Comments and Anonymity

Key Takeaways:

• The majority of sites we talked to try to enforce a policy requiring commenters to use their real names.

• Many sites moderate all comments, reviewing them before they’re published. This takes lots of time and inhibits direct conversation, but protects discussions from shills, trolls, spammers and, potentially, libel suits.

• A few sites believe commenters have a right to anonymity, understanding that allowing anonymous comments demands extra vigilance in monitoring them.

 A real-time policy provides context and clarity

We have a real-name policy. To me that’s an ethical issue online. If you have people commenting in a public forum, especially in a small community, readers have a right to know whether that’s a former elected official or somebody who works for the state senator, or just a bitter businessman that got screwed over. Who a person is can give their comments clarity, meaning and context. So to me that’s an ethical issue. It’s more than having a civil place to have a community conversation – though a real-name policy helps with that, too.  It always surprises me when journalists who I consider ethical and knowledgeable in this space disagree with me on that point.

Our real-name policy is enforced with at least 90 percent accuracy. There’ve been two or three times when it comes to my attention that longtime commenters aren’t using their real names.

There are sites that are at a scale where the way I enforce a real-names policy might not work, but certainly in a small town I think it works. In a medium town it can work – I hear Buffalo’s doing it. I’m not against anonymous online commentary or blogs – I believe that you can establish credibility anonymously. I’m just talking in the narrow context of participating in a news site that is an attempt to be a journalistic endeavor.

We have a “submit news” button – you can submit news or story tips anonymously, without identifying yourself. About half of the news tips I get are from people that send me their name, they just don’t want it public. I find those tips to be a bit more credible.

 Worry about site reputation, not page views

I moderate all comments and make everybody identify themselves by name. I treat comments more like letters to the editor. I don’t allow the free-for-all. For several reasons. One is self-preservation – you know what the free-for-all looks like: any newspaper website. It’s acutely obvious and painful in a small community like this if the free-for-all is allowed to go unchecked. It takes over your site, and people begin to think that is what your site is all about, it’s a place to go grouse anonymously about whatever you want, to make unfounded accusations, to publish false information, to libel and slander.

The reason why I do it the way I do it now is, we had a couple of incidents  where comments were posted on the site that created problems for me. This is my business. I started it, my blood sweat and tears have gone into it. I’m creating it for the community. I see a responsibility to the community to keep it going, and if a comment is posted on the site that jeopardizes that, I don’t feel I’m under any obligation to publish it.

I refuse to play the game some other sites do, which is that, all content is content, comments are content too, and if it gets page views, that’s good. 

In one case, one of the candidates for mayor in the election of 2007 posted some information in a comment about the town board and the other candidate for mayor. Basically, it was accusations without any foundation. I disallowed it, and after four or five of those I told him he needed to stop. I ended up banning him from the site. It was really ugly – I had to ban him from commenting in the midst of the campaign. He ended up writing a column for the Charlotte Observerafter he lost the election in which he accused DavidsonNews.net of taking sides in the election and being responsible for his loss.

You know what? People like me need to worry more about the reputation of our site than how many page views we have.

The other thing that caused me to change my policy was, a person had posted something on the site about another business person. It was dangerous stuff.  And I realized, if people are going to post this kind of thing on my site, I have to moderate – because some people saw it before I had a chance to remove it.

I refuse to play the game some other sites do, which is that, all content is content, comments are content too, and if it gets page views, that’s good. You know what? People like me need to worry more about the reputation of our site than how many page views we have.

 Registering users led to healthier conversations

Now we’re starting to get a level of commenting that I’m more proud of. I think it’s a healthier, cleaner discussion.

We instituted last year a policy that you have to disclose your full name to comment. We didn’t have most of our content available for commenting for a long time. We opened it all up but we pre-review and copy-edit all comments, and we decided to do this no-anonymity thing. And so when a person registers on the site to comment we send them a note to make sure their contact info works, and if there’s any question we also call them and try to do that. Some readers have a lot of trouble with it. But now we’re starting to get a level of commenting that I’m more proud of. I think it’s a healthier, cleaner discussion. We now have 3,675 registered users through that process.

So that’s been interesting. We also have a pretty heavy moderating effort, where any kind of accusations or ad hominem attacks we try to cull out. Every once in a while somebody blows up and accuses us of censorship. But this is our forum, we’re trying to make it productive.

