Irish Times website no longer allowing comments

In regard to the above describing “setting the agenda” as high minded is remarkably naive. I took the phrase from a relatively recent advert for a national daily IIRC. (I didn’t keep a copy of it so I can’t produce it as evidence so discount my post accordingly if you wish.)

It’s a measure of how they see themselves as power brokers and manipulators of public opinion. It’s about power, not high mindedness. When you see that the govt is considering subsidizing these failing businesses with tax payers money their true role is clear. Add in the revolving door of journalists into govt spin positions and the picture is very clear.

TL;DR There are far more serious problems with the IT and journalism than comments sections.

Advisory: I do not engage anymore with posters who reply to the post they imagine they read rather than the post written.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119724694#Comment_119724694

It was a point about the newspapers and how they consider their position rather than your comment.

Regards...jmcc

cheese sandwich

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

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119724934#Comment_119724934

Does the Guardian have comments? I just opened up the site and opened 3 random articles and none of them had comments sections underneath.

As for your assertion that the IT is not interested in what its readers have to say - sure it is - they publish their letters every day on all manner of subjects.

I'm a subscriber myself and I remember the comments sections on the old site - it was 90% cranks moaning about the article - pure scutter. Absolutely no loss.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119697551#Comment_119697551

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

Hotblack Desiato

I don't see how hosting in the US would protect them if the domain owner and/or site admins were based in Ireland, but hey ho. Do you know if the auctioneer case was dropped, settled, or what.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119732881#Comment_119732881

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).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_230

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

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

Manach

This is a trend that is occuring across Europe. In the book Information Technology Law By: Andrew Murray the author mentions it is partially explained by people who object to the comments contacting the site publisher en masse and threatening legal action about the perceived offensive nature of said comments. To avoif the hassle, the comment section is turned off.

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119731451#Comment_119731451

I don't know what strategy they apply, but The Guardian definitely has comments in some of its news articles; it can be hard to discern when comments will be allowed - but it's not universal, as you note yourself.

Their opinion pieces often will have comments opened up, especially if the article's angle is bashing the Tories or government in general. With the comments reflecting that too, though they're usually a little better or longer written than the average newspaper comment. While The Guardian itself seems able to mark certain comments as a "Guardian Pick" - again though, no idea what metrics are used there. For example:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/12/liz-truss-anti-growth-coalition-class-power

Hotblack Desiato

@jmcc I don't see how an Irish resident content creator can hide behind US law just because that's where their site happens to be hosted.

If I defame you and you are Irish resident you can sue me in an Irish court, it doesn't matter (afaik) whether I use a webhost in the US to do it or a printing press in Bratislava.

I always felt that ireland.com was a terrible brand for the Irish Times - tourism is a far better use for it - some Yanks thought it was a government site.

Everyone and their mother was issuing email addresses 20 years ago but it was a loss making business. That's OK if you're Google or Microsoft as it ties people in to other services, but even for Irish ISPs it was a bad move and one by one they got out of the game. What the IT were thinking I'll never know. Then again the Indo got involved in flogging internet set-top boxes (with dialup!) and lost a fortune.

jmcc

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119733766#Comment_119733766

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

iffandonlyif

I suppose the comments section isn’t coming back, then? Does anyone know if the Irish Times formally announced it?

Brussels Sprout

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119743020#Comment_119743020

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

On-site functionality allowing readers to comment on selected articles has been under review and will return in the near future for subscribers.

https://www.irishtimes.com/media/2022/05/23/the-irish-times-unveils-redesigned-website-and-app/

iffandonlyif

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119749306#Comment_119749306

But nothing said about it since. I can’t imagine they’re going to reinstate it after so long.

cheese sandwich

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

Sunny Disposition

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119889145#Comment_119889145

I do feel that comments sections are very negative and it's a good idea to get rid of them.

But you are right too, that article was scandalous, absolutely incredible that it was published and its hard believe that they're not getting far more communication about it than their letters page indicates.

Hotblack Desiato

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.

Sam Russell

Roisin Ingle is a very low level writer and not to be taken seriously in the slightest.

magicbastarder

i didn't see the article, but somehow doubt that a comments section would count as them being held accountable. and it strikes me as the sort of topic they'd switch off comments on anyway unless they were stupid.

elperello

For anyone with access to a subscription this is a link to the article.

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-style/people/2022/11/16/roisin-ingle-turns-out-blackrock-college-was-a-world-away-from-us-pill-hill-girls/

FrancieBrady

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891261#Comment_119891261

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.

magicbastarder

a bit of a 'meh' from me over that article.

elperello

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891274#Comment_119891274

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.

FrancieBrady

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891298#Comment_119891298

Recommending editorialship with a bit of cop on.

japprentice

Is this woke?

elperello

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891659#Comment_119891659

I'm not sure it's the type of piece you could edit without losing the thrust altogether.

It either went in as is or not at all.

FrancieBrady

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891886#Comment_119891886

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

fly_agaric

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891659#Comment_119891659

Saw the new posts on this thread while browsing this evening...!

