// essays //
May 18, 2015
No Comment:
The New Collective Censorship
Hannah Vaitsblit
“Normally I'd pose these questions via Yik Yak. But I just got voted out of the herd.”
After reading this Facebook status twice to confirm it wasn’t actually alerting to a new epidemic of exclusivity in the wild, I discovered a relevant description of the eerie pop-ocracy that the fashionable, new-ish app condones. In the spirit of free-reigning rule of the people, Yik Yak, a localized anonymous commenting platform, is effectively self-regulated by this “herd” - its own committed population of users, or more aptly, followers.
According to the New York Times, Yik Yak founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington’s motivation behind the development of Yik Yak was “to create a more democratic social media network.” Embellishing this sentiment with words like “disenfranchised,” they marketed the app enticingly as a place to be heard. But not without limit, of course. A rating system allows users to essentially filter what content is available “out there” based on their own preferences, and perhaps a bit of anonymous peer pressure. Apparently, the app manages its law enforcement by popularity contest. 5 nays and you’re out.
Feeling empowered by the prospect of such unmitigated authority, I decided to test out the popular policing system for myself. Finding a post with four downvotes, I read the Yak just to make sure it was actually worthy of being voted out of the herd––wouldn’t want to just conform, you know. It did - it was some stupid Yak about Yakking for the first time in Harlem (as if someone has to give you a medal for that). With the press of a downward arrow and a refresh of the feed - poof! The Yak was gone. I had officially contributed to the silencing of one eager Harlem Yakker.
It’s true that only the app itself has the power to block certain comments before they even appear. In fact, the app is programmed to identify explicitly hateful, discriminatory, and violent messages and inhibit their publication with moralistic warning messages. But this under-the-radar censorship free-for-all is something else altogether. While admittedly most of the content yakked about should be censored based on sheer stupidity - at least my 1.5 mile radius around Columbia didn’t yield any of the kind of democratic creative commenting brilliance that Droll and Buffington idealized - this particular policy promotes a kind of nearly-idle, anonymous groupthink, silently removing opinions from a comment free-for-all, based on momentary preferences, prejudices, and priorities that never have to be justified. Plenty of seemingly offensive comments are up-voted, while others are down-voted until no public record of them remains. This may not be a big deal in a radius of people with differing opinions and infrequent yakking, where a yak can survive to see the glory of a few hours of e-fame, but imagine the yakking atmosphere at a rally or demonstration, where unpopular opinions are bound to be pushed down the virtual drain as quickly as they appear. So much for democracy.
In the journalistic sphere, where comments actually have some kind of historical and social weight, comment control isn’t only happening at the anonymous level. Tablet Magazine, a trendy daily web outlet covering Jewish news and culture, recently announced that it would be charging users a fee for commenting in order to keep the conversation intelligent. While this is perhaps annoying for those of us that have become accustomed by the persuasions of social media to saying whatever we want, whenever we want, and at no cost at all, Tablet’s policy might be an intermediate model. Any commenter who wishes to pay to be heard has the liberty to do so, regardless of the strain of his/her opinions. Furthermore, Tablet specifically motioned to Facebook as a remaining platform for unfettered commentary, encouraging further discussions. In justification of its new policy, Tablet referred to other news sources, like Bloomberg Business and Mic, which have completely removed the ability for readers to comment. Readers can still use other platforms, and in fact, the Facebook, Twitter, etc. icons still appear on articles, implicitly inviting readers to comment in some form anyway. But it seems that direct engagement with published pieces has been significantly derailed. The Tablet move is, practically, a silencing measure, but more than anything it is a lesson in thoughtful contribution. And in a truly democratic vein, Tablet’s comment crackdown is at least equal opportunity, comprehensively applicable to all comments, not arbitrary like Yik Yak’s free and unregulated censorship by the demos.
Our own campus daily, the Columbia Daily Spectator, has pursued a similar policy, although in a more troubling discriminatory manner. In February, Spectrum (the blog arm of the paper) announced that Spectator was barring comments on all editorials addressing sexual assault because their respective comment sections had been previously misused for offensive, vitriolic rhetoric. (Curiously enough, this controversial announcement was, itself, left open to comment).
While the contentious Spectator comment thread has long been a soapbox for bored, procrastinating students with less-than-enlightening things to say, it has also served as a crucial platform for opposition to popularly accepted opinion on campus, exposition of Spectator’s own editorial biases, and revelation of misinformation and selective reporting. Why, then, would Spectator, a supposed crusader for “free and open discussion and debate,” close comments on its most prominent area of editorial coverage? And why sexual assault and no other sensitive topic?
