In Defense of Anonymous Commenters: Jen Eyer at TEDx
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My talk at TEDx Kalamazoo in defense of anonymous internet commenters. In it, I argue that anonymity is important because it gives voice to the voiceless. But any online community — whether it requires real names or not — needs strong management. This talk outlines those steps, too. See it here: https://youtu.be/3wWFmR-Gigo
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In Defense of Anonymous Commenters: Jen Eyer at TEDx
- 1. In Defense of Anonymous Commenters Jen Eyer
- 2. “The principal at ---- is in deep trouble. Do some research.” — WM
- 3. Photo from Wikipedia commons
- 4. Image from the Internet Archive
- 6. “Being the new kid in the school, our son was faced with bullying.” — pat
- 7. “Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.” — SPJ code of ethics
- 8. 34% of those not willing to use real names cited job concerns
- 9. “Yes, I bullied Rebecca and she killed herself but I don't give a f---.”
- 10. “White folks get job training, get a job and buy a car. Black culture. Stick a pistol in some cracker’s ear and car jack his car.” – Leonard Webber
- 11. “This little tramp has some VERY stupid, incompetent parents.” – Ken Weeks, on a story about a missing girl
- 13. 30% of comments on sites that use Facebook system are uncivil. University of Houston study, 2013
- 14. What’s so great about anonymous comments?
- 15. “It was a zoo down there with close to 200 people standing around acting like fools.” – jenkins
- 16. “The woman killed was my daughter. Her son was life-flighted to Motts and is in stable condition.” - Mark
- 17. “20 grams is a large quantity? Maybe to a Lilliputian.” - greeby
- 18. “I am a woman engineer of mixed Native American and white heritage, and I am deeply and profoundly against affirmative action...” – AMOC
- 19. Photo by Jen Eyer
- 20. • GOVERN • ENGAGE • EVOLVE
- 21. “Why was my comment removed?” “Calling people cronies and entitled idiots crossed the line.”
- 22. “Sometimes it doesn’t occur to me that someone would read it who could be hurt.” – Beetlebomb
- 23. Courtesy photo
- 24. “But what about my First Amendment rights?!?”
- 25. “Do you think a billboard is an appropriate way for a church to highlight the issue of gay marriage?” – Zane McMillin, reporter
- 26. “Talk generally about what your religion teaches, rather than tell someone they’re going to Hell.”
- 27. > GO FORTH AND COMMENT!
Editor's Notes
- The other morning I was getting ready for work, putting on my makeup while listening to my 7-year-old son tell me about the new house he built in Minecraft. This typical morning routine was interrupted by a text from one of our local editors, alerting me to a comment problem. Someone had posted potentially harmful insinuations about a school principal.
- I quickly navigated to the problem story. As I became distracted, my son grew upset. I apologized to him and tried to explain the situation in terms he could understand. “Someone is being bullied right now on the website, and thousands of people might be reading it. So I have to stop it right now.” He understood, and watched with a serious expression as I removed the comment. As you probably know, this is not an unusual situation in the world of online communities. Theories abound as to why people sometimes are less respectful of others online than in real life, and many believe anonymity is the problem. “If only people had to use their real names instead of hiding behind their keyboard, online discussions would be civil,” they say. I disagree that the solution is that simple. Why? Because I’ve been watching where it’s been tried, and it’s not working. Moreover, there is a lot of good that comes with anonymous commentary. Although I removed the comment about the principal, I also emailed the commenter and asked them to contact our schools reporter with any information they may have. Turns out, there are indeed potentially newsworthy problems with the principal. Once the facts are known, we may find that the comment was the tip we needed to uncover an important story.
- Online communities have been around since the ‘70s, starting with listservers and bulletin boards, evolving to chat rooms in the ‘80s, then sharing platforms like Napster and online gaming communities in the ‘90s.
