From overseas press

US news sites rethink anonymous web comments

(chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2010-04-14 14:20

Web users have become accustomed to considering the Internet a "free-for-all" and a "digital disguise", allowing them to speak without revealing their identities, said an article in the New York Times on April 11. But it added that anonymity is "under attack from several directions, and journalists, more than ever, are questioning whether anonymity should be a given on news sites."

The article revealed that some prominent journalists such as Leonard Pitts Jr., a Miami Herald columnist, wrote recently that anonymity has made online comments "havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety."

It also wrote about the similar view of William Grueskin, dean of academic affairs at Columbia's journalism school. Grueskin understood that people turned to the Internet to comment anonymously on issues that may cause troubles for them in real life. "But a lot of comment boards turn into the equivalent of a barroom brawl," he said.

Then how to solve the problem? Many newspapers, including the New York Times and the Washington Post, have plans to require readers to register to provide personal information that "isn't shown onscreen before posting comments", said the article.

And it mentioned that the Washington Post is planning to establish a system to ask readers to rank comments. "One of the criterion could be whether commenters use their real names," explained Hal Straus, interactivity editor of the Washington Post, and he said that this approach was much like the one the Huffington Post is set to adopt.

Another way to weed out unhealthy content is having someone to review opinions before they go online. The Times is among a few news organizations that adopted this method, and "some sites and prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, simply do not allow comments."

According to the article, "Some news sites review comments after they are posted, but most say they do not have the resources to do routine policing". And many sites allow contributors to "flag objectionable comments for removal, and make some effort to block comments from people who have repeatedly violated the site's standards".

The article mentioned that it's too labor-intensive to verify false identities, but news executives believed that "merely making the demand for a name and an e-mail address would weed out much of the most offensive commentary".

According to the article, Arianna Huffington, a founder of the Huffington Post, said, "As the rules of the road are changing and the Internet is growing up, the trend is away from anonymity."