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| FILE - In this Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2013 photo illustration, hands type on a computer keyboard in Los Angeles. Companies including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order to restore civil discourse on online comment threads. |
NEW YORK (AP)
-- Mix blatant bigotry with poor spelling. Add a dash of ALL CAPS. Top
it off with a violent threat. And there you have it: A recipe for the
worst of online comments, scourge of the Internet.
Blame
anonymity, blame politicians, blame human nature. But a growing number
of websites are reining in the Wild West of online commentary. Companies
including Google and the Huffington Post are trying everything from
deploying moderators to forcing people to use their real names in order
to restore civil discourse. Some sites, such as Popular Science, are
banning comments altogether.
The efforts put
sites in a delicate position. User comments add a lively, fresh feel to
videos, stories and music. And, of course, the longer visitors stay to
read the posts, and the more they come back, the more a site can charge
for advertising.
What websites don't want is
the kind of off-putting nastiness that spewed forth under a recent
CNN.com article about the Affordable Care Act.
"If
it were up to me, you progressive libs destroying this country would be
hanging from the gallows for treason. People are awakening though. If I
were you, I'd be very afraid," wrote someone using the name "JBlaze."
YouTube,
which is owned by Google, has long been home to some of the Internet's
most juvenile and grammatically incorrect comments. The site caused a
stir last month when it began requiring people to log into Google Plus
to write a comment. Besides herding users to Google's unified network,
the company says the move is designed to raise the level of discourse in
the conversations that play out under YouTube videos.
One
such video, a Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family, met
with such a barrage of racist responses on YouTube in May that General
Mills shut down comments on it altogether.
"Starting
this week, when you're watching a video on YouTube, you'll see comments
sorted by people you care about first," wrote YouTube product manager
Nundu Janakiram and principal engineer Yonatan Zunger in a blog post
announcing the changes. "If you post videos on your channel, you also
have more tools to moderate welcome and unwelcome conversations. This
way, YouTube comments will become conversations that matter to you."
Anonymity
has always been a major appeal of online life. Two decades ago, The New
Yorker magazine ran a cartoon with a dog sitting in front of a
computer, one paw on the keyboard. The caption read: "On the Internet,
nobody knows you're a dog." At its best, anonymity allows people to
speak freely without repercussions. It allows whistle blowers and
protesters to espouse unpopular opinions. At its worst, it allows people
to spout off without repercussions. It gives trolls and bullies license
to pick arguments, threaten and abuse.
But
anonymity has been eroding in recent years. On the Internet, many people
may know not only your name, but also your latest musings, the songs
you've listened to, your job history, who your friends are and even the
brand of soap you prefer.
"It's not so much
that our offline lives are going online, it's that our offline and
online lives are more integrated," says Mark Lashley, a professor of
communications at La Salle University in Philadelphia.
Facebook, which
requires people to use their real names, played a big part in the
seismic shift.
"The way the Web was developed,
it was unique in that the avatar and the handle were always these
things people used to go by. It did develop into a Wild West situation,"
he says, adding that it's no surprise that Google and other companies
are going this route. "As more people go online and we put more of our
lives online, we should be held accountable for things we say."
Nearly
three-quarters of teens and young adults think people are more likely
to use discriminatory language online or in text messages than in face
to face conversations, according to a recent poll from The Associated
Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV. The poll didn't
distinguish between anonymous comments and those with real identities
attached.
The Huffington Post is also clamping
down on vicious comments. In addition to employing 40 human moderators
who sift through readers' posts for racism, homophobia, hate speech and
the like, the AOL-owned news site is also chipping away at anonymous
commenting. Previously, anyone could respond to an article posted on the
site by creating an account, without tying it to an email address. This
fall, HuffPo began requiring people to verify their identity by
connecting their accounts to an email address, but that didn't appear to
be enough and the site now also asks commenters to log in using a
verified Facebook account.
"We are reaching a
place where the Internet is growing up," says Jimmy Soni, managing
editor of HuffPo.
"These changes represent a maturing (online)
environment."
Soni says the changes have
already made a difference in the quality of the comments. The lack of
total anonymity, while not a failsafe method, offers people a "gut check
moment," he says. There have been "significantly fewer things that we
would not be able to share with our mothers," in the HuffPo comments
section since the change, Soni says.
Newspapers
are also turning toward regulated comments. Of the largest 137 U.S.
newspapers - those with daily circulation above 50,000 - nearly 49
percent ban anonymous commenting, according to Arthur Santana, assistant
communications professor at the University of Houston. Nearly 42
percent allow anonymity, while 9 percent do not have comments at all.
Curbing
anonymity doesn't always help. Plenty of people are fine attaching
their names and Facebook profiles to poorly spelled outbursts that live
on long after their fury has passed.
In some
cases, sites have gone further. Popular Science, the 141-year-old
science and technology magazine, stopped allowing comments of any kind
on its news articles in September.
While
highlighting responses to articles about climate change and abortion,
Popular Science online editor Suzanne LaBarre announced the change and
explained in a blog post that comments can be "bad for science."
Because
"comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media
culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock
scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories," wrote
LaBarre.
We can't wait to see the response to this story.
