There’s a notice over at Gannett’s Sheboygan Press that they will be moving their stories’ comments to Facebook.
Two quick observations.
First, comments on Facebook are not anonymous, and the publisher surely (and correctly) hopes that this will moderate the comments posted. Since a private paper is free to publish some comments, no comments, or all comments, this is a private (rather than a First Amendment) issue.
It’s legitimate to criticize a newspaper for its coverage; it’s an infringement on that paper’s liberty to compel it to publish specific content. (It’s both ignorance of the law and a disregard of liberty to contend that the First Amendment somehow compels publication of certain speech.)
I’m a strong advocate of the existing rights of anonymous and pseudonymous speech. These rights are available to anyone, but are especially useful to minority viewpoints. In general, a citizen in a free society owes no one his or her identity before speaking. A community arrogantly and wrongly infringes on individual liberty when it thinks otherwise.
Still, the answer to private restrictions in one place is a private alternative elsewhere. People are free to publish their own, alternative websites.
Second, and tellingly, there’s little practical chance that comments will go away. Running comments (remarks that are less restricted than letters to the editor have ever been) through Facebook is a sign that there’s no going back to a pre-comment era. Few websites are more conventional than Facebook. By the time papers turn to Facebook to manage their comments, they’ve conceded the permanency of commenting.
The announcement is at the Sheboygan Press.