It’s not exactly news, at this point, that more and more online media outlets have given up on their comment sections, shutting them down because they don’t have the time or money or patience to deal with the cesspools of vitriol and hate they’ve become.
Popular Science kicked off the wave of comment section closing back in 2013. Since then, comments have been removed from the sites of media giants like CNN, Reuters and Bloomberg; from major newspapers like The Chicago Sun-Times and the Toronto Star; and from a wide assortment of online outlets including re/code, Mic, The Verge and Vice’s Motherboard. Most sites regard the decision to close comments as one that is both sad and necessary.
But one site is touting what seems to be the impending end of online comments — at least on sites unwilling or unable to moderate the hell out of them — as a huge victory.
In a recent fundraising appeal on his site A Voice for Men, Men’s Rights elder Paul Elam happily takes credit for making the comments sections of other sites so poisonous for so many people that those who run the sites are increasingly crying “uncle” and shutting them down.
Elam doesn’t phrase it quite so bluntly, of course. He sees the closing of comment sections as proof that feminists (and presumably everyone else disgusted by AVFM) just can’t handle the TRUTH.
“The free pass for feminists has been revoked,” he declares.
Many Major websites that continue to run misandric bullshit now often have two words in common at the end of their hateful posts.
Comments Closed. That is now a common reaction of the feminist media in the wake of average people clobbering them with dissent and ridicule.
Apparently calling women the c-word is a form of “dissent.”
Elam goes on to suggest that AVFM has led the way in making virtually everyone so disgusted by Men’s Rights activists and other, er, “dissenters” that they’ve given up on the possibility of civil discourse online.
Again, Elam doesn’t put it quite this way. He claims to be “changing the cultural narrative,” dontcha know?
I can say with certainty and pride that it was AVFM that kicked the door in on all of it. We took the daggers thrown at us by mainstream media across the western world and pushed back defiantly.
Don’t flatter yourself, dude. While AVFM and its flying monkey squad of comment-section-poisoners has definitely played a role in making the comment sections of a number of media sites even bigger cesspools than they already were, AVFM hasn’t singlehandedly ruined online comments forever.
Many other terrible people have played their part — white supremacists, GamerGaters, white-supremacist GamerGaters, the list goes on and on.
Here at We Hunted the Mammoth, of course, we know that you don’t have to shut down your comment sections to prevent them from being overrun by malignant jerkfaces. Instead, you can simply close your comments to malignant jerkfaces like Elam and his crew, inviting some of them in only as a source of amusement and banning them quickly when and if they start flinging poo.
Discuss. (Not you, MRA jerkfaces.)
I stopped commenting in the Guardian (UK). Full of really nasty characters (and so is the Telegraph UK.)
In one of the two I saw a person openly admitting to discriminating against women in the hiring process, and these nasty buggers swarmed to support this guy, proving literally everything I’d been saying to them. Then again, it was a nasty little article about feminism making men scared of false rape accusations. Pathetic, wretched commenters on both sites really, (although the Guardian articles are almost always fine and dandy!)