Like trigger warnings, topically selective comment-curbing is highly subjective and prejudicial to particular issues, prioritizing certain public “preferences” for privacy and protection over others. Readers are still free to comment on opinion pieces relating to mental health, contentious political encounters on campus, and racial issues. At what point will these areas of discourse also become too sensitive for the public to weigh in? What is the threshold and why has Spectator not explicitly identified and addressed these criteria for subject-dependent comment restrictions?
Granted, Yik Yak is not the most serious of platforms, and the “censorship lite” that the app endorses is arguably less threatening in the larger scheme of regulating free speech in the world of ideas, and as such, manipulating public opinion (disclosure: my post was only finally voted off after four hours of struggling viability). Tablet’s effort to elevate conversation by monetizing commentary is certainly innovative, and maybe a questionable necessary evil at worst. The movements of other sources away from comments across the board are at least consistent over all subject areas, although notably disturbing in terms of mainstreaming the views of the elite over the general public. But the exclusion of one editorial subject area as untouchable is a weak measure to vacuum-seal certain opinions from contrasting views.
In between refreshes of my Yik Yak feed, while cataloging some battered old Jewish books at Columbia’s Rare Book Library, I came across a more ancient form of the same censorship we take for granted today. Over the past year, I’ve flipped through dozens of volumes containing lines upon lines of text, blotted-out passionately in thick black ink. Fortunately, over 400 years, many of the censors’ marks have faded with time, allowing a careful reader to occasionally decipher the inflammatory printed material. Some censors, mimicking the modern movement for permanent erasure, had burned through problematic parts of the text, deleting that information from the historic record for good. Unlike Yik Yak’s collective censorship, cowering behind the sheltering web of virtual anonymity, these censors expurgated with pompous exhibition, often signing their names, accrediting their work for eternity, elevating the great Western enterprise of censorship with the utmost reverence.
Those were different times, though. Or were they? Is it possible that we haven’t lost our palate for cruel and convenient censorship, but that we’ve only muted the self-aggrandizing part by embracing a quiet kind of censorship that leaves no paper trail? Silent censorship seems to be vibrantly still in vogue, so long as it accompanied by a public, professed display of openness and acceptance. Tolerance reigns supreme, but only toward the end of eliminating all acceptably “intolerable” and “non-progressive” views. All of this begs the question: what is tolerance anyway, if it is predicated upon selectivity and convenience? The word begins to lose its meaning, like so many others in the contemporary liberal lexicon.
Instead of reinventing a discreet censorship fit for the modern day, wouldn’t we be wiser just to bury the censor deep in the pages of the 17th century and never look back?
After reading this Facebook status twice to confirm it wasn’t actually alerting to a new epidemic of exclusivity in the wild, I discovered a relevant description of the eerie pop-ocracy that the fashionable, new-ish app condones. In the spirit of free-reigning rule of the people, Yik Yak, a localized anonymous commenting platform, is effectively self-regulated by this “herd” - its own committed population of users, or more aptly, followers.
According to the New York Times, Yik Yak founders Tyler Droll and Brooks Buffington’s motivation behind the development of Yik Yak was “to create a more democratic social media network.” Embellishing this sentiment with words like “disenfranchised,” they marketed the app enticingly as a place to be heard. But not without limit, of course. A rating system allows users to essentially filter what content is available “out there” based on their own preferences, and perhaps a bit of anonymous peer pressure. Apparently, the app manages its law enforcement by popularity contest. 5 nays and you’re out.
Feeling empowered by the prospect of such unmitigated authority, I decided to test out the popular policing system for myself. Finding a post with four downvotes, I read the Yak just to make sure it was actually worthy of being voted out of the herd––wouldn’t want to just conform, you know. It did - it was some stupid Yak about Yakking for the first time in Harlem (as if someone has to give you a medal for that). With the press of a downward arrow and a refresh of the feed - poof! The Yak was gone. I had officially contributed to the silencing of one eager Harlem Yakker.
It’s true that only the app itself has the power to block certain comments before they even appear. In fact, the app is programmed to identify explicitly hateful, discriminatory, and violent messages and inhibit their publication with moralistic warning messages. But this under-the-radar censorship free-for-all is something else altogether. While admittedly most of the content yakked about should be censored based on sheer stupidity - at least my 1.5 mile radius around Columbia didn’t yield any of the kind of democratic creative commenting brilliance that Droll and Buffington idealized - this particular policy promotes a kind of nearly-idle, anonymous groupthink, silently removing opinions from a comment free-for-all, based on momentary preferences, prejudices, and priorities that never have to be justified. Plenty of seemingly offensive comments are up-voted, while others are down-voted until no public record of them remains. This may not be a big deal in a radius of people with differing opinions and infrequent yakking, where a yak can survive to see the glory of a few hours of e-fame, but imagine the yakking atmosphere at a rally or demonstration, where unpopular opinions are bound to be pushed down the virtual drain as quickly as they appear. So much for democracy.
