Given the overabundance of information on the Web, it often feels as if posting a comment on someone else’s article or blog post makes absolutely no difference.
I wonder - in the short history of the Web, has any comment been posted anywhere that had lasting effects? (Widely interpreted, that is - maybe one that solved a problem, exposed wrongdoing, added an expression to the language, or just went viral.) That was, in some way, consequential?
To repeat, I’m talking about comments posted at the end of someone else’s article or blog post.
The only one I have come up with so far is the comment that helped expose the Penn State child molestation scandal.
Don’t know about that specifically, but there may have been analogous cases in the pre-internet days. I vaguely recall that it was some throw-away off-hand remark made by some Federal Aviation Agency official, before some Congressional committee, that raised a few eyebrows and ultimately led to blowing the lid off some MAJOR scandal (Watergate, I think it was). Not even sure what I would search for on Google to try to find it now.
It was Alexander Butterfield, FAA Administrator, who had formerly been one of Nixon’s White House staffers. Sam Ervin’s committee was already investigating Watergate, and Butterfield (who was not at all directly involved) was called to testify on some very general topics of some sort. Nobody on the committee knew about Nixon’s secret taping of practically everything. Then, in committee, Butterfield casually mentioned it, to gasps of astonishment! That blew the lid off the secret tapes, and set in motion the Battles of the Tapes!
ETA: [hijack] That wiki also mentions that Butterfield said he suspected (ultimately proven correctly) that “Deep Throat”, the guy who told the story to Woodward and Bernstein, was actually Mark Felt. I learned, just a few years ago, that I have just “two degrees of separation” from Felt, if you count an intermediary that I had some unrelated e-mail conversations with. [/hijack]
I believe that it was a message board post which exposed the fraudulent nature of the documents that Dan Rather had presented as proving George W. Bush’s non-fulfillment of his National Guard duties. At the very least, this did serious damage to Rather’s journalistic reputation; at most one could say it swayed a decent number of undecided voters in the 2004 presidential election, although I’d doubt that said swayed voters are a large enough number to say that it genuinely affected the outcome of the election.
Say [del]rather[/del] uh, instead, that Dan Rather’s liberal reporting on CBS (I don’t think anybody really disputed that point) could well have swayed who-knows-how-many swayable voters to lean Democratic, and it would be no surprise if certain Republican operatives wished to “neutralize” him. Certainly, Rather was widely reviled by conservative pundits.
Those documents didn’t break the news that Bush had welched on his National Guard duties – that was well known. What those docs DID do (had they been genuine) was provide higher-level corroboration than was previously known – they purported to be from Bush’s commanding officer. See Wikipedia, Dan Rather – Killian Documents
The docs were blatantly false, as was immediately noticed, but Rather swallowed the bait. In this wiki: Killian documents controversy, it is claimed that:
[QUOTE=Wikipedia:]
The authenticity of the documents was challenged within hours on Internet forums and blogs, with questions initially focused on alleged anachronisms in the documents’ typography and content soon spreading to the mass media.[12]
[/quote]
The Conspiracy Theorists were right on top of this one! It almost seemed like those bloggers knew ahead of time this was coming, and were just drooling over their keyboards for Rather’s 60 Minutes broadcast, so they could jump all over the case! On the other side, there was wild speculation all over the place that those docs were deliberate dirty-tricks hoaxes, specifically designed and planted to pwn Rather! If so, they sure succeeded, and the took the bait all right! It was even widely speculated that this came down from Karl Rove himself! Of course, the Bush Administration jumped right in to investigate this! Not.
I personally feel (without much evidence beyond just the sort of stuff I just said here) that it was a political dirty trick, intended to destroy Rather, possibly originating from some “High Places”. Karl Rove himself, from all that we think we knew about him, could certainly have been a plausible suspect. But nobody with real power to get to the bottom of it ever did, and Rather ended up spending his later years suing CBS instead. One of the mysteries of our time remains!
There are a lot of political happenings that start in blog comments. Someone blogs that Mr Politician said something, someone comments that they said the opposite earlier, someone posts a video, maybe the voting record. Sooner or later the media picks it up and Mr Politician is scrambling trying to explain himself. I’m pretty sure there have been things like this at Daily Kos and Wonkette. Some blogs played a part in the Dan Rather documents, but it originated on freerepublic, which I would classify as a message board instead of a blog.
A few years ago people were saying blogs would put journalists out of business for this very reason. I’m sure there are examples of this that fit the “exposed wrongdoing” criteria, I just don’t know of any offhand because one of the last things on earth I want to do is read blog comments.
Rather himself had the power to get to the bottom of it. He knew who his source for the forged documents was. Certainly, after it came out that this source wasn’t quite reliable, if he genuinely thought it could have originated as a dirty trick from Rove, I’m certain he’d have been very publicly all over that.
Every day? I guess it depends on what you mean by “make an impact.”
Here’s a blog post from TheOatmeal that’s resulted in over $100k being raised for charity. Does that meet your criteria?
Here’s a blog post from Comics Alliance talking about DC’s insanely-sexist (and badly-drawn) image of Catwoman for an upcoming cover. It will almost certainly result in DC changing the cover, or at least making an apology for it.
If you read a lot of blogs, you really see these kind of items every day.
EDIT: Oops, totally misread your OP and brought up blog ENTRIES, not blog COMMENTS. Sorry, mea culpa.
Comments on blogs can have a big effect on the writer(s). If certain posts generate more/less comments, or if those comments are more/less positive, they’re likely to take that into account when generating future blog post.
While this isn’t going to make a single comment significant (per the OP’s definitions) all by itself, it’s certainly worth thinking about when you’re deciding whether or not to respond.
Hmmm… I heard an interview with Dan Rather the other day on CBC Radio where he still insists the documents were genuine and CBS sold him out to the powers-that-be/were.
I have some sympathy for the guy and the gist of the story was somewhat correct as far as anyone knows or can prove, but seriously - what turned out to be MS Word/Windows Times Roman - proportional spaced with superscripts for the “st” as in “21st”? No matter how many times you re-xerox it to fake old photocopying… NOBODY at that level of office staff in backwater Texas had typewriters in 1973 that produced proportional space type. Superscripts?? Who the heck had those? Any superscript typeface would be so difficult to use on a typewriter, people would just type the regular characters…
I can’t believe people in journalism were so stupid or eager they fell for that clunker.
As for other clever online isssues, there have been several embarrassing email gaffes over the years, and the Weiner guy sending his underwear photos…
A lot of people have been arrested for the wrong sort of chat with a (alleged) minor…
I believe Dan Savage has said that the It Gets Better Project was inspired by a comment on one of his blog posts. That seems to have made a fairly big difference in terms of bringing media attention to anti-gay bullying.
If you comment on Norman Tebbit’s (an extremely important Brit politican in the eighties, and one who still has some clout now) columns on the Telegraph website if you make a reasonably coherent point he tends to respond.
Edit: Here is the latest column, and if you scroll down you’ll see he spent more than half of it arguing with the contributors to the previous one - and he doesn’t pull his punches!
The Polymath Project was kicked off by a thread that developed on Tim Grower’s blog, in which the commenters found a new solution to some long-standing math problem (can’t post links from the phone, just search wiki for polymath project).