News Sites Rethink Anonymous Online Comments

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

From the start, Internet users have taken for granted that the territory was both a free-for-all and a digital disguise, allowing them to revel in their power to address the world while keeping their identities concealed.

A New Yorker cartoon from 1993, during the Web’s infancy, with one mutt saying to another, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog,” became an emblem of that freedom. For years, it was the magazine’s most reproduced cartoon.

When news sites, after years of hanging back, embraced the idea of allowing readers to post comments, the near-universal assumption was that anyone could weigh in and remain anonymous. But now, that idea is under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites.

The Washington Post plans to revise its comments policy over the next several months, and one of the ideas under consideration is to give greater prominence to commenters using real names.

The New York Times, The Post and many other papers have moved in stages toward requiring that people register before posting comments, providing some information about themselves that is not shown onscreen.

The Huffington Post soon will announce changes, including ranking commenters based in part on how well other readers know and trust their writing.

Yep, I agree. Newspaper website comment boards can turn into a dump of mindless extremism. For example, on crime news articles on my local news sites for the San Francisco Chronicle and San Jose Mercury News, many comments often race-bait or blame immigration.

In one case, anonymous commenting has posed harm:

The Plain Dealer of Cleveland recently discovered that anonymous comments on its site, disparaging a local lawyer, were made using the e-mail address of a judge who was presiding over some of that lawyer’s cases.

That kind of proxy has been documented before; what was more unusual was that The Plain Dealer exposed the connection in an article. The judge, Shirley Strickland Saffold, denied sending the messages — her daughter took responsibility for some of them. And last week, the judge sued The Plain Dealer, claiming it had violated her privacy.

[ericinne]

1. Try Topix

Try reading some of the crap on TOPIX. That site IMHO, is also a contributer to alot of the hate rhetoric being spewed by anonymous posters.

[Pithlet]

2. They're the worst.

One of our local tv stations uses a topix forum for its website and when they reported about the recent shooting at our zoo when they held one of the free days during spring break, the comments were just so unbelievably disgusting. You can report them, but the station doesn't bother to remove or moderate.

[KT2000]

3. Comment sections are horrible

it seems that no matter what the subject, they turn into a board for bigots, racists and teabaggers.
The subject of the article is forgotten while everyone ends up responding to commenters' "character" instead.
The thought of people all over this country sitting at their computers thinking up mean comments and enjoying the turmoil makes me sick.
Tend to avoid them now.

[JDPriestly]

4. Many of us use pseudonyms on DU. DU, of course, knows

who we are and has our e-mail addresses.

I don't understand how a person can register to post on a website without identifying him- or herself.

But I defend the right to use pseudonyms. Some of the best letters to the editor published by Benjamin Franklin were his own. He used great pseudonyms. And behind each pseudonym was a well drawn character. IMO, Franklin's letters to the editor were an art form of their own. Not quite theater but almost in some cases.