Millions of netizens have fallen prey to the average, uninformed person enjoying/abusing the privilege given to them by the comment sections.
Victims of these ‘kangaroo courts’ are met with harsh criticism, hate, homophobia, racism, prejudice among others.
All one has to do is post a photo or thought and wait for comments. Within a few minutes, replies start flowing in and the violence of words begins.
In the popular comment culture, all people are invited to weigh in on all issues at all times, expertise is devalued, and people are compelled to speak before thinking. It has infected public discourse, and troubled hearts, and impaired our minds.
Karen, a notorious troll, reported she usually comments because her opinions matter and she is also exercising her freedom of speech.
“I approach the comment section poised to attack. It’s a brutal world in the replies and I go in guns loaded.”
She adopted this strategy after being overly victimized in the comment section.
Ottis, an expert critic, revealed the comment section has empowered him in ways he didn’t expect.
“I am uninformed about academics, research, and business but the comment section has given me a chance to criticize and devalue individuals who have spent years gaining expertise in these fields.”
Ottis regards himself as a jack-of-all-trade pundit who deserves a say on everything from the risks of COVID vaccines to the odds of the USA invading North Korea after Kim Jong Un’s death.
“The information is all in my fingertips when I google. Why should I not give my expert opinion?”
Whereas keyboard and online personas give commenters a sense of anonymity credits go to social media sites that are engineered to create an illusion of urgency for the average, uniformed person to weigh in on every issue.
Some sites have exploited the power of comment culture to drive traffic by generating content engineered to strike controversy.
“Comments to any site are important than views. The more the comments in a certain post the more the people are clicking back to the post, the more are refreshing their feeds to follow the conversation, the more the people the post reaches.” John the blogger mentioned.
Those who use reason, emotion, and historical context in perfect blend to handle false claims have their talents end up being pearls cast before swine in the comments.
“Comment threads are not productive places for meaningful discourse. They give amplification to voices that don’t belong in certain conversations.” Mark Zuckerberg said in a recent press release.
He advised those with meaningful thoughts to write essays and independently instead of wasting them in the comment section.
Citizen 250Q 