Why South Africa’s biggest news sites closed their comments
On 11 September News24, South Africa’s largest news website, switched off comments on its articles – a decision which elicited strong emotions from the website’s readers.
This was followed by a more recent announcement by Independent Online (IOL) to do the same thing.
MyBroadband spoke to leaders from these two sites to find out exactly what motivated the move to shut down their comment sections.
News24 was known for its active comment sections, but not all the comments were constructive. Racism, sexism, and bigotry became common.
News24 Editor-in-Chief Andrew Trench said they wanted to be known for the quality of their content rather than for their comments.
He said interesting and considered contributions were often drowned out by a cacophony of insults from a minority of users.
Closing comments
Many people criticised the decision, saying it was silencing South Africans and will lead to the decline of the website.
Trench told MyBroadband that they are not concerned that the decision will lead to a loss of traffic, though.
“We calculated the potential impact of this prior to making the decision, and the impact a month in has been negligible and in line with our expectations,” said Trench.
He said they still open some of their articles for comments, and since they have lowered the volume of comments they are able to carefully moderate those which are submitted.
Facebook and Twitter
Many people have taken to Facebook and Twitter to voice their opinions, and this was not a surprise.
Trench said this was a trend they observed before closing comments, and is in line with the experience of publishers globally.
“Users are increasingly using social media to respond to our content, particularly on Facebook where we have nearly two million followers.”
He said the popularity of social media will continue to grow regardless of whether publishers keep comments open on their platforms or not.
“For many users, Facebook is effectively their Internet experience and this will most likely to continue to be the case for the foreseeable future,” he said.
Trench said it is too early to tell whether they will look back in a year from now and say that closing comments was the right decision.
“I think it is important to reflect the voices of our community of users, which we continue to do through channels like MyNews24.”
“I also think there is a space in-between article-level comments and a separate user opinion platform which is the sweet spot for interesting engagement and we are doing a lot of thinking about that still.”
Trench said he would like to see how things unfold over the course of the year before passing judgment on their decision.
For now, though, he is satisfied that it was the right decision for News24 to close its comments.
Independent Online (IOL) said its decision was necessary to fight abuse on its comment section.
The decision followed recommendations by an advisory panel set up in 2014 to investigate online abuse on IOL’s platforms.
The panel found it is desirable to have online comments in the interests of freedom of expression. However, the constitutional rights of people should not be infringed by such comments.
IOL Managing Editor Adrian Ephraim explained that the “freedom of expression guaranteed by our Constitution was never meant to override the personal freedoms and human rights of our fellow citizens”.
IOL’s decision to close comments was criticised by people who felt the platform will be poorer because of the lack of comments.
MyBroadband spoke to Ephraim to gain insight into the decision, and to get feedback on some of the issues raised by critics.
Many Internet users said they will stop visiting IOL, and that the site will see a decline in traffic. Are you concerned about a loss in traffic?
We do expect a drop in traffic because some of our readers come to our site to actually read just the comments. However, we have come up with ways to mitigate that slight dip in traffic and so we haven’t experienced a worrying loss at all.
In any event, “clean” traffic will always be better for our brands in the long run. That said, we must point out that the number of “bad apples” were in the minority, but the volume of bigoted comments they generated was quite substantial.
Many South Africans are already using social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook to voice their opinions. Will IOL comments move to these platforms?
IOL is certainly directing people to social media in order to engage with other readers and ourselves. We feel these platforms are suitable to forming engaged communities with specific interests.
News is one of those interests, as is Motoring and Entertainment, etc. Many South Africans already use social media to discuss current affairs so it’s not a huge leap.
Many people said the decision to close comments was a mistake. Are you confident IOL will look back at the decision a year from now and say it was the right decision?
Yes. This was not a decision we rushed into. It took us more than a year to close down comments precisely because we didn’t want to regret it later without having considered all the factors.
In the end we think our readers deserve better, and the majority of them have expressed their support for our decision to close comments.
More on comments sections
IOL closes comments on its online articles
News24 is shutting down its comments section
The silent sufferers of the Internet’s most hateful comments
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