Irish Times website no longer allowing comments

Obviously it’s up to the IT if it wishes to allow comments under articles or not. There’s no human or constitutional right to be allowed comment on a private website.

But the IT likes to consider itself on a par with other reputable English language newspapers like the FT, NYT, Guardian, London Times etc. All of which allow comments. So by refusing to do so, it’s marking itself out as less confident or less interested in hearing its subscribers views

Yep. Remember that Boards/MCD issue. Ireland doesn't have a Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (US) to protect websites. There were two on Politics.ie. The first was in relation to a tribunal when Bertie Ahern was being questioned. That's when P.ie moved its hosting to the US. The other was when an incorrect statement about an auctioneer was posted. That one got as far as legal proceedings. There were also too many incidents with the media where the trheat of legal action was used to get publications to drop stories.

Regards...jmcc

Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act would have made legal action more difficult. What happened to Ahern in the Tribunal made any action irrelevant. There was a case with comments made about a solicitor on a solicitor rating site in 2004 (I think). The domain name was a .COM registered via the Godaddy registrar and it had WHOIS privacy which protected ownership. Godaddy tends to roll over on the receipt of any legal paper and removed the WHOIS privacy. The auctioneer case (2010) was settled as P.ie took measures to remove the problem posts and the poster once notified.

For website operators, Section 230 offers some protection in that it does not make them as liable for what users posts as the legislation does in other countries. Free speech and the freedom of the press has more constitutional protection in the US (First Amendment rights).

There is also some protection for websites under the EU E-Commerce Directive. Journalists and publications in Ireland tend to get threatened with legal action quite frequently. It also happens in other European countries. The documentary on the collapse of Wirecard (on Netflix) has a section on how Wirecard employed legal threats to the Financial Times to stop its coverage of Wirecard.

The comments sections on Irish newspapers are potential minefields for defamation but commercial reasons are more likely to have led to the decisions to drop the sections. Limiting them to subscribers and putting them behind a paywall is quite stupid in simple commercial terms as it restricts them to people who are already subscribers and only allows advertising as the main revenue source. Once behind a paywall, they stop being means to get people to subscribe. In terms of defamation, the people posting on those sections have already given up their anonymity but the publications still had to moderate comments. That meant paying the wages of the people who had to task of moderating comments.

Irish newspapers had been very much behind the curve when it came to adding comments sections as they frequently highlighted the poor quality of the articles, commentary and reporting. Despite the propaganda about how digital subscriptions are the future of newspapers, the reality is that Irish newspapers are businesses and it is more difficult to get digital subscriptions due to much of the same news being free elsewhere on the Web.

The comments sections on Irish newspaper websites probably didn't bring in enough money from advertising to justify their costs. The Irish Times has made some poor commercial decisions while trying to be the leading Irish newspaper website. Its first paywall only got 38K subscriptions for the duration of its operation. This was pre-mobile Web and pre-Smartphone. Subscriptions were limited to people with desktop and laptop computers rather than smartphones and tablets. That was a major difference between the size of the potential digital subscriptions market then and the size of the same market now where almost everyone has a smartphone.

The decision by the IT to put much of its content behind a paywall when Google was launching its Adsense Pay Per Click advertising (2003) probably gave away millions of Euro in easy advertising revenue to competitors. The IT's first paywall also surrendered dominance of the Irish news market to RTE's website and the Indo/Sindo website where news and commentary were free. It bought a property website for 52 million or so at the peak of the property bubble which then burst. It rebranded from the category killer ireland.com domain name to irishtimes.com and thousands of ireland.com e-mail users lost their addresses as a result.). It also had some successes and managed to sell the ireland.com domain name to Bord Failte for about 250K having paid about 10K for it in the 1990s. It also hired David Cochrane of Politics.ie as its Social Media manager (think that he is now working for the Sunday Business Post). It is in a competitive business and print sales are continuing to fall. About ten years ago, it was selling over 100K print copies a day. Before Covid, those print sales were about 50K a day.

The comments sections on newspaper websites break the "one to many" publishing model. Where there is a large enough market and enough users, they can make money but Social Media such as Twitter and Facebook have destroyed a lot of the rationale for having them on Irish newspaper websites. It is a complex market for publishers and journalists. People seem to forget that publications are generally in business to make money.

