Posted on 01/16/2021 2:34:05 PM PST by Kaslin
This week Dr. Thomas Lifson’s blog, American Thinker, announced that it was closing its comments section.
It is news to almost nobody who reads American Thinker that a political witch hunt is underway. Parties in and out of government are looking for excuses to suppress and destroy voices that oppose the left.
Because AT lacks the ability to monitor comments in real time, and because our position that comments are a forum, not something we publish, is being called into question, we can no longer publish comments.
We take this action with a heavy heart.
This was followed up by a statement by Deputy Editor Andrea Widburg that made it clear that the decision was a very difficult one:
Third, this site is a labor of love for everyone involved, especially for its founder, Thomas Lifson. If you imagine that he would ever authorize such a difficult decision when there were other choices to be made, well, you don’t know Thomas. All of us who work here agree that the choice was binary: shut down the comments or shut down the site. Or to use an analogy, amputate the limb or watch the patient die. Looked at from that perspective, there really was no choice.
I have no inside knowledge of why the decision was made and don’t intend to speculate (Ms. Widburg’s post seems to say that the decision had nothing to do with American Thinker’s legal difficulties with Dominion Voting Systems). The fact is that they were forced to choose between continuing to exist or having unmoderated comments, and they chose the former over the latter. One can’t fault them for that.
In the past week, we’ve seen the freedom of expression of conservative voices come under direct attack by a techno-kakistocracy that cares for very little other than getting revenge for their middle school years when they were mocked by all their classmates (“you’re ugly and your Mom dresses you funny”) and forced to eat paste while donating their lunch money to the class bully’s 401k plan. These are not good people. They are not even emotionally well people. They are not acting in good faith to protect their employer from liability or others from harm. They are hellbent on making American society conform to the socialist hellscape in which they think they want to live. Please make no mistake, these people, not the people they censor, are the danger to the American Experiment.
Comments sections are one of the last remaining frontiers of free speech on the internet. But even that limited and small-scale freedom is more than the left can countenance. Last June, the left came for the comments sections at The Federalist and ZeroHedge:
Tech giant Google has barred ZeroHedge from its lucrative ad platform and threatened to boot The Federalist after finding “racist” content on their pages related to the Black Lives Matter movement.
ZeroHedge, a mostly financial Web site that posts articles from anonymous writers, will no longer be able to rake in millions of dollars of ad revenue through the search giant’s platform after it was found to have violated Google’s policies related to race, NBC News reported.
The Federalist, known for its right-wing content, has been warned that it, too, could be booted from the ad platform because of hate speech in its comments section.
Ever since its founding, the comments section at RedState has been a central part of the site. Perhaps the only time there was serious discussion of dissolving our comments section was when the site had assumed a viscerally NeverTrump aura that made belittling our readers its be-all, end-all. We are keenly aware of the financial pressures the tech conglomerates can bring to bear on a website that produces content loathed by the SJWs these corporations seem to seek out and whose dysfunctional and anti-social behaviors they coddle.
How did this come about? A leftwing branch of the Karenwaffen called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) trolled the comments sections of those two sites to find allegedly racist comments about BLM and the George Floyd demonstrations. With this, they got their allies at Google to shut down the cause of their wadded panties.
Just a couple of days ago, the same basic tactic was used by other actors against the gun-rights message board, AR-15.com, to get its web host, GoDaddy, to shut it down (see Amazon Partner GoDaddy Deplatforms the World’s Largest Gun Forum Website).
We know that we are being watched by people who are trying to build a case to shut down your ability to comment. It’s a fact. I’ve had comments screenshotted from here tossed at me on Twitter as evidence of our racism and desire for violence. I know there are agents provocateurs on the site who surface periodically to make blatantly racist comments and encourage violence and then circulate their own comments as though they had found it. There are others that are obvious mobys…lefties who spout the extreme stuff they think that conservative sites post. We ban those accounts as they are identified but we are constantly playing catch-up.
