We must overcome hate, Butler County
In the Facebook comment section of a Butler Eagle article written about “how to overcome hate,” numerous keyboard warriors pushed our newsroom to make an unprecedented decision.
The comments on a story headlined “Documentary teaches how to overcome hate at Cranberry library” were filled Thursday afternoon with people making false statements about the Holocaust and ridiculing the Jewish community.
We turned the comments off.
When the Eagle’s social media specialist alerted me to the comments, I was floored. This is the Butler County I grew up in. I read Anne Frank’s diary as part of my third-grade class work and heard from a Holocaust survivor during an assembly as a teen at Butler Senior High School.
On Thursday, we deleted the comments and turned them off to prevent further conversation on the post.
In my years as an editor, I’ve often been among the voices that most forcefully advocate for giving readers a voice and allowing for various opinions to stay in comment sections. Here at the Eagle, we’ve launched quizzes, conducted surveys and asked readers to participate in polls.
We also launched a “Civics & Civility” project about a year and a half ago, where we highlighted our community, its differences and how people with different views could have civil conversations.
We want to hear your voice, readers, but the hate-filled comments on Thursday’s post, we will simply not condone.
This isn’t new. It’s simply the first time we’ve had to take action to this extent.
“We encourage discussion in our comments, but only civil discussion,” our longstanding social media policy states.
The social media policy indicates that to foster civil discussion of current news and events, we reserve the right to remove obscene, vulgar, indecent or profane languages or emojis; hate speech directed at race, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender, national origin, ethnicity, age, religion or disability; and aggression or threats toward fellow users or Butler Eagle staff.
We’re not alone in decisions like this. Just a short time ago, the nearby Indiana Gazette made a similar decision regarding a social media post. For the first time in her 20-year career, their publisher, Margaret Weaver, turned off comments on a social media post.
“Everyone has a right to their own opinions. There is certainly a place for passion in healthy debate. Disagreement is part of democracy,” she said when making her decision. “But the keyboard warriors took it too far.”
I spoke with her as I made a similar decision Thursday, and I told her how disappointed I was to be put in this position.
Western Pennsylvania — Butler County — we are better than this.
Butler County, we must build a space where we talk with each other behind a keyboard like we would in-person. We can challenge each others’ ideas and opinions without tearing each other down.
But let me make clear: There is no room for hate speech or falsehoods to be spread in the Butler Eagle’s comment section. We must overcome the hate.
Tracy Leturgey is the interim managing editor of the Butler Eagle.
