The problem is that this is a matter of public safety, which now that the science has been unleashed will show that it has been guided by fiction and fantasy.  That is not the proper way to run a public policy debate.

Now, I know that the usual suspects will complain, but it has to be said.

Since I mention The Fifty Cent Army

I thought I would repost from my blog: 

George Monbiot, you swine…

You beat me to writing a piece on this topic and did it in a way that was really close to how I would have written the piece.

George and I are pretty much in agreement about most things, which is the reason I titled this the way I did since it is jest that I am describing him as a swine (and I’m a dog). I guess great minds think alike. And I concede  that  George is much more plugged in, but his post Reclaim the Cyber-Commons is pretty close to something I’ve had sitting around as a draft. But I have to tell him his tag line:

Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it.
Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.

is a little off in this case.  I totally agree with him when he makes this point and would have started my post the same way:

The weapon used by both state and corporate players is a technique known as astroturfing. An astroturf campaign is one that mimics spontaneous grassroots mobilisations, but which has in reality been organised. Anyone writing a comment piece in Mandarin critical of the Chinese government, for example, is likely to be bombarded with abuse by people purporting to be ordinary citizens, upset by the slurs against their country.

But many of them aren’t upset: they are members of the 50 Cent Party, so-called because one Chinese government agency pays 5 mao (half a yuan) for every post its tame commenters write. Teams of these sock-puppets are hired by party leaders to drown out critical voices and derail intelligent debates.

George learned about online astroturfing in 2002, when the investigators Andy Rowell and Jonathan Matthews looked into a series of comments made by two people calling themselves Mary Murphy and Andura Smetacek. These two people had launched ferocious attacks, across several internet forums, against a scientist whose research suggested that Mexican corn had been widely contaminated by GM pollen. Rowell and Matthews found that one of the messages Mary Murphy had sent came from a domain owned by the Bivings Group, a PR company specialising in internet lobbying.

And anyone who blogs about unpopular topics such as Palestinian Rights or Gun Control knows, you will be inundated by comments challenging your beliefs. George points out that:

Reading comment threads on the Guardian’s sites and elsewhere on the web, two patterns jump out at me. The first is that discussions of issues in which there’s little money at stake tend to be a lot more civilised than debates about issues where companies stand to lose or gain

I'm with him...but I'm watching what I say when we're at dinner parites

billions: such as climate change, public health and corporate tax avoidance. These are often characterised by amazing levels of abuse and disruption.

Articles about the environment are hit harder by such tactics than any others. I love debate, and I often wade into the threads beneath my columns. But it’s a depressing experience, as instead of contesting the issues I raise, many of those who disagree bombard me with infantile abuse, or just keep repeating a fiction, however often you discredit it. This ensures that an intelligent discussion is almost impossible – which appears to be the point.

The second pattern is the strong association between this tactic and a certain set of views: pro-corporate, anti-tax, anti-regulation. Both traditional conservatives and traditional progressives tend be more willing to discuss an issue than these right-wing libertarians, many of whom seek instead to shut down debate.

So what’s going on? I’m not suggesting that most of the people trying to derail these discussions are paid to do so, though I would be surprised if none were. I’m suggesting that some of the efforts to prevent intelligence from blooming seem to be organised, and that neither website hosts nor other commenters know how to respond.

I have to admit that if I had written my piece on Astroturf, I would have also borrowed from George where he talks about the people who aren’t paid, but who are willing to shill for the PR firms that  do the internet astroturfing by repeating their messages. They are the committed, although, I do wonder as to how many are truly concerned individuals since they rarely bother me after I started posting IP addresses! So, I am in agreement with you that the keyboard warriors who do post here are truly individual, but rare.

But, since you beat me to it, George, I’m going to borrow from you. Especially since you mention this:

For his film (Astro)Turf Wars, Taki Oldham secretly recorded a training session organised by a rightwing libertarian group called American Majority. The trainer, Austin James, was instructing Tea Party members on how to “manipulate the medium”. This is what he told them:

“Here’s what I do. I get on Amazon; I type in “Liberal Books”. I go through and I say “one star, one star, one star”. The flipside is you go to a conservative/ libertarian whatever, go to their products and give them five stars. … This is where your kids get information: Rotten Tomatoes, Flixster. These are places where you can rate movies. So when you type in “Movies on Healthcare”, I don’t want Michael Moore’s to come up, so I always give it bad ratings. I spend about 30 minutes a day, just click, click, click, click. … If there’s a place to comment, a place to rate, a place to share information, you have to do it. That’s how you control the online dialogue and give our ideas a fighting chance.”

Over 75% of the funding for American Majority, which hosted this training session, comes from the Sam Adams Alliance. In 2008, the year in which American Majority was founded, 88% of the alliance’s money came from a single donation, of $3.7m. A group which trains rightwing libertarians to distort online democratic processes, in other words, was set up with funding from a person or company with a very large wallet.

I wish that George would allow for comments since I want to give him a hand for putting out something that I will admit is a much better version than what I had written. More importantly, I think that what George has written needs to be published so that more people are aware of how debate is being stifled: especially since he neglect subjects where this practise is widespread (non-inclusive list of where I add the issues of  Palestinian rights, gun control to the ones George mentions).

George, this is the exception that proves the rule.  So, a grudging thank you for telling me something I knew already and saving me a lot of work in actually writing it by beating me to the punch here. I hope you don’t mind me passing it on with my own comments.

OK, George, I borrowed from you. I hope that you will borrow from my post The Centre for Alternative Technology is in financial straits. After all, they are in your neck of the woods.
I think you can get the proper audience for that message.

See also:

• http://www.lobbywatch.org/
• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Astroturf
• http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Grassroots_PR_Activists_Swap_War_Stories
• http://astroturfwars.org/about/tea-parties/
• http://crooksandliars.com/karoli/american-majority-part-astroturf-see-whats