Today, Mike Ford has a great piece on the role that comments sections fulfill (Opinion: Online Publications & Their Comment Sections, the Taverns of the Modern Era). In principle, I couldn’t agree more. The climate of the times, my fiduciary responsibility to the folks who own this site, and my loyalty to my contributors, some of whom depend upon their earnings here for a non-trivial part of their monthly budget, compels me to add a huge “however.”
If we are going to retain the comments section, we have to manage it so that it does not jeopardize this site. That existence may very well be in jeopardy over the next four years, but we should not allow the push to silence us to be an easy one.
We have a list of guidelines for posting on RedState, and we have a small number of moderators (see Announcing New Moderators in the Comments Section); because of the success of our comments section, the list of mods will expand in the near future. However, our first line of defense is self-policing. Not every thought that runs through your frontal cortex needs to be posted here. Beyond that, stop bleating about how your personal right to post whatever the hell you want is being infringed upon by corporate lackeys, pause and think about how what you are about to post may impact the site and others’ ability to post. We want to retain as free and vibrant a comments section as possible. We believe we can do that without racist remarks, without ethnic slurs, and definitely without calls for violence against individuals and groups.
This is not a joke to me. It is not a joke to the contributors. It is certainly not a joke to the folks who pay all of us. You can be tough and uncompromising without being a dumbass that gets us all in trouble.
Disconcerting, even though I don’t think I ever read comments there, much less made any.
I think what it comes down to is Google money. Rather than going out and finding their own advertisers, or being user funded like Free Republic, they just sign up for google ads (and google Java Spy bots that record page reader’s every mouse move and letter typed, where you came from and where you go when you leave the page).
I have ranted about this for years, and quit doing business with many websites that essentially are monitored and often even controlled by Google, but now maybe some of these sites that should be on ‘our side’, will finally get a clue.
i have had a fantasy for awhile that Free Republic could become big, very big and more influential than it ever has. And I was around at the beginning when we had trouble and there were attempts to demonize us and in effect shut us down. It was quite a long time ago and I forgot the particulars, though. It obviously came directly on behalf of protecting the CLinton Administration from criticism and exposure, and those were “happier times”/////now anything goes. Anyone able to remember what the nature of their threats were?
All anybody does is retreat before the left. Retreat retreat retreat...the new American way.
I agree, but the Leftists have been making preparations for this moment for decades.
Take over the universities and fill the young minds with pap - check.
Take over the media - check.
Take over the hubs of mass communication in the form of social media and web hosting services - check.
Build an unelected bureaucracy that is staffed with true believers - check.
And about 30 other elements they have also put in place.
We’ve just gone about our lives, building and maintaining the nation, while they plotted against us.
Now they are striking. We are no powerless, however. We still wield tremendous economic power, if we can only coordinate and use it to our advantage.
We can stop the motor of the world. WE. All of us, together. The question is, will we?
Traffic and new members are something every discussion forum should and has welcomed since forever.But NOW things are different, and perhaps there should be a careful vetting for new members. But how would that work?
RE: Google has barred ZeroHedge from its lucrative ad platform
ZeroHedge has bern barred from FR for the longest time. Try posting ANY article from Zerohedge here. You can’t.
I lost interest in American Thinker after about five articles or “thought-pieces” in a row came across as pretty timid or substandard, but I would never agree they should be controlled or edited in any way. See how easy it is for the censors to turn us provisionally against each other?
How much longer before FR is in their sights?
Geez, it’s not that hard to fix.
Make people register if they want to comment.
Don’t use the feature where people can just log in with their twiiter, facebook, google+, Discus ID.
Filter for bs email addresses like hotmail.
Don’t publish their first few comments.
Filter for words and phrases.
ALL of that is built into every Content Management System’s commenting system, plus you can install more robust commenting systems for FREE because those CMSs are Open Source. wpDiscuz is a good one for WordPress. They usually have premium addons or a premium version that will do more for $100/year or something.
