Irish Times website no longer allowing comments

A lot of people on this thread, mostly seem to want the comment section so they can disagree with everything, and express their distant for the IT itself. How about take a shortcut and just not read it. Low viewership would seem to get that point across far better than reading it.

Lol @ "sheeple"

We are a neutral country so putting up large flags of a country at war is, like I said, pre-empting the response to some extent.

Has that ever happened in Ireland before?

Lots of people knew nothing about Ukraine before that then suddenly blue and yellow mania was being pushed from top-down.

And all 3-4 weeks after a two-year 'Emergency' diktat system issuing orders. Yeah no pressure anyone.

I said Ireland Neutrality is lip service for the most part. With examples.

Media is not neutral. You'd be naive to think otherwise.

Lack of interest in outliers is not seen as a threat. It's just not interesting to the majority of the audience and deliberately causes problems that require a disproportionately level of resources to manage.

You say that people should be allowed to express their opinion, then complain when people express opinions you don't agree with.

*looks at join date* sure.

It's deflection.

It's easy to shut people down than discuss the issue I assume.

Selectively ignoring facts so what's left fits the narrative in their head.

Similar alright.

I think believing that the IT closing the comments option is censorship is no different to people believing they own their facebook page.

Laughable nonsense

If the Irish Times controlled 90% of schools at taxpayer expense and had daily IT indoctrination classes then you (and I) would have something to complain about. The comparison with the church which, bizarrely in a developed country, still has this control is ridiculous.

It's a newspaper and a website, if you don't like it, don't read it, but it's not censoring you any more than RTE are because you can't ring them up and demand to get on air.

"X" totally censors speech. When people like Musk talk about "free" speech they mean they're in the position to dictate the terms.

You said

That was the essence of your defence of the IT. Or perhaps your personal definition of “private enterprise” excludes both the IT and Elon Musk’s many undertakings😋

As if there's no abuse or defamation on Facebook!

Would you give that sort of private information to a site like Boards? I certainly wouldn't.

The Guardian does have comments.

Years ago the prevailing internet wisdom was that a comments section drives traffic. The Irish Times was free, then subscription only, then free again, now subscription again. It has some advertising but doesn't gain much from it I'd imagine compared to subscriptions. So there's little or no benefit in having people read the same article repeatedly just to catch up on the comments. But there is a very real potential downside in libel and defamation, and unless and until our defamation laws are reformed there's no benefit only risk for them in having comments return.

Different countries have different legal systems and therefore different liabilities concerning what they publish. That drives some of what the Irish Times does as regards comments. Another aspect is the size of the IT's daily circulation. It is really just a provincial newspaper with aspirations. Prior to Covid, its daily circulation was falling and it may have been selling around 50K copies a day.

On a medium or large sized publication's website, having a comments section and people to maintain it may not be a financial burden. For a small publication like the IT, that would require employees to moderate what would be posted in the comments section. It is quite different to a forum website like Boards.ie. It has a few employees but a lot of voluntary moderators who are not paid. Such a model would not work for a newspaper website in Ireland due to the problem of legal liability over what would be published on the newspaper's website.

There's a wonderful phrase, "midwit", that could be applied to the IT in that collectively it is smarter than average but not by much. The depth of its knowledge on various subjects is often shallow and wrapped in a kind of Dunning-Krugeresque attitude. This would probably apply to many newspapers that fancy themselves as being a cut above the rest. As others have pointed out, the comments sections often showed up the weaknesses of opinions of its columnists. The comments often became more entertaining and better read than the opinion columns. But that's a deeper problem that many newspapers ran into as they tried to cut costs due to losing readers. Most people no longer buy a daily newspaper.

Journalism costs money. Investigative journalism is even more expensive and can take weeks or months before a story is ready for publication. Opinion is cheap and as easily produced. The IT achieved global notoriety for having been fooled with an AI-generated opinion piece recently. Some people will read those opinion pieces to reinforce their own views and others to be outraged. They generate traffic for the newspaper's website and are basically clickbait. Many newspapers, including the Irish Times, became more viewspapers than newspapers for financial reasons.

As for participation, sites like Boards.ie are better and probably have more readers than the IT. You could always dash off a few letters to the editor of the IT or try to get a job there. Both would probably be a waste of time. Forums and Social Media have replaced the comments sections.

Regards...jmcc

A private enterprise choosing to not publish your content on their behalf is in no way censorship.

If I write what I regard as the novel of the century, but editors at several publishers regard as horrific dreck and refuse to publish it, am I being censored, or critiqued?

The funny thing is that it's never been easier to publish whatever you want. Buy a domain ($10 a year or less), get hosting (similar cost) and off you go. Just remember to have a solicitor on speed dial in case you uncensoredly publish anything someone might regard as libellous or defamatory.

FWIW I regard our current defamation laws as erring far too much on the side of those who would rather things not be published, but they are what they are and we have a system of democracy if enough people want a law to be enacted or changed.