javascripts 09.04.12

I did something last night I never did before.

I went through comment threads on the RiverheadLocal Facebook pages and deleted comments I thought were insensitive, mean, stupid and racist.

Now, I value free speech more than most other things in our society, and I believe it makes America great. The role of censor does not come naturally to me and I don’t like how it feels. But I felt it was necessary to take some of the Facebook comments down. OK, I know deleting comments is not akin to the government arresting someone for their speech, but it still seems, well, wrong.

The Facebook pages, and the pages of this website, are intended to provide a community forum for discussion. I harbor a (perhaps polly-anna) belief that community discussion, even when people use the forum to rant and say things that are overtly hateful and/or factually incorrect, is inherently good. The so-called experts tell us: Let the discussion flow, the forums will police themselves.

But Facebook comments on my post about Saturday night’s fatal motor vehicle accident on Route 58 immediately turned into a stream of vile speech about “unlicensed” “drunk” “illegals.”

One young woman of Hispanic heritage jumped into the fray and attempted to set the morons straight.

Yes, I just called them morons. This is an opinion piece, and in my opinion, that’s exactly what they are. Morons.

They are morons because they shoot their mouths off without having any facts, and I mean ANY facts about what happened.

They are morons because they don’t care about facts. They prefer instead to cling to their opinions and advance their world view no matter what, without consideration for the truth or for other people.

It turns out the young woman was the daughter of the man who was killed in the crash. She was arguing with the morons on Riverheadlocal’s Facebook page before she even knew the subject of the argument — the man that the morons, without any information about who he was or what had happened, were calling drunk, illegal, unlicensed, etc. — was her own father.

That pretty much broke my heart, folks. And that’s when I decided to start removing comments.

And, wow, does it underscore the need to use the power of digital publishing very, very judiciously, as I wrote about yesterday.

We don’t yet know how the accident happened. We don’t know why Julio Velez crossed into oncoming traffic. We don’t know why his car hit two others along the way or why he kept going. The police are still trying to figure all that out. It’s their job and they do it well. All we can do is speculate. And speculation is pointless, usually leads to bad conclusions, and feeds the rumor mill.

We don’t know the status of the man’s driver’s license, or whether or not he was a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant. Running off at the mouth — or the keyboard — about these things just because of the victim’s surname is ignorant and racist. If you don’t see that, then I consider you a moron too. There are people, plenty of people, of Hispanic heritage who are US citizens or in this country legally, you know. 

Now if you’re one of the morons who posted things like “close the borders” on the story about the crash even before ANY information was available, or whose knee-jerk reaction is to rant about “illegals” on our Facebook page, I don’t expect you to get it. I figure I might as well be talking to one of those walls you’d like to build at our border to keep other people out.

But making comments about the decedent’s ancestry and ethnicity, accusing him of things you have zero knowledge about, in addition to exposing you as an idiot, is extremely hurtful to the victim’s family. If you need to spout off like that, go do it someplace else.

I know this community is full of wonderful, caring, compassionate people. I want to believe the people who spew this kind of thing are simply a vocal minority.

But sometimes, Riverhead, you depress me.

Denise Civiletti, reporter, editor, digital maven and former newspaper editor and publisher, lives and works in Riverhead. She vaguely remembers having a life away from electronic gadgets before being consumed by her role as a digital-hyperlocal-news-entrepreneur-pioneer — lol— publishing RiverheadLocal.com with her husband Peter Blasl.