The Pakistani Spectator

I will begin with a few remarks inspired by the responses to my last article Limits of Free Speech: Based on those insightful responses, I think that earlier article (which focused on the legal issues behind free speech) missed the more important question, which is how best to live with the moral responsibilities of free speech, and how to cope the fact that not all members of society take those responsibilities seriously. I can’t do this subject justice right now, so I will promise another article on that topic soon.

In my last article, I discussed the legal boundaries that even a progressive democracy imposes on completely unrestrained freedom of expression. One of these boundaries is that owners of a newspaper or a blog, for example, are under no obligation to print anything they don’t wish to print. Indeed, we would not usually want editors to place nonsense prominent on the page, making it harder for us to find intelligent articles, so editors perform a service for us, here. Of course, we may disagree with the editorial choices of a given newspaper or blog, and we are free to take our eyeballs somewhere else if we don’t like their choices. To make this discussion most relevant, I am going to use The Pakistani Spectator as an example, respectfully, although I do not wish to imply that this blog, which I admire and appreciate, is doing anything wrong in applying its ownership rights to control its own content.

Taking The Pakistani Spectator as my example, there has always been a process in place to filter articles submitted that do not come from the list of regular authors, and more recently even those recurring authors have to submit the articles to a behind-the-scenes editor who approves the article and decides when and where to place it on the page. Where there are more articles available than most readers can comfortably read, these editors are doing us a useful service by doing this (and I salute their efforts!) – otherwise, the more interesting articles would inevitably be quickly buried under more recently posted articles, and we readers would have to search much harder to find the best material in our own areas of interest. Of course, the readers (for any sort of privately-owned media platform) may disagree with the editors about what is good writing worth reading – where that happens, the best bet is to find another blog (or newspaper, or television station…) that appears to be better edited, according to your own judgment. (There is a danger, here, though – we tend to like editors who agree with our viewpoints, but if we only read what we already agree with, we are much less likely to learn something new! Therefore, I think there is a good argument for forcing ourselves to read blogs and other media that we disagree with (but that is hopefully at least thoughtful and well-written), sometimes, just in case it might turn out to have something to teach us! It is far more useful to read something that might change your mind or teach you something new than to read something that simply says what you already believe!)

Readers may want to comment on the choices of articles in The Pakistani Spectator; are there points of view you’d like to read more, here, or do you already find the balance of viewpoints ideal? (Note, however, that just because you do not read a point of view here does not mean the editors are refusing to print that point of view! They may simply not be getting offers of articles with that point of view, or at least nothing written coherently that would do justice to that viewpoint. If you have a point of view you want to see more, your best bet is to craft a well-written article, yourself, and contact the blog address about becoming a writer, here!)

A number of weeks ago, I noticed that The Pakistani Spectator had begun an approval process not only for the articles, but even for the comments on the articles. Although this was well within the rights of the blog owners, I understand that they have chosen to return to letting comments go directly to the page without delay for approval, and to leave comments untouched.

The trade-offs involved in this choice are tricky. There are good reasons to discard comments, and correctly discarding comments can be a service to the readers, if too many comments are sheer garbage. Even the most fervent free-speech advocate would probably agree that at least one category of comments truly deserves to be discarded – comments that are utterly off-point, not connected with the article at all, just advertising something the commenter wants to sell – comments serving the same purpose as email spam. Since such comments could be posted quite easily to thousands of blogs’ articles every day, if nothing prevented this, we could quickly be buried in “blog spam” if nothing prevented this, and we should be grateful for anything necessary to prevent this. (Manual editing is not the only way to prevent this blog spam, though – there are automated tools to prevent most blog spam from reaching the page in the first place, where the spam is placed by an automated program, and these tools are in wide use in the blogging world.) Comments that address the article are another matter, and blocking these is a more difficult judgment call, with difficult trade-offs between the virtues of airing competing points of view with rapid discourse, and the virtues of higher-quality writing. Let’s look at some possible reasons to reject comments, other than the comment simply being obvious blog spam:

