Why does The Guardian (along with so many other papers) allow members of the public to post their opinions on some, not all, items on their web pages? The Guardian does not appear to allow it in order to make money from advertising. I have only seen adverts for other Guardian products. Perhaps they are unable to attract advertisers to their pages.

I did ask earlier about advertising on Twitter. Is there a lot of it or does Twitter make money from selling their data?

Here are 2 comments from the thread on The Guardian which Steve mentioned.

"The Guardian is quite selective about what is allowed to be expressed btl."

And

"This comment was removed by a moderator because it didn't abide by our community standards. Replies may also be deleted. For more detail see our FAQs."

I am one of that dying breed that still goes to the pub. I will engage in conversation with people whose opinions are completely different from mine. I don't stop them expressing their opinions but I will tell them why I don't agree with them.

People mentioned bullying behaviour in that Guardian thread. I have said before that I find elements of that on the UK Politics thread here on mudcat. Some members post stuff which I cannot imagine them saying to their friends, assuming of course that they have friends who hold different views to their own.

Increasingly it seems that people on the web/net, only want to swap posts with like minded individuals. Heaven forbid that they should have to skim a post containing views different from their own, let alone read it.


Now I am not in favour of total, unregulated free speech. I just think that it is not as easy to police it as some think. I don't have the answer to that.