Hitting ‘delete’ on verbal bullies

Sunday morning, I killed all the comments and turned off any further commenting from that story. The man had died. To say it was inappropriate to make such cruel comments at that time is an understatement. (The GSP now believes the accident didn’t involve a car at all making all the inane anti-bicycle comments even more cruel.)


Unfortunately, I wasn’t surprised by either situation. Over the past three years, there have been a number of times we have had to kill insensitive or inane comments from the Journal’s website. With a tragedy, people have often used that as a venue to spout venom toward their fellow human beings.

And it’s not just tragedies. The headlines that go up on the Journal’s website are often just short blurbs of much longer articles that appear in the print edition. Yet every week, people will make inflamed comments about articles that they have not yet read based simply on the headline blurb. Preconceived notions, conspiracy theories and hatred often dominate the agenda of those who comment online.

What’s wrong with these people? While we all understand the passion that politics can elicit in the public arena, I’m not sure we’ve ever encountered the depth and breadth of antagonism that often surfaces on the Journal’s website.

My theory on this has several parts.

First, there are a lot of unhappy, frustrated and socially impotent people who make many of these comments. These are people who feel they have no power over their own lives so they attempt to compensate by going online and trying to show a sense of control they don’t have in real life. They feign knowledge about issues that they really know little about. They lash out at others as a way to compensate for their own problems. They are bullies and like bullies from the playground to the corporate world, they try to mask their own insecurities by projecting a sense of bravado.

That’s true across the Internet where small people with small minds feel an outsized sense of empowerment simply by making comments.

But these people really aren’t brave. Their inane, often cruel comments are done behind a mask of anonymity. They lack the toughness and courage to put their name on their spewing venom. They hide in the shadows and are important only in their own minds while the rest of the world thinks they are loons.

The second part of this issue is more specific to Barrow County. For too many years here, there was no real coverage of the local government news. In that void, a system of gossip, rumor and innuendo became the currency for many people’s “news.” Facts were not important, only that John down the street heard something at the store about a politician, so it must be true.

That created a very warped sense of place for many people. Knowledge is power and for many in the community who seek power, rumor and innuendo became a substitute for facts.

That rumor-based dynamic became institutionalized to a large extent. Everything became a conspiracy. In some of the online comments, this kind of rumor-driven mentality is evident.

Last week, we had a story on a possible new industry looking at Barrow County. Immediately, rumormongers began to post comments about all kinds of conspiracy theories of who was doing what on the inside, although nobody knows any details of that situation. Rather than waiting for facts, the uninformed began to sow seeds of distrust and to show their own ignorance.

The real heroes of this situation are those people in the community who fire back online and verbally slap the immature commentators. Some of those people have the courage to use their names on their posts. They call out the weasels who post cruel or stupid comments for what they really are: Small people with small minds who display their ignorance for all the world to see.

Still, what does it say about a community where that kind of garbage is viewed as commonplace and even acceptable?

We have been fairly open in the past with the Journal’s online comments. It does serve a purpose for people to comment on local news events.

But the depth of depravity that we have seen lately has become too much. If these loons want to make cruel comments about churches burning down or people killed in an accident, they can create their own blogs and say whatever they wish no matter how childish or ugly.

But no more on the Journal’s website. Those who spew venom will be banned. Those who deal only in rumors will be deleted. The Journal’s website is a source of local Barrow County news, not a bullhorn for every miserable miscreant to spit his verbal garbage.

Reasonable, serious, civil debate in online comments is welcome, but we’re done with the verbal bullies. Go away.

Mike Buffington is co-publisher of the Barrow Journal. He can be reached at mike@mainstreetnews.com.