News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source commenting platform. Parent comment

Re:Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source c... by xienze on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @06:01PM (#15233290)
It's about preventing wrongthink from being expressed on newspaper comment sections. Previously they just removed commenting from politically contentious stories, so I'm not sure why they're bothering with bringing it back.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source c... by memeCrasher on Wednesday September 13, 2017 @02:44AM (#15236048)
No need to completely censor, when you can instead control the direction of the conversation.

Without comments, people go elsewhere to discuss the issue - elsewhere that you don't control. With comments, they discus it on your site, where you can completely control who can say what and how visible those comments are.

Done correctly it's a form of soft censorship by controlling of the discussion and manufacturing consensus among the "commentators".

Hard censorship has more immediate backlash than this does.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Washington Post integrates Talk – Mozilla’s open-source c... by stephengillie on Tuesday September 12, 2017 @08:07PM (#15234244)
It's about allowing "rightthink" comments to be expressed on politically contentious stories, without having to deal with the backlash of weeding out certain comments, or having to pay the comment weeders.

It's part of a larger narrative being sold to the 21st century investor, that AI are taking everyone's jobs, so buy your robots before someone enslaves you with theirs. (It's all still leading to the Butlerian Jihad of Dune.)

[ Parent | on HN ]