Reporter's Notebook: An Argument For Turning Off Comments On Facebook

A photo of Norman Rockwell's 'Freedom of Speech' painting.

I’ve been thinking.

I’m in a few Facebook community groups that don’t allow political posts.

I used to think that was wrong.

I used to think that The Valley Indy Facebook page was doing the ​‘right thing’ by not moderating comment threads under the stories I post.

But now I understand why so many people are turned off by Facebook political threads.

I closed a political thread on Valley Indy Facebook Monday night — meaning no one was allowed to comment — because it was just two guys arguing, and I needed to help my kid with his math homework.

When you close a thread on Facebook, you risk being accused of bias and censorship.

I closed the thread, got a ​‘tsk tsk’ from the chairman of the Ansonia GOP, helped my kid finish his homework, and I obsessed over whether I made the right decision for the next three hours.

Here are my thoughts, even though you did not ask.

I saw that I had been ​‘tagged’ in a Valley Indy Facebook by a reader just before 9 p.m., as my daughter and wife screamed about a giant spider upstairs.

(Note: a ​‘thread’ is a series of comments on Facebook under a ​‘post.’ A ​‘post’ is when I post a link to a Valley Indy story on Facebook, hoping people will come to ValleyIndy.org and read local news instead of yelling at each other on Facebook.)

The spider upstairs was big, and it was dangling on a curtain, and I wasn’t touching that hairy SOB to release him into the wild, so I sucked it up with a vacuum.

Then I ventured into the thread, where a reader I don’t know complained that I favored Democrats. 

He was arguing with another reader over politics. 

The other reader was a Democrat-leaning guy who previously said I supported rightwing fascism (because of a letter I published from a Republican).

Anyway, I quickly read their back and forth, and snapped at my kid when he asked me a question. My kid was distracting me from the task at hand — moderating a political Facebook comment thread at 9 o’clock at night.

I quickly glanced at a few posts between the two guys, and made a snap decision: enough.

It looked like it was just two guys having a run of the mill disagreement over politics.

After rudely telling them to go away (I am not proud of that, I was wrong) I ended the thread by turning off commenting.

Closing threads is viewed as censorship. I’m a hypocrite for supposedly being a First Amendment advocate while preventing the public from commenting further.

Sometimes I just want to be off the clock.

Here’s the thing: it’s 2022 and it is widely accepted that moderation on the Internet is a good practice.

In that particular back-and-forth, there was no real discussion of policy that I saw. There was no advancement of a candidate. There was no clarification about where a candidate stands. There was no relay of useful information that might lead to a better-informed voter.

It was just two people going at it.

Even Reddit, a message board with anonymous users, closes comment threads after a period of time.

There is a point when a discussion on the Internet, or in real life, runs its course. I run the Valley Indy Facebook page, which is, to some extent, a business. A failing business, sure, but a business nonetheless.

Sometimes I fantasize about printing out these long political bickering Facebook threads and going to, I don’t know, United Cigar on Elizabeth Street in Derby.

I would give a stranger a copy of the Facebook thread.

We would act out the thread. I would read one part of the thread, he would read the other. At times we would yell, based on whether there were all caps.

We’d walk away, but hours later we’d come back to continue the argument. We’d ignore customers. We’d ignore everything in the store. Just face-to-face arguing. Over politics. We wouldn’t even blink.

Of course, eventually one of us would ask to speak to the manager.

And then we’d yell at him when he asked us to leave.

My philosophy is that you let people have their say, and then we move on.

Election Day is Nov. 8, 2022.

The author is the reporter, bureau chief, grant writer, marketing manager, ombudsman, photographer, podcast producer, podcast host, audio engineer, movie critic, copy desk chief, senior web staff, videographer, assignment editor, and social media manager for ValleyIndy.org

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