In the journalistic sphere, where comments actually have some kind of historical and social weight, comment control isn’t only happening at the anonymous level. Tablet Magazine, a trendy daily web outlet covering Jewish news and culture, recently announced that it would be charging users a fee for commenting in order to keep the conversation intelligent. While this is perhaps annoying for those of us that have become accustomed by the persuasions of social media to saying whatever we want, whenever we want, and at no cost at all, Tablet’s policy might be an intermediate model. Any commenter who wishes to pay to be heard has the liberty to do so, regardless of the strain of his/her opinions. Furthermore, Tablet specifically motioned to Facebook as a remaining platform for unfettered commentary, encouraging further discussions. In justification of its new policy, Tablet referred to other news sources, like Bloomberg Business and Mic, which have completely removed the ability for readers to comment. Readers can still use other platforms, and in fact, the Facebook, Twitter, etc. icons still appear on articles, implicitly inviting readers to comment in some form anyway. But it seems that direct engagement with published pieces has been significantly derailed. The Tablet move is, practically, a silencing measure, but more than anything it is a lesson in thoughtful contribution. And in a truly democratic vein, Tablet’s comment crackdown is at least equal opportunity, comprehensively applicable to all comments, not arbitrary like Yik Yak’s free and unregulated censorship by the demos.
Our own campus daily, the Columbia Daily Spectator, has pursued a similar policy, although in a more troubling discriminatory manner. In February, Spectrum (the blog arm of the paper) announced that Spectator was barring comments on all editorials addressing sexual assault because their respective comment sections had been previously misused for offensive, vitriolic rhetoric. (Curiously enough, this controversial announcement was, itself, left open to comment).
While the contentious Spectator comment thread has long been a soapbox for bored, procrastinating students with less-than-enlightening things to say, it has also served as a crucial platform for opposition to popularly accepted opinion on campus, exposition of Spectator’s own editorial biases, and revelation of misinformation and selective reporting. Why, then, would Spectator, a supposed crusader for “free and open discussion and debate,” close comments on its most prominent area of editorial coverage? And why sexual assault and no other sensitive topic?
Like trigger warnings, topically selective comment-curbing is highly subjective and prejudicial to particular issues, prioritizing certain public “preferences” for privacy and protection over others. Readers are still free to comment on opinion pieces relating to mental health, contentious political encounters on campus, and racial issues. At what point will these areas of discourse also become too sensitive for the public to weigh in? What is the threshold and why has Spectator not explicitly identified and addressed these criteria for subject-dependent comment restrictions?
Granted, Yik Yak is not the most serious of platforms, and the “censorship lite” that the app endorses is arguably less threatening in the larger scheme of regulating free speech in the world of ideas, and as such, manipulating public opinion (disclosure: my post was only finally voted off after four hours of struggling viability). Tablet’s effort to elevate conversation by monetizing commentary is certainly innovative, and maybe a questionable necessary evil at worst. The movements of other sources away from comments across the board are at least consistent over all subject areas, although notably disturbing in terms of mainstreaming the views of the elite over the general public. But the exclusion of one editorial subject area as untouchable is a weak measure to vacuum-seal certain opinions from contrasting views.
In between refreshes of my Yik Yak feed, while cataloging some battered old Jewish books at Columbia’s Rare Book Library, I came across a more ancient form of the same censorship we take for granted today. Over the past year, I’ve flipped through dozens of volumes containing lines upon lines of text, blotted-out passionately in thick black ink. Fortunately, over 400 years, many of the censors’ marks have faded with time, allowing a careful reader to occasionally decipher the inflammatory printed material. Some censors, mimicking the modern movement for permanent erasure, had burned through problematic parts of the text, deleting that information from the historic record for good. Unlike Yik Yak’s collective censorship, cowering behind the sheltering web of virtual anonymity, these censors expurgated with pompous exhibition, often signing their names, accrediting their work for eternity, elevating the great Western enterprise of censorship with the utmost reverence.
Those were different times, though. Or were they? Is it possible that we haven’t lost our palate for cruel and convenient censorship, but that we’ve only muted the self-aggrandizing part by embracing a quiet kind of censorship that leaves no paper trail? Silent censorship seems to be vibrantly still in vogue, so long as it accompanied by a public, professed display of openness and acceptance. Tolerance reigns supreme, but only toward the end of eliminating all acceptably “intolerable” and “non-progressive” views. All of this begs the question: what is tolerance anyway, if it is predicated upon selectivity and convenience? The word begins to lose its meaning, like so many others in the contemporary liberal lexicon.
Instead of reinventing a discreet censorship fit for the modern day, wouldn’t we be wiser just to bury the censor deep in the pages of the 17th century and never look back?
// HANNAH VAITSBLIT is a Sophomore in Barnard College and a Staff Writer for The Current. She can be reached at hv2163@barnard.edu. Screenshot courtesy of Hannah Vaitsblit.