As many of you have already noticed, the MV Times is suspending comments during the holidays, though we are still accepting — and encouraging — Letters to the Editor.
For the last 15 years, The Times has invited comments online, and for years, we have struggled to do our best to moderate them. We believe the comment section can be a place where our Island comes together in civil dialogue about the issues we cover, a chance to hear each other out, to raise concerns or ideas we should be pondering. Overall, our great hope is that the comment section might be a place where we productively discuss the Island and its challenges and how we can work together to solve them. However, we also feel we have fallen short in that goal. Indeed, it is fair to say the whole Island has fallen short. Recently, we have not done as well as we need to in moderating the torrent of comments — sometimes rising to hundreds of entries per day — that are coming onto the site. Perhaps because we live in a polarized time, the tenor and tone of the comments has shifted over the last year to become more divisive and too often borders on — and even at times crosses over — into hate speech. Whether it is anti-semistism, or anti-Palestinian or anti-immigrant, or misogyny or some toxic mix of all of those vile expressions, it has just become too heated and, frankly, unacceptable. As a result, we have decided to stop accepting live comments during the holiday season. We ask for your patience as we do our best to go through past comments to weed out those that are offensive. We hope our readership understands this decision as a way for us as a news organization to stop, reflect and try to be better at moderating a dialogue on our Island. We hope you, our readers, might also reflect on how we can all be more civil in our dialogue with each other.
We will still be accepting Letters to the Editor and we want to hear from you about how best to improve our online moderating or whether we should consider ceasing the online comments altogether. We ask that you write to us and, with permission, we may share some of your comments and your thoughts. Write to our news editor Sam Houghton at sam.houghton@mvtimes.com. We will circle back to this discussion shortly.
