I Used to Tell People to Read the Comments. I Was Right…But I Was Also Wrong.

In 2017, I gave a TED talk at TEDxBend called "Yes, Read the Comments Section." The argument was simple: behind the hostility and noise of online debate, there were real people with real perspectives, and disengaging from them entirely was its own kind of failure. Apathy is not compatible with love. Ignorance is not the fuel for compassion. If you only retreat into the feeds that confirm what you already think, you lose something important — the ability to understand how the people you disagree with actually see the world.

I believed that then. I still believe most of it now.

This week, my op-ed on academic freedom and the First Amendment ran in Reason. My partner asked about the comments, since there seemed to be a lot of them. Out of curiosity, I looked and shared some with her — she instantly regretted asking. I, on the other hand, felt mostly apathetic.

For years, I didn't just read the comments. I responded to them…all of them, or close enough. When someone attacked me personally, I responded. When someone distorted my position, I corrected it. When someone deployed misinformation about my legal case or my band, I laid out the actual record. I did this deliberately, because I believed the real audience wasn't the just person I was responding to, it was also everyone else reading. If I responded with clarity and patience, I thought, I was modeling something useful. Showing that it was possible to engage across a hard disagreement without losing your composure or your principles.

Looking back, I think I was only partly right about that.

No matter what intentions I began with, I think the public response ended up becoming more performative over time. People would often commend me for my patience, for bringing rigor to otherwise toxic discussions — and I appreciated that. But performance has a cost. It can harden the person you're performing in front of. There's research suggesting that public correction, especially when it carries any hint of superiority, makes people dig in rather than reconsider. The same conversation, held privately, with some existing relationship and trust behind it, tends to go differently.

The landscape has also changed in ways that make 2017's argument feel like it was written about a different internet — because it was.

When I gave that talk, Twitter and Facebook were the dominant platforms for public debate, and despite their limitations, both maintained some baseline expectation of argument structure. The ability to mute or block people was a relatively new feature that most people used only in the most extreme cases. The default was still to engage (even if uncomfortably). Today, the channels have multiplied: Threads, Bluesky, TikTok, and whatever comes next — and with each shift, the nature of the engagement has changed. TikTok comments operate differently than Twitter replies, which operate differently than YouTube threads, which operate differently than Reddit threads. The common thread across all of them is that the urgency has increased. People feel the stakes are higher now, that there's less time to waste on genuinely exploring an opposing perspective. Social media has also created what I'd call a vanity tax: you have to perform confidence at all times, because any visible uncertainty or revision becomes a weapon. Starting from a hypothesis and working backward to find the evidence that supports it has replaced the older, slower practice of starting from evidence and developing a hypothesis. The comments section reflects that. It doesn't cause it, but it reflects it.

I cited a 2016 Pew Research poll in the original talk about partisan division. Whatever those numbers were then, the trend they captured has accelerated since. The filter bubble problem I described (algorithms feeding you content calibrated to your existing beliefs) has compounded with years of platform design that rewards the most emotionally activating content, not the most accurate or nuanced. NPR, which I mentioned as one outlet experimenting with alternatives to traditional comments, eventually shut down not just its comments section but also severely cut back its social media presence, citing toxicity.

Some things that seemed like problems have gotten worse. Some things that seemed like solutions haven't worked.

What I hold onto from the 2017 argument is the underlying value, not the specific practice. The belief that connection across disagreement matters, that disengagement is a choice with real civic costs, that the cure for bad speech is more speech rather than silence — those things still seem right to me.

What I've let go is the sense of obligation to be present in every space, regardless of whether it's actually conducive to the kind of exchange I care about. There's a difference between avoiding a conversation because it's uncomfortable and recognizing that some conversations — as currently structured — aren't actually conversations. They're performances for different audiences, with conclusions already determined. I can still hold the underlying belief that connection across disagreement matters without spending my limited time and energy in spaces where intellectual honesty isn't a shared expectation. I'd rather focus on writing, research, and the kinds of exchanges where someone is at least willing to consider that they might be wrong — including me.

Apathy is not compatible with love. But neither is pouring yourself into a space that has no interest in either.

I speak on civic life, free expression, and how we build understanding across difference at universities, civic organizations, and corporate events. If these questions connect to work you're doing, simontam.org/speaking is the place to start.