Social media, insults are often empty shells: when arguments run out, insults arrive

A reader wrote to us asking why we don't preemptively close comments on certain news stories. His concern is understandable: in some cases, the discussion quickly devolves into a string of aggressive comments, personal judgments, provocations, and gratuitous insults.

But closing comments before a discussion even begins would mean choosing the easiest and, at the same time, most dangerous path: preemptive censorship. And we don't censor discussion. We can moderate excesses, we can intervene when certain limits are exceeded, but we can't decide in advance that people don't have the right to express an opinion.

The point, if anything, is another: why do so many people, faced with news or an idea different from their own, feel the need to offend?

Often, insult isn't strength. It's weakness. It's the refuge of those who can't argue, those who can't truly explain their position, those who lack the tools to sustain a debate. When the right words are missing, the wrong ones arrive. When reasoning fails, insults arrive. When you can't hit an idea, you try to hit the person.

Yet many insults are just empty shells. Words thrown around to make noise, not to say anything. Phrases that seem heavy, but often have no meaning. They don't explain, they don't add, they don't build. They only serve to fill the silence left by the absence of thought.

The problem is that today offense is often mistaken for opinion.

But not everything written is automatically a thought. Saying "I disagree" is a position. Explaining why you disagree is a contribution. Insulting those who think differently, on the other hand, is simply a surrender.

A mature society should learn to distinguish between criticism and aggression. Criticism can be harsh, even extremely harsh. It can challenge an idea, a political choice, a public behavior, an administrative decision. But it remains critical when it maintains a connection with facts and reasoning. Offense, on the other hand, severs that connection. It isn't intended to convince, it simply seeks to wound. And we mustn't let ourselves be wounded by an empty shell.

And perhaps we should also learn not to take certain words too seriously. Not because insults are nice or acceptable, but because they often reveal more about the person who says them than the person they're directed at. Those who insult are saying something, above all, about themselves: their anger, their inability to listen, their difficulty engaging in a civilized discussion, but above all, they reveal their ignorance (in the sense of not knowing the topic or fact).

Closing comments preemptively would mean surrendering to this trend. It would mean admitting that we're no longer capable of distinguishing between those who want to argue and those who just want to shout. It would also mean denying space to those who actually have something to say. Instead, seeing all those mostly useless words there gives a vivid representation of the social media world. Of course, it's obvious that a part of it, fortunately, is still alive, and it's worth reading the contributions people leave in the comments, filtering out all the background noise.

Freedom of speech is not the freedom to insult. But neither can fear of insult become an excuse to shut down any discussion. A newspaper's job is not to silence society. It's to report on it, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's tense, even when it shows its worst side.

Insults pass. Arguments endure. Empty words make noise for a few seconds, then die away. Ideas, if solid, endure.

This is why we shouldn't fear confrontation. If anything, we should demand it to be better. More civilized, more serious, more adult. Because discussion doesn't mean destroying the other. It means trying, at least for a moment, to understand if behind a position different from our own lies something worth listening to.

And when there's nothing left, when only the insult remains, perhaps the best response is to not give it too much importance. Because certain insults, after all, aren't boulders. They're just empty shells.