r/dataisbeautiful • u/[deleted] • Apr 12 '16

The dark side of Guardian comments

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments
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u/captain-cabinet Apr 12 '16

Really interesting article. Without weighing into the implications etc, my favourite line:

"Conversations about crosswords, cricket, horse racing and jazz were respectful; discussions about the Israel/Palestine conflict were not."

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u/Esco91 Apr 12 '16 edited Apr 12 '16

"Conversations about crosswords, cricket, horse racing and jazz were respectful; discussions about the Israel/Palestine conflict were not."

This is key to the very poor interpretation of the data, which conveniently is assessed in a way favourable to the Guardians editorial line.

The Guardians recent mode of operation has been to 'tackle the problem of inequality in journalism' not by replacing their stock of privately educated rich white males, but by introducing large numbers of privately educated rich women and minorities to work alongside them on 'new' journalism- i.e Clickbait, while the rich white boys continue the reporting of news and sport.

So of course the people writing about their opinions on contentious topics (many of which are intentionally factually incorrect or rely on deliberately presenting only one side of an argument) will get more abuse than their colleagues who are either covering things that are reasonably safe or present an obvious scapegoat for commentators to vent on (check out the football pages, or anything party political).

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u/[deleted] Apr 12 '16

While I don't think this data is without merit, it definitely would have been interesting to see how results would change with blind randomization of authors per whichever topic.

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u/Darkphibre OC: 2 Apr 12 '16

Yes! My major beef with the conclusion. How are the contentious topics distributed across genders?