 Real names are not the problem

When it started in 2005, our whole site was anonymous because we didn’t know we would wind up doing what we did. We were chronically anonymous on the Internet before that. We first got online in 1994 and were cognizant that there could be a trail of what you say or what you do. It just didn’t seem right that if we went around using our own names that people could find, for example, me discussing my pregnancy on misc.kids.pregnancy on Usenet back in 1995. So we were always using initials or things like that.

Then I thought: gee, I’d love to talk about West Seattle online and ramble about our neighborhood. So I didn’t think twice [about staying anonymous]. We started West Seattle Blog as just: hey, I’m this person out here, talking about whatever I see in the neighborhood.

After the first year, we started to cover some news.  At that point, it was almost like we really could be, in the best way for a journalist, something of a fly on the wall. I remember the first time I went to cover a meeting in this tiny room in a restaurant, and I was sitting three feet from the person who was the ringleader of a local protest. Nobody knew I was the person running the local website.

Aside from a few events we were able to go to or observe, we did everything by email. It would’ve made a great academic study. By then our site was starting to develop a small following, and people apparently could tell that we were responsible, we were accurate, we spelled things correctly. We even got people to talk with us by email who were in official capacities. A local politician’s staff communicated with us, even though they only knew us as the West Seattle Blog people, because they trusted us. Not that they were telling us anything confidential, but if you wrote to them with a question about something that was in their jurisdiction, they’d answer, which was really amazing.

On the other hand there was also a wonderful woman – who since then has become somebody we work with – who, the first time we sent her a question, said, “Sorry, nothing personal, but I’m a longtime journalist and I won’t speak with anyone when I don’t know who they are, where they’re coming from, or what their track record is.”

Later in 2007, we thought we need to get serious about this, and there was no question that we would have to say, “OK, here’s who we are.”

I still strongly believe that people have the right to comment online and in person whether they choose to give their names or not. I’ve noticed that even in contexts where people are supposedly all sitting there with their own true names, like on Facebook, it doesn’t stop people from being acrimonious, it doesn’t stop them from getting into flame wars. Real names are not the problem.

I also highly resent the fact that people are implying that we should all have to give proof of our identity online, yet I can walk into a public meeting tomorrow, and someone can request that I identify myself before I stand up and speak, but they can’t require me to, and I can stand up there and say something. People should have that same right online.

On our site, we don’t require real names. My strong belief about that is it’s all about the rules that you set, the atmosphere that you set. And not only having rules but enforcing them. And inviting people to tell you if someone is breaking the rules. We have a forum, for example, that I don’t spend my whole day watching. So we say, please let us know if someone is violating the rules, whether it’s a civility rule or a different kind of rule, like no free advertising.

If humanly possible it’s really important to keep an eye on comments. Search engines tend to pick up comments as if they were content on their own, and if you have something there that’s an out-and-out falsehood, no matter how big or small or dangerous, it’ll be there in the record, somebody will come across it, cite it somewhere. So if you have some way to truthsquad, and luckily we do, then I think that should be part of the policy.

If it’s something you have no way of verifying, and you think that if it turns out not to be true it could be damaging, you can delete it. But sometimes you can easily verify it yourself. We had an example this morning. We had a fairly long comment today about a guy who bought an old firetruck, put it on his lawn, and now the city says that it’s breaking the rules and it has to go. It got about 150 comments the first couple of days; it’s about a week old now. This morning I noticed a commenter said, “I want you all to know the firetruck is gone now.” I had just seen it yesterday, so I posted a comment quickly to say, “Well, if that’s true, it’s been since yesterday afternoon when we saw it – we’ll go over and check.”

We learned fairly early on that if you go trying to explain why you deleted something, you wind up just tying yourself in knots.

My husband was dropping our child off at school, he went over to check, verified the truck was still there. In the meantime the firetruck’s owner had already posted saying, “it’s still there.” So I then noted in my response that thanks for that comment, I’m deleting the other one, we don’t take kindly to people posting falsehoods.

I don’t usually comment on whether a comment has been deleted, or anything like that. We learned fairly early on that if you go trying to explain why you deleted something, you wind up just tying yourself in knots. No matter how many policies you have, there’s always something that skirts the line or doesn’t fall into a clear category, and then someone will just come back around and use your words against you.

 The actions of some changed the rules for all

There are now no anonymous posters on Coastsider. Everybody there registers with their own real name. We’re fairly loose about verifying names, we’re essentially trusting people to be honest, and we haven’t had any problems.

