The Comments Section

Ignore or Engage?

Photo by Ravi Sharma on Unsplash

One of the ways that I’ve continued to grow and learn in the last year is with the comments section on YouTube. Talking about Palestine is a matter of indifference for many, but for Zionists, it’s always about what has happened to them, and it’s never about admitting any wrongdoing. They have passed that victim mentality down to their acolytes. So when do you ignore the trolling and when do you engage?

After a year in which my videos on Palestine and Israel were viewed over 250,000 times across various platforms, I have a few simple guidelines:

1. The overwhelming majority of comments come from people who really like or really hate what you have to say. Say “thank you” or “you’re welcome” to every person that took the time to leave a comment. You may choose to block the people who are hateful and lead with name-calling. You have no obligation to welcome close-minded negativity into your life, and YouTube’s shadow ban feature (“hide user from channel”) is remarkable because the troll doesn’t get the satisfaction of being blocked, but continues to have access to your channel, only no one can see his/her comments anymore, so the rantings are to an audience of zero. At some point the troll will realize this (or not) and move on. However you choose to respond, remember that you have no moral obligation to take on negativity and anger, especially from someone unwilling to engage with you in a civil manner.

2. If 90-95% of commenters fall into the category above, the remainder are either open to engaging or genuinely interested in learning.

   1. Open to engaging types do often have strong opinions, but they like to consider themselves “moderates” and talk about “hearing both sides.” That’s a commonsense approach to pretty much any topic on this planet except Palestine. This is because all most of us have ever heard in the press our whole lives is the Israeli side. So, it’s not as if we’ve never heard the Israeli side such that we need to “hear both sides.” What is lacking, what is almost never realized, is that most people do not know, cannot even begin to grasp, the Palestinian side. So those who like to imagine themselves “in the middle” on this issue are squarely in the Zionist camp, the camp of occupiers, murderers, rapists (or at least defenders of rapists, as we most recently saw). I have found engagements with these types of individuals to be fairly fruitless. After eight or ten comments back and forth, either side may concede a moderation of some language, but not of the core of the message, and they part, never to speak again.

   2. Those genuinely interested in learning are sponges. They will take every resource you have, not because they unerringly trust you, but because they trust the process of learning. They know that in reading enough books on a subject they will be able to see what is true and what is false, what keeps coming up over and over whether written by an Israeli or a Palestinian, or by a Catholic or a Druse. I pour into these people because I know the return of investment is solid.

3. You cannot take things personally. The Internet can often feel like a freeway, where motorists may take aggressive driving personally. There’s no need for that. That person doesn’t know you. If they say hateful things, let it roll off your back. I’ve said recently to friends of mine with are parents that if I wished we modified anything in our educational approach, it would be to expose children to this some of this ugliness earlier. We can often be trapped in our bubbles in which we don’t perceive the differences of opinion that swirl all around us. The more that we can, at an earlier age, acknowledge those differences to exist, and at the same time go our own way, undisturbed, the more peaceful lives we can have. As a Christian I’ve tried often to say a short prayer for someone right before shadow banning or blocking him/her. These people are created by God in His image and likeness and whatever reason they have for thinking and acting the way that they do, I hope, in whatever time they have left, they seek out His image and likeness and try to conform themselves to that, instead of cutting out a path so hateful (and misinformed). Life is too short to be angry.

After a year and thousands of comments I’ve had to moderate, I can now figure out within about 10-15 seconds what category someone falls into and can then act accordingly. I’m sure this approach may not work at scale, or I may need to bring on help for comment moderation in the future, but in the meantime it keeps me very close to the way people respond to my work and holds me accountable. I look back at some of my early work on Palestine and cringe at what I didn’t know at the time I said something or drew a conclusion. But it’s also nice to see that content up, as it’s a humbling part of the journey of knowledge.

#EndTheOccupation