- In the early 2000s, forums were the thing, then came blog and news comments. All along, anonymity was the norm. With the explosion of social media in the past five years, people began getting comfortable using their real-life identities in limited ways online. The mainstreaming of social media has, I believe, caused a backlash against anonymous commentary on news sites. Millions of people are on Facebook using their real names, and many see no reason why people who post comments on news stories can’t use their real names, too. The thing is, there’s a big difference between
- sharing cute cat videos on Facebook under your real name, and commenting about a problem in your kid’s school on a news site under your real name…
- like the parent here who says: “Being the new kid in the school, our son was faced with bullying.” People frequently pine for the “old days” of letters to the editor, when “everyone had to put their name to their opinions.” Actually, an interesting historical point is that anonymous letters to the editor were common until the 1960s. A 2005 research paper in the Journal of Mass Media ethics determined that editors began requiring names for a couple of reasons. First, they had strong personal biases against anonymous writers (some calling them crackpots with selfish personal agendas). And second, from a practical standpoint, requiring names was an easy way to limit the number for publication. The fact that newspapers are liable for everything they publish almost certainly was a third, unspoken factor. But it can be argued that these real-names policies are in direct contradiction with a basic tenant of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
- On the reporting side, anonymous sources are frequently used in news stories. Reporters are careful to vet the information, of course, and guard against being used by sources with personal agendas. But editors have been unwilling to extend this practice to letters. And it’s the voiceless who are most hurt by real-names policies. A 2004 national survey found that 35% of respondents who had never written letters to the editor said they would want to do so if their names would not be published; among those respondents, women, racial minorities, and urban residents figured prominently. Indeed, demographic studies of letter writers indicate most published letters are written by people in middle to upper socio-economic classes. Real names policies tend to protect the powerful and the status quo. Many papers have seen a huge decline in letters to the editor since the advent of online commenting, and as comments have replaced letters, there is pressure from certain members of the community, and even some readers, to bring real-names policies to the comments. But if real-names policies discourage the powerless from voicing their opinion in letters to the editor, they do so in spades for online comments. What you say online becomes part of your digital footprint, searchable forevermore. A letter to the editor in the paper was read by a few hundred or thousand people, then disappeared into the archives on microfiche. Information posted online can haunt a job-hunter for years to come. I’ve seen it happen. At AnnArbor.com, we surveyed readers to find out whether they would be willing to comment using their real names, and if not, why not. The vast majority said they would not comment if required to verify their identity. Of those, the most frequent reason cited was employment concerns.
- Think about it. If you’re the owner of a local shop in town, would you really feel comfortable expressing your opinions on local political issues for the entire community to read? Wouldn’t you worry that you might alienate potential customers who don’t agree with you? That same concern applies to attorneys, doctors, non-profit leaders, and business and service-industry workers. Public sector employees have also expressed concerns about using their real identities. I’ve seen teachers comment on our sites using their real names, and some have told me about the backlash they’ve received from school administrators for doing so. And how about low-income people, who live with violent crime every day in their communities? How likely are they to participate in important discussions about the problem if they have to use their real names? Still, people argue, it would be worth the reduction in participation if the result was that comments are more civil. The assumption that real names equals civility is hard to argue against because it seems so intuitive. And if we could just force everyone to use their real names, we’d no longer have problems with incivility, bullying and libel online.
- Right? One of the girls who bullied Florida teen Rebecca Sedwick posted this defiant message on Facebook. But she’s a kid. Adults know better, right?
- This lovely comment by someone using his real name was posted on a crime story: “White folks get job training, get a job and buy a car. Black culture. Stick a pistol in some cracker’s ear and car jack his car.”
- On stories about sexual predators, you’ll find a lot of victim-blaming. “This little tramp has some VERY stupid, incompetent parents,” a guy, using his real name, wrote on a story about a local teen who disappeared with a 37-year-old man. I could fill an unlimited number of slides with examples like this and much worse. I periodically go to news sites where commenters use their real names and see how long it takes me to find a racist, homophobic, sexist or otherwise offensive comment. Usually it takes a mere couple of minutes.
- Beyond my own anecdotal evidence, though, there has been some research on this topic. The popular blog comment hosting service Disqus analyzed their comments and found that commenters who use pseudonyms are the most productive members of the community. They participate more often, and their comments are rated as more positive than even those who use real names, as indicated by the number of likes and replies. The negative factors — the number of times a comment is flagged, deleted or marked as spam — were relatively consistent across identity types. The Disqus research makes an important distinction that I want to stress. Usually when we’re talking about anonymous comments, what we’re really talking about are pseudonymous comments. On most sites, users are required to create an account that is linked to a real email address in order to comment, and they have to use that same account every time. As they accumulate a comment history and a place in the community over time, users take pride in the online persona they have created.
- Another study compared comments on news sites that have anonymous commenters to those that use Facebook for comments. On the anonymous sites, about 50% of comments were deemed uncivil, while on the Facebook sites, 30% were. Sure it’s an improvement, but it’s still a third of comments that are uncivil — and that’s with people using their real names. So while there are certainly nasty comments out there, they’re almost as likely to be posted by someone using their real name. Jerks will be jerks, and many don’t care who knows it. The problem isn’t anonymity; it’s the removal of the intimacy of in-person communication. The problem isn’t new to digital communication, either, but it is heightened by the ease, the megaphone and the sharability of online postings. We as a society are learning to adapt to this mode of communication, and requiring real names does nothing to teach people how to behave online. In most cases where it’s been tried, three things happen. It reduces participation, because most people don’t want to use their real names. It causes most of the discourse to become bland, because most who do participate using their real names feel inhibited. And there are those who are still uncivil using their real names or who circumvent the real names policy with fake accounts.
