Officials in Cleveland declined to bring charges against two police officers for the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice on Monday, December 28. That outcome was pretty much expected. Hoped for? Welcomed? Shocking? No, but expected nonetheless. Since Monday’s announcement one of the items that has (re)surfaced in the cyber world comes from the news site Cleveland.com. Written by the vice president of Content of the Northeast Ohio Media Group (Cleveland.com’s parent company), the article talks about why they turned off the comments section of news stories about Tamir Rice. Chris Quinn says that:
“Just about every piece we published about Tamir immediately became a cesspool of hateful, inflammatory or hostile comments. Rather than discuss the facts of the case, many commenters debased the conversation with racist invective. Or they made absurd statements about the clothing and appearance of people involved in the story. Or they attacked each other for having contrasting viewpoints. In many cases, well over half of the comments on Tamir stories broke our rules and had to be deleted.”
“We ultimately decided that the comments sections of Tamir stories, overrun as they were by wickedness, were not contributing to the needed conversation. In early October, we reluctantly and finally decided to close down the comments on any news story about Tamir.”
“Some have tried to continue their odious comments by moving their conversations to comments on stories that have nothing to do with Tamir, and in those cases, because the commenters so clearly intend to violate our rules, we have closed down the accounts of those involved.”
Dude said “wickedness.” Wow. Sick, sad and pathetic, as overused as they are, are the words that immediately come to my mind; they are probably the best words. We’re talking news stories about a 12-year-old child whose life was taken violently. Yeah, those may be the best words.
Comments sections on websites throughout the internet are legendary places. The term cesspool is most often used to describe this area. The Washington Post looked at the issue two years ago, as did a number of other news and opinion sites. There are as many advocates for closing down anonymous commenting as there are for keeping them.
This issue is not new and it certainly didn’t begin with Tamir Rice. When Oscar Grant was murdered by a transit cop back in Oakland in 2009, researchers at Washington State published a paper called “This is citizen journalism at its finest: YouTube and the public sphere in the Oscar Grant shooting incident.” While the purpose of the study was “to examine audience responses to this act of citizen journalism on YouTube,” the authors felt it necessary to state:
“It was indeed disheartening to note the excessive presence of racial slurs, outright insults and other provocative reactions that comprised the majority of all posted comments.”
Sick. Sad. Pathetic. And wicked.
