Behold evil words from one of the biggest online newspapers in the world, The (London) Daily Mail: “The comments below have been moderated in advance.”
With those simple eight words a person can be made to feel stifled, gagged, frustrated, angry, marginalized, compromised, misunderstood, disempowered, wounded, cutoff, ridiculed, undermined, manipulated, … and so on and so forth, all under the guise of “keeping things civil.”
Sure. People should not be permitted to make threats towards others or use gratuitous profanity but, beyond that, one ought to be able to speak the truth as honestly as they see fit!
To me it’s really disgusting that a place like the Mail can hire people to shamelessly use their positions to create an artificial sense of what the general perception is regarding any “controversial” issues that come up via their articles. And there’s basically not a thing that a person can do about it except to stand by and watch a BS picture of things being created to serve an agenda, and it’s almost always a LIBERAL one!
It’s laughable to even call it a “newspaper”, given their occasional forays into whole-cloth fiction in their “reporting”. But their bullshit is definitely reactionary right-wing bullshit.
There’s a scary thought, considering the ones that get through.
They’re a private organization, they can do what they want with their comments sections. Vote with your eyes/mouseclicks and just don’t visit the site if you don’t like it.
Personally I think comments sections, while often toxic, offer insight into what people really think and are valuable to an extent.
The BBC News website also heavily moderates comments in advance and even so, they still let through plenty of right-wing gibberish - so much so that someone invented an automatic comments generatorwhich rather successfully mimics (or did at the time it was made) the sort of inane comments common to the website.
Why would a reactionary right wing rag cull online comments to, paraphrase the OP, “promote a liberal agenda”?
I assume OP also reads Daily Mail articles as well as the comments. What could possibly give him the impression that the Daily Mail is anywhere but well right of centre?
Perhaps OP’s politics lie far more to the right then he realises or is willing to admit?
In a similar vein there’s the Daily Mail headline generator, my favourites so far being “WILL THE UNEMPLOYED MOLEST YOUR PETS?” and “WILL FEMINISM INFECT TAXPAYERS’ MONEY WITH AIDS?”
Easier said than done, especially since it seems like all of the English-speaking papers in the world get their heads-up from the DM … and, to my knowledge, don’t have a substantial website like the DM has.
I don’t know how you can get that kind of value from a place that bullets so many posts that people write in that place but don’t go up. I like it that they have LOTS of articles constantly featured of current events along with photos, but it’s getting to be a joke to actually think they really care about wanting to know what us regular folks think by letting us give our thoughts without feeling as if Nazis are looking over our shoulders.
But who knows?, maybe one day I’ll come into a billion dollars and will be able to have my own newspaper website, allowing me to indulge in my own cockamamie way of fooling the masses into seeing events in the world through my own warped point of view.
No, no one takes their cue from the Daily Mail online comments. It’s meaningless in the grand scheme of things - do you really feel that the comments on the Daily Mail website has any impact on other papers, let alone anyone else in a position of power?