- On MLive, we find that anonymous commenters contribute in a number of high quality ways. The first that comes to mind for most people is whistleblowing. However, this type of comment is actually pretty rare, and in most cases, we remove true whistleblowing comments — at least until we can verify the information. More often, commenters do add general tips and bits of information to stories that go beyond what our reporters have written. Increasingly we are seeing people who are somehow related to a story joining the conversation in the comments on that story. On breaking news articles, eyewitnesses often add their perspective in the comments
- like this example where a witness to the scene of a homicide says: “It was a zoo down there with close to 200 people standing around acting like fools.” On tragic stories, relatives of victims often voice their sadness,
- as in this example where a father wrote: “The woman killed was my daughter. Her son was life-flighted to Motts and is in stable condition.” Readers not necessarily connected to stories give reporters constructive feedback. This can sometimes have humorous results, as in the case
- where several commenters took a reporter to task for calling 20 grams of marijuana “lots of pot.” One commenter wrote: “20 grams is a large quantity? Maybe to a Lilliputian.” But most importantly, anonymous comments can generate conversations about problems in the community and discuss solutions. A recent study published in MIS quarterly showed that when people are anonymous, they are more creative and willing to discuss difficult topics critically.
- This commenter on an affirmative action story launched a frank discussion when she wrote: “I am a woman engineer of mixed Native American and white heritage, and I am deeply and profoundly against affirmative action...” Unfortunately, research shows anonymous commenters are less likely to be taken seriously. There’s a tendency to dismiss unidentified commenters as “anonymous trolls.” This dismissive attitude has led a lot of news sites to take drastic measures to either attempt to force commenters to use their real names, or to shut down comments completely. PopularScience.com shut off its article comments in September, citing a study that they say showed comments harm readers’ understanding of science. The study did show some differences in how people interpret a story based on the tenor of the comments. But to conclude that comments should be shut down is a big leap
- — a classic throwing the baby out with the bathwater move — especially when there are proven ways to keep online conversations civil.
- Bringing civility to an online community is essentially a three-step process: Govern, Engage, Evolve. Governing refers to all the ways a site moderates its comments. Personally, the steps I take include setting clear rules and enforcing them through warnings and comment removals; maintaining a public blog where people can ask questions and get answers about moderation,
- like this exchange where I told a commenter that “Calling people cronies and entitled idiots crossed the line”; and emailing rulebreakers to communicate why their comments were removed or their account disabled. If a commenter is, say, blatantly racist, I’ll just ban them and notify via email. But if I think a commenter is reformable, I’ll start a conversation with them about how and why their comments violate the rules. When commenters post information that is misleading, or that clearly promotes a personal agenda, we remove the comment and contact the commenter. If the email bounces, the commenter is banned. I have to be able to contact people when they post problematic comments. Sometimes this approach works great,
- as you see here with the commenter saying “Sometimes it doesn’t occur to me that someone would read it who could be hurt.” Other times,
- I get a virtual mooning in response.
- This is the type of commenter likely to complain that their First Amendment rights are being violated on MLive. To which I say, “You have no First Amendment rights on MLive.” The First Amendment doesn’t apply to the website of a private company. But I also remind them that, outside of hate speech, it’s possible to communicate pretty much any idea in a civil way — even ones I find personally repugnant. As long as they keep it civil, they won’t be moderated.
- The second step, engage, refers to authors and other staff members participating in the comments, answering reader questions, and even posing their own questions in order to send the conversation on a productive path. In this example, the reporter posed several questions like this on his story about gay marriage, and the conversation was so civil and on-topic that nothing had to be removed. I know from years of experience that this works, and a study by the Engaging News Project at the University of Texas recently confirmed it.
- And the final step: Evolve. By that I mean, never stop expecting and demanding a higher level of discourse from your commenters. You got rid of the “isms”? Great, now work on getting rid of name-calling and personal attacks. Then snarkiness and low-value, drive-by comments, like “Thanks, Obama.” Then start to combat commenters who threadjack, and challenge commenters who push misinformation. I’m currently in the midst of an ongoing series educating readers on how to discuss hot-button topics in a civil way. In many ways, it’s similar to how I teach my kids to express themselves: by using a lot of I statements rather than you statements, as in this example where I advised a commenter to “Talk generally about what your religion teaches, rather than tell someone they’re going to Hell.”
- These are the hallmarks of a well-managed online community. I hope that if you recognize a well-managed community, and the topic interests you, you’ll feel comfortable joining the conversation. Your perspectives and insights can play a part in shaping public opinion and finding solutions. I also hope that, after what you’ve heard here, you might think a little differently about anonymous commenters. That you might be more inclined to look past the lack of identity and consider the comment on the merits of its content.