Because we had some early incidents, and just a lot of nonsense from anonymous posters, there are now no anonymous posters on Coastsider. Everybody there registers with their own real name. We’re fairly loose about verifying names, we’re essentially trusting people to be honest, and we haven’t had any problems.

Part of this is about that idea of creating community, and everyone can participate and know who they’re talking to. When I go downtown in Half Moon Bay I meet people I know. I want Coastsider to feel that way as well. And again, that was one of the reasons I went away from allowing anonymous comments.

 Anonymous phone comment lines led the way

We do not require correct names, but we do require an email address. I can look and find your IP address in the back end of my system. So I will occasionally email a person and say: you know, listen, I know, you sit at your desk in the town of so and so and you’re making these comments, but you need to stop, because I will ban you, and if I ban you then I ban everybody around you, and people are going to want to know why the town of so-and-so can’t log in to my site any more, and then I’m going to have to tell them. Sometimes that’s enough to make people behave.

Our community has had anonymous phone speakout calls for more than 20 years, and there’s a page in our paper where we’re literally transcribing phone calls of people talking about everything from kids’ haircuts to the plowing job that the mayor supervised. We edit it. You can’t go in there and start talking about somebody’s sex life. But we do have this anonymous forum, and it was good practice for dealing with commenters.

 Using common sense

If somebody posted a comment saying “Joe’s Restaurant is the best in the world! I had the best experience ever!” and we can see that the user’s registration email is like chefjoe@joesrestaurant.com, we would not give up their personal information — but we would publicly call them out. We would say, “We’re not saying Joe’s Restaurant isn’t awesome, but the email address of that user would indicate to us that they are an inordinate fan of Chef Joe.”

Or if a bunch of commenters would suddenly pop up on a certain issue or story and they all have the same IP address, we would never give up their IP address, but we would say, “They could all be different people logging in at the library, but you need to know that the last seven comments all came from the same IP address, which means it’s likely, though not certain, that they’re all related.”

 Selling ads creates a false construct

We heavily censor and monitor comments before they’re printed. We don’t try to run up like a million comments, because people don’t read that anyway. It’s more we want everyone to feel comfortable being part of it. So we don’t print comments about racism, personal nastiness, factual allegations, libel. So the KKK people don’t get on. The comments on the other TV, print, paper websites are sort of like the sewer. They don’t want to spend the money [to moderate]. Also, they’re selling ads, eyeballs – it’s a real false construct, because it doesn’t have to do with engagement of readers.

Good comments come from good original reporting.

Whereas on our site, if someone gets killed in a poor neighborhood or something, that family is on there. You get this real diversity of conservative to liberal, black, white, brown, rich, poor, power, not power. We write a lot about school reform, a lot about police, controversies, layoffs, and the cops are all over it posting.  I believe it’s because, first of all, there’s good reporting – good comments come from good original reporting. Posing issues in the proper way. And then heavy monitoring – we’re religious about that.

 Legal threats led to a practical change

We take a pretty light approach to moderation. If somebody’s being egregiously abusive, we’ll unpublish their comment. But you really have to do a lot to get your comment taken down on Gaper’s Block. It has happened a couple of times. And we’ve had to ban a couple of IPs based on their inability to follow community norms.

In another situation, where we faced a libel-suit threat, there were comments that were inflammatory, that painted an inaccurate picture of one of the people involved in the story. Rather than take down the original comments, we allowed the person who was being defamed to make a statement, and added that to the story, just to try to fix that. That was a case of Google causing our story to rise to the top for searches on the name.

Just the threat of legal action is enough to cause us to move. We wouldn’t be able to afford to respond.

 Transparency above all

I’m not a big fan of anonymity. One of the principles we outline in our “Ethics for Bloggers” document is transparency. What comes along with using your name is the sense that you’re responsible for what you say. There are certainly moments at which anonymity is necessary in journalism, with sources. But those are really rare. You can set up criteria on which you would cross that threshold, but I think you have to set that bar very high.

In most instances, knowing who’s speaking is a really helpful thing. Having properly sourced stories, having people identify themselves in comment sections, is definitely my strong preference. It helps with situations of abuse, of people being misleading. So my advice to local news providers is, try to be transparent, try to require user’s names.

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Share your story below: Have you changed your commenting policy because of user behavior? What happened?