The notion, as expressed by some, that Charlie Crystle ended TalkBack is absurd. It was not his property; he didn’t have access to the plug.
Personally, I was surprised by the number of racist comments. I didn’t realize those sentiments still had many proponents. Charlie Crystle had a reason to be upset but Lancaster Newspapers held the keys. Frankly, I found their actions cowardly.
People want to point fingers so let’s point. Mine is pointed at the TalkBack community. I’m not casting blame on racists. They’ve got an ill-founded sense of superiority based on a superficial notion of skin color. Chances are they’ll die as racists despite tender Hispanic nurses who assist their end-of-life treatment. The rest of the community is to blame for its loss.
In the marketplace of ideas, the best ideas should win. Unfortunately, poor ideas were allowed to thrive. Freedom is not without responsibility.
Were you a TalkBack user? Sure doesn’t sound like it! If you had visited even the threads with the most racist statements, for every one of those statements there were a dozen protests of them!!!
This is all smoke and mirrors. Charlie Crystle has political ambitions. He needed to magnify and amplify the handful, and I do mean handful, of racists. It serves his purpose. Look at all the publicity he has gotten. For free!
All that LNP had to do was ban the offenders. There is talk that LNP is on of the newspaper groups that is looking to charge for online content. Can you imagine the outcry from TB-ers when that announcement was made? LNP doesn’t have that problem now. TB is gone. The problem is that they have badly misjudged their worth to the community. And in ditching TalkBack, they badly misjudge how many online readers they will have left …