• The comment is illegal, harmful speech, according to something like the Pakistani version of the sort of legal limits that I mentioned in my earlier article, Limits of Free Speech. In general, owners of most sites do not have the time or expertise to police their sites perfectly, so eliminating illegal speech like this is a difficult burden, and site owners should not be punished just because someone’s submitted comment turns out to be false and libelous, for example. In one sense, a non-removal policy has a virtue, here – if no comments are removed, then the presence of a comment should not imply that The Pakistani Spectator in any way “certifies” the truthfulness or legality of a comment! The consequence of this policy is that readers should of course use good sense in recognizing that some comments are bound to be sheer nonsense; just because you read it in print, especially in a comment made by who-knows-who, does not make it true and does not mean you ought to act on it!
• The comment is legal but highly offensive. The problem here is that what is offensive to one reader (or to the editor) might be written in precisely the right language to make a fine and necessary point, to another reader. In the US, at least, I think most readers of most blogs would prefer that blogs only remove the most venomous sort of comments, if any – readers would prefer to make their own choices to ignore offensive comments, as soon as they can see that they are offensive, rather than have those choices made for them. Sometimes, offensive comments actually make a useful point – by displaying the foolishness of the commenter, they make a useful point against the commenter’s point of view! (We should remember, however, that it is possible that the person posting the comment intended precisely that – deliberately making a stupid argument for a point of view the commenter wanted to discredit! Something like this sneaky approach has sometimes been used to discredit opponents in US political campaigns, I hear.)
• The comment makes a case for a point of view the editors dislike. Most intelligent readers, I think, would prefer to make up their own minds, rather than being fed only a single point of view, so most readers should choose blogs that permit wide-ranging debate, without forbidding any points of view. Even the appearance that the editing process filters out some points of view would tend to alienate readers who want to see all sides of a question, so editors who choose to restrict points of view (as is their right) will likely pay a price in losing many readers.

So, the editors may choose any process they wish for preventing comments they don’t like, but the real question is what sort of comment filtering is wise. I applaud The Pakistani Spectator for returning to unfiltered comments, though I certainly see good arguments for both sides of the question. There are two problems with filtering comments:

1. Readers will wonder how much of the debate they are not being allowed to see, even if only the very worst 1% of comments are filtered.
2. If comments must be approved before they appear on the site, then this creates a time-lag between making the comment and seeing it on the site. For a site like The Pakistani Spectator, which I’m sure makes far too little advertising income to support a full-time, paid editor, this time lag must sometimes be considerable, in spite of the noblest, unpaid efforts of the people behind the site. One of the best virtues of blogging is the way a conversation can develop between the writer of the article and several readers, through rapidly posted comments back and forth, but even short time lags between posting a comment and having it appear on the blog will seriously obstruct these conversations. As a practical matter, too, comments tend to trigger more comments, and comments tend to halt after a day at most, so if we slow down the appearance of comments, we will tend to get far fewer comments, overall.

I think there truly is no perfect answer to the question of filtering. As long as most commenters stay on-topic and civilized in their debate, as is currently the case on The Pakistani Spectator, I think it is a fine choice to let readers cope, themselves, with the few offensive comments that find their way to the page – we can learn to recognize which comments are not worth our time, make our own judgments, and just move on. If ever a really large fraction of the comments were truly awful, however, we might all yearn for the service of the same sort of editing that goes into the process of accepting the articles, themselves, something to save us from having to read five pages of material to find one page worth our attention. As a way to keep the quality of comments as generally high as they are, now, and to discourage the worst ones that come through, voluntary guidelines might be a help. Mainly, these are a waste of time for most commenters, since most of you already show the good sense to avoid bad practices, so I hesitate to even put these guidelines into words, but perhaps these are not useless, if only because they provide something concrete to point to when we want to explain why we feel someone else’s comment has gone “over the line”:

1. Comments should be on-topic, somehow related to the article or the comments that followed the article.
2. Comments should be legal, for example, not advocating criminal violence or knowingly making harmful statements of fact about another person when you are not sure that these facts are correct.
3. Comments should avoid foul language. With effort, we can make our arguments better and more clearly with civilized language.
4. Comments should avoid pointless insult of any entire ethnic group, religion, or gender.
5. Where comments express disagreement, they may certainly attack an idea, but they should avoid pointless, offensive, personal attack of the writer behind that idea.
6. So long as the comment follows the above guidelines, comments may express any idea at all. If the idea is foolish, or foolishly expressed, we trust the readers to see this for themselves, though others add our own separate comments pointing out where their own ideas differ, and why.

I would like to put the questions to the readers (and The Pakistani Spectator may wish to respond, too, of course):

Do you agree with The Pakistani Spectator’s choice to return to unfiltered comments? If not, what guidelines would you prefer for when already-posted comments should be removed?

Would you like to see guidelines for more constructive debate in the comments posted on some permanently linked page? Taking the guidelines above as a starting point, what would you change, remove, or add?

No choice of The Pakistani Spectator will please everyone, here, and people behind The Pakistani Spectator must try to take into account the wishes of readers who do not comment on this article, as well as readers who do, as well as their own beliefs, so I respect whatever choice they make here – I am not trying to force one choice or another, just to invite feedback about the wishes of the readers.