Comment Sections and the Ethical Demands of Democracy

Abstract

The decision of some online news platforms to eliminate comment sections is both understandable and frustrating. It is understandable as one does not have to read far into comment sections to see democracy at its worst. Commenters post all sorts of things, many of which are irrelevant to the story at hand, untruthful to what many might accept as the facts of the story or situation, and hurtful or offensive to other commenters. Too much of the comment section risks being taken over by harmful and ill-informed opinion. Yet Yahoo!’s decision (and those of the other platforms pursuing similar courses of action) is ultimately disappointing because it gives up on a central tenet of democracy: the idea that we should be able to talk to other citizens about ideas that matter to our lives, and that we should engage in the project to cultivate this ability more and more through new instances of practice. This worry about Yahoo!’s decision in this case strikes at a deeper concern – the important but contested ethical demands of democratic life. The ideals of democracy consequently inform what we expect of the institution of journalism. Many discussions of democracy often focus, explicitly or implicitly, on the decision-making procedures implied by this term. How are laws made, or just decisions reached? Are all included in these procedures, or are all included in the voting that elects those who take part in these decision processes? Perhaps this notion of democracy as a decisionmaking procedure evokes the idea of an informed citizenry, leading to the entailment that media should, ideally, help create informed and knowledgeable voters or citizens. The center of gravity to democracy and its relationship to the news media, on this reading, lies in the act of informing through truthful information that matters to public decision making. There is another way into the idea of democracy, and with it, the troubles that Yahoo!’s decision portends. Taking our lead from the American philosopher John Dewey, we can start with the idea that democracy denotes a habit or way of communicating with others; given the fact that our interactions with others spread throughout the timespan of our lives and do not occur only at periodic moments of political decision making, one can see why Dewey (1988) calls democracy a “way of life.” Writing in 1939 in the shadows of an approaching world war, he notes: “I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another” (1988, p. 227). Why does he postulate this everyday and communicative notion of democracy? It is partially because democracy cannot be envisioned as a silent community of happy individuals; it entails noise, disagreement, laugher, persuasion, and heated utterances. Dewey’s stance is grounded on what he calls “the fundamental principle of democracy,” namely the belief that “the ends of freedom and individuality for all can be attained only by means that accord with those ends” (Dewey, 1987, p. 299). Democracy is about communities or groups of individuals that share common interests – if not many views and values – and that freely communicated with each other. Of course, many of those interactions could be heated and not simply displays of agreement and friendship, and the holding of shared interests is often