There are also services like askimet for blocking known spam commenters.
Beitbart’s comments come in so fast, there’s no way to moderate them.
Also, put a disclaimer above the commenting system. While we do our best to moderate comments, we’re not responsible for the words of others. (But in fancy lawyer talk)
Of course all this only applies to conservatives. The rules don’t apply to leftist threats of violence on twitter, reddit, DU etc. Still, there are ways to minimalize nasty comments. Better than being scared of the left.
It would help if these site didn’t utilize every single Big Tech technology on for their sites. Here’s what redstate is running, similar to americanthinker; https://builtwith.com/?https%3a%2f%2fredstate.com
google, google, google, facebook, facebook, amazon, amazon, amazon and a whole slew of tech to market and monetize.
“ZeroHedge has been barred from FR”
True, but I pick up interesting tidbits from there.
Wow! We are quickly spiraling out of control straight into the pit of communism HELL! In a span of a few months the effin rats have turned our nation into a police state. Wake up! USSA= United States of Socialist America is upon us! AND IT’S ONLY THE BEGINNING 😞
See 31 and 32.
See 31 and 32. Time is short.
My guess is a fair number of 'racist comments' were made by liberals pretending to be conservatives. The written form of the 'FAKE HATE CRIMES' that are so common among the commie class.
http://www.fakehatecrimes.org/
Yes, they should have gone to court, lost their a$$es and closed their doors.
The problem wasn't the retraction and apology. The problem was publishing false and defamatory claims that they knew they couldn't possibly back up. Or maybe they trusted that Wood and Powell would come through with their fantastic promises. If that's the case, they are fools. While it might not seem fair that the leftist press gets away with it every day, life isn't fair.
I just watched a video on him on YouTube oddly enough I should go explore that took place
Thank God for the mature rules and mods on FR with their judicious moderation versus either the snowflake moderation so often found on others or the toleration of profanity, vulgarity and porn,
The last resort to get information leaves much to the imagination.
For example. Are ham radio and short wave radio the same thing?
I’d venture to say no one within half a mile of reality, unless you include licensed ham operators, will have a clue what 3 to 8 Mc is.
Much less how to scan around for stations, and that’s my last resort for information that might keep me aware of what is going on in a grid down situation? Help.
Really, I’m not trying to be obtuse, and I sure hope you don’t take it that way, but Amateur Radio isn’t really for amateurs. It takes a good degree of knowledge just to work the receive section of just such a radio.
Which is the reason for my post, and I’m about as amateur as they come, being a rather aged six year tech, studying for the General license.
I guess my bottom line would be don’t tease, if you are going to set the stage of last resort for information, then please get specific.
What is needed for that last resort information including Antenna, radio, band, what one is looking for on the band, frequencies one might be looking for, single side band needed or not. The list goes on and on and isn’t necessarily for sissies.
Perhaps lastly would be links for help when your information still proves lacking to the one interested in the last resort.
Please consider what is being asked and the spirit of help in which it is being asked. It is not an attack on you for bringing up the subject, but an attempt at helping those who just might have a valid interest in your teaser.
As further example, I would have to do some math to figure out what band 3 to 8 megacycles is. I have never been to said band to listen that I am aware of despite having a Grundig Yacht Boy 400PE sitting on the table next to me. Why? I have no clue what is there without a list of frequencies stations, and the times they broadcast.
With newer radios you need to know what you are looking for and the frequency for tuning. It isn’t like my Dad’s long gone Hallicrafters tube receiver from the forties with a variable tuner that allowed me to roam about the sky looking for broadcasting stations on short wave.
Lastly, by the time I got to this thread at five something MT time, the whole thread is pretty much dead anyway. So, sorry for any inconvenience.
Maybe one question, where did you come by the Frequencies for various broadcasters from 3 to 8 Megacycles?
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