I don't use twitter, so wondered was so wrong with IT article till I googled. Am still not sure really. A bit clumsily written (which leaves it more open to attack I suppose)?

Expect it would upset those who attended Blackrock or very similar fee paying schools. So many people in Dublin that have attended these private secondary schools for generations really do revere them utterly and think they are a great, positive Irish institution, almost above criticism or question.

And woe betide those who dare criticise them...and she really went at the whole idea/ideology of them (the Great Irish Private School) in parts of it.

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891298#Comment_119891298

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

https://twitter.com/VillageMagIRE/status/1593235605751681025?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1593235605751681025%7Ctwgr%5Ec22d3f162d0d270c4968478a501be4d33eceaca5%7Ctwcon%5Es1_c10&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fgript.ie%2Firish-times-asked-to-retract-ingles-disgusting-article-on-blackrock-abuse%2F

FrancieBrady

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891952#Comment_119891952

I didn't go to a fee paying school and I found the gloating obscene tbh.

hamburgham

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891971#Comment_119891971

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.

SuperBowserWorld

If I guy wrote gleefully like this about something similar happening in a girls school he'd be ostracized for life. No joke.

I got to read the article in one of my free views this week.

Edit ... removed moan about Irish times.

fly_agaric

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891971#Comment_119891971

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.

FrancieBrady

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892015#Comment_119892015

There's a lot more than private/fee paying school goers swinging for her tbh.

elperello

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.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892145#Comment_119892145

Im presuming you have never been the victim of physical or sexual abuse,thats the only explanation i can come to for someone not understanding how upsetting Ingles article was.

The Irish Times have received too many complaints re this article to deal with at present but they intend to address the matter in the near future.

I rang the Times myself today to make a complaint and this is the information I was given.

I got the impression they have been completely overwhelmed.

And i was also advised that since the website was updated it hasnt been possible for the comments section to return.

I was told the comments will be returning once whatever this unsurmountable issue is sorted.I was told last May though that the comments would be returning in two weeks.

As far as I know there was never any information given about the comment facility being removed,they disappeared without explanation, is this correct.

I pointed out that the Journal which is a free news source can manage to provide a comments option for the public so isnt it very odd that a paper with a paid user base cant offer something similar.

elperello

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892180#Comment_119892180

Getting a bit too personal there with your assumption if you don't mind me saying.

I'll leave it there but I will approach any further statement from the IT with an open mind.

hamburgham

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892212#Comment_119892212

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.

magicbastarder

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892145#Comment_119892145

it wasn't worth complaining about. i got a 'we were told they were privileged but it turns out they weren't ' vibe off it more than a 'ha ha sucks to be them' vibe that we're told we should expect. Not exactly an article full of insight but not one full of insult either?

Icemancometh

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892568#Comment_119892568

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.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892002#Comment_119892002

That's not it at all. The article was attacking the snobbery behind such schools and the blind loyalty / omerta that surrounds them and has enabled the decades-long coverup of the most vile abuse.

The pearl-clutchers can feck right off imho.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119891968#Comment_119891968

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

It's jumped the shark.

Hotblack Desiato

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119892180#Comment_119892180

I'm not surprised, the "defenders of the faith" like to make out that they represent public opinion instead of a tiny fraction of it.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119893061#Comment_119893061

can i ask if you have links to ingle or the IT?

the people defending this piece all seem to and tbh id not often disagree with you and agree wholeheartedly with francie but you're way off the mark on this one

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119893068#Comment_119893068

Are you living in a dream world?

They are not defending the Catholic Church. Is that how you see criticism of the Ingle article?

I think you're the one who's jumped the shark. Your robot brain just picks up that there is a Catholic connection to Blackrock and short circuits the details of whats being said.

Ingle is in trouble because she is perceived to be gloating that 'posh' boys have had a difficult (abusive) childhood. There's no religious angle to this particular controversy within the larger abuse controversy.

growleaves

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119893074#Comment_119893074

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

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119893074#Comment_119893074

This is nothing to do with defending the faith.

Have you actually read what the boys endured, one described cycling home with blood on his underwear after he was raped by a priest,he tried to scrub his underwear clean and went out late at night and hid the underwear in a neighbours bin.

This was a very young boy who wouldnt have referred to anything as a pill hill.

And it wasnt just Blackrock boys who referred to the local school as pill hill,other local girls schools referred to it as pill hill too, if any of the girls in all girls schools were raped and abused would Ingle write a similar article about them,ie the sisterhood, you can bet your life she wouldnt.

FrancieBrady

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119893061#Comment_119893061

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

Roisin Ingle has form when it comes to empathy fail and sneering at others - try the Trans community.

The article she wrote was disgusting, vile, and nasty - aimed at children. She'll get away with it though. Finty will back her up. An inauspicious start to the new IT editor's role.

You can email her at roisin (atsign) irishtimes.com.

Now just don't say she's fat or you're for it.