Regards...jmcc

The protections under Section 230 of the CDA limit the liabilities of the website operator over what is posted by others on their site. It doesn't limit the liabilities for defamation as such. With the Irish situation, the website operator is effectively held liable as the publisher of any defamatory comment along with the person who posts the comment.

The ireland.com domain name was what is known as a category-killer domain name. People would also type in the domain name in the browser toolbar expecting their to be a website. When it rebranded to irishtimes.com, it lost a lot of that type-in traffic. Instead of building on the ireland.com website, it tried to be the New York Times. It was really a marketing failure with a domain name that effectively required little or no marketing.

The e-mail address effectively created a community of people for marketing purposes. I think that a company called Commtouch provided the backend on that. The Indo's parent company, IN&M also had a Microwave TV (MMDS) franchise and TV deflector operations destroyed that. The set top box approach was one of those DotCom bubble ideas and it had also been tried in the US. Again, the problem with trying to transplant US technology to Ireland is that Ireland is, for a large part, run by gombeens. Local calls in the US were either low cost/unmetered or free. Telecom Eireann shifted away from the unmetered local calls to a per unit charge for calls. That nearly murdered the infant Internet in Ireland because accessing the Internet via dial-up was much more expensive. Not all of the early ISPs had local points of presence (POP) either so getting online involved a long distance call to Dublin or Galway. This is why the Internet took off so rapidly in the US and other countries while it struggled in Ireland.

Regards...jmcc

They said this about it when they announced the new site design in May:

The vile article from Roisin Ingle this week on Blackrock College (I’m not linking to it, it shouldn’t have been published at all) is exactly why the IT should have kept its readers’ comments section, but almost certainly why it got rid of it - it doesn’t want accountability. There has been an overwhelmingly negative reaction on Twitter to the article but only two short letters shoved down the back of the Letters page. Presumably the new editor is hoping the issue will just go away and Ingle can go back next week to writing about her favourite cafe in Sandymount or whatever

What was wrong with it?

Those two letter writers sound really up themselves. I think I can guess where they went to school. No wonder it's taken decades for victims to speak out.

She’s flat out blocking people on Twitter. She provoked a lot of genuine bewildered anger with that pointless article. Well it had a point I suppose ~ ‘me, me, me!’

Appalling stuff from her and whoever edits.

Twitter is hardly a good indication one way or the other.

It's a bit ironic that a thread set up to accuse the IT of censorship has veered to recommending censorship.

My red marker would go right through the line where she clearly gloated...the one that upset most people.

Not just unknown Twitter users objecting but Village Magazine. Though you're right its now the IT which has refused to self-censor.

Was truly bizarre. They were wealthier than us but we were actually better than them because they were being abused. Not an iota of sympathy for them.

Yeah in fairness I can see how it reads as gloating (the clumsier parts I was referring to).

Don't think that was intended message though from reading the whole thing.

Anyway, some (more) people will gladly take it that way because she took a big swipe at such schools (and not just the clergy - that target is a-okay!) and I have observed over the years that is not on + people will come out swinging for them.

I have followed the comments but I'm still not convinced that there was anything in the article that was egregious enough to warrant it's censorship.

I think it is totally diminished without the readers’ comments. They were often thoughtful and more interesting than the original article. The Daily Telegraph, the Times and the Guardian can all manage and allow comments but neither the Indo nor the Irish Times can.

I do think it’s odd and and am pretty sure official Ireland weren’t thrilled that us plebs had an opportunity to express our views. For example during the lockdowns, a huge number of the comments in the Irish Times were anti lockdown measures. That was about the only channel we had to express our views. It was gratifying to know that so many shared my views at a time when the public climate to expressing same was so hostile. Also not so easy to dismiss Irish Times readers as lunatics etc.

Also used enjoy the anti RTE comments whenever there was a story about their salaries or a licence fee increase. Contrary to some posters’ views here, there were often good, well thought out points. Rubbishing the comments section is just a way of trying to silence people or invalidate legitimate opinion.

It's just such an odd angle to approach the story from. They thought they were they better than us, but they weren't, because they were abused. I got an odd vibe from it too.

The Village defending powerful abusive elitist and unaccountable Catholic Church bodies.

It's jumped the shark.

Eh do you even know that "defender of the faith" is a term associated with King Henry VIII and subsequent British (Protestant) monarchs?

FFS. Omerta and loyalty are not 'unique to such schools'.