Free Republic

Following Jesus means remembering Christ’s command to forgive and to pray for our enemies. It means letting go of malice and bitterness, even under fire. Even though I know better, I recently left a comment on the Facebook post for a Federalist article I saw lamenting mask mandates. I didn’t rant or get on a soapbox. All I did was express my belief that wearing masks protects others and wrote a couple of sentences pointing out the need to look out for our most vulnerable citizens. Since The Federalist is a conservative publication and I tend to lean to the...

Have you ever really dug into the comments section below a controversial news article? The correct answer is "No, I am not a crazy person," but if you have you'll know that it's a Hobbesian netherworld down there, and a new study in Journal of Communication puts some numbers behind the all-caps hysterics. Researchers from the Universities of Utah and Arizona examined more than 6,400 comments posted on the website of the Arizona Daily Star (those poor, poor researchers ... ) and found, in a result unlikely to shock anyone who has been called an OBAMABOT or RETHUGLICAN by a...

In the early days of the internet, there was much talk of how the web would connect us all, thereby furthering knowledge and fostering community. Yet for all its advocates’ and early adopters’ optimism about its potential to enable us to organise, think and influence one another, freed from institutional supervision or what the newcomers frequently described as “mainstream media bias”, one thing has remained consistently problematic: comments posted under articles or blogs (or “below the line” in internet-speak). ~snip~ One of the great questions for the future of the net is: to what extent this extraordinary freedom will be...