Flaming trolls get doused

Faced with the unbounded id of anonymous readers who can't resist posting nasty comments under online articles, some news websites have taken steps to rein in the verbal bile.

And some, tired of the mess that occurs when free speech gets a little too free, are ending reader comments altogether.

Abusive comments that stray over the line into plain old hate speech have plagued news sites for almost as long as there have been news sites.

Beneath an article about, say, a racially charged subject, you'll often find a predictable outpouring of racist comments from people hiding behind phoney screen names.

News organisations like reader comments because they foster loyalty and interaction and because they keep readers on a site longer, a measure known as "engagement", which helps guide ad-buying decisions.

But reader comments got so out of hand, particularly on crime articles, that the Chicago Sun-Times temporarily shut down its comment boards last month.

The worst comments tended to come from people who saw a Sun-Times crime article linked on the conservative Drudge Report website and flooded the paper's site to offer their perspective, said Craig Newman, the Sun-Times managing editor.

"The comments were scaring [readers] off. People didn't want to read the articles or dip into the comments because it was so vile."

Popular Science magazine turned off its comments in September after product promoters and trolls - people who post deliberately inflammatory comments - "made constructive discussion impossible", according to Digiday, a digital news site that reported on the magazine's decision.

Some darlings of the new-media age never allowed readers to comment in the first place. For example, Vox.com, a news "explainer" site, began last month without a reader-comment feature.

"We've watched sites open their comments, and what should be a community devolves into an endless series of flame wars," Vox co-founder Melissa Bell wrote in a post explaining the lack of a comments feature.

She declined in a series of email exchanges to explain why "flame wars" might be problematic, or what Vox is planning to do as an alternative.

To tamp down the ugliness, news organisations have experimented with a variety of tactics.

The Washington Post enables readers to flag trolls through a "Report as Abusive" button that directs suspect comments to a monitoring staff for possible removal, said Bethonie Butler, the paper's digital producer for audience development. The Post's site also has an "Ignore" button that enables a reader to opt not to see comments from a particular user.

When things threaten to get stormy, the newspaper simply shuts off comments, as it has with articles about Michelle Obama and convicted spy Chelsea Manning and with news stories involving deaths or serious injuries, such as the Washington Navy Yard shootings in September.

Few news organisations can match the comments "curation" resources of The New York Times, which devotes 14 people, including seven full-time staffers, to screen comments on Times articles. The moderators read every comment submitted and approve or reject them based on criteria developed over the past seven years, said Sasha Koren, deputy editor of interactive news.

Unlike many news sites, which open comments on dozens of articles each day, the Times limits comments to an average of 18 articles a day.

The idea, Koren said, is to "minimise incivility and elevate comments that include commentary and personal observations of some substance.."

The 30 daily newspapers owned by the McClatchy Co have approached the problem from a different angle. Last year, 29 of the newspapers began requiring commenters to register through their Facebook accounts. (The flagship Sacramento Bee is experimenting with a different system). Now, much like traditional letters to the editor, comments come with names, home towns and even faces and professional affiliations attached.

A similar system imposed by the Huffington Post in December proved controversial: A news article announcing the change from anonymous posting to Facebook-verified posts was met with nearly 6000 comments - many of them taking exception to what they felt was limiting their right to free speech. However HuffPost's director of community, Tim McDonald, said the trade-off was a "significant decrease" in trolls and spam and an increase in more "civil conversations".

The big worry for publishers is that taming the vox populi would reduce a site's traffic, and hence its advertising revenue, however both McClatchy's Gyllenhaal and HuffPost's McDonald say that hasn't occurred since their publications began using Facebook registration. The Washington Post

BY LEANNE ITALIE

DANAH Boyd has made a name for herself at the research division of Microsoft for work examining social media, Big Data and the tension between public and private lives, but it’s her teens’-eye view of the digital world that sets her apart.

Boyd has written her first book, It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, which is available for free on her website, Danah.org.

Boyd interviewed more than 150 teens from a range of backgrounds for the book. 

Q: What do parents need to understand about the online lives of teens?

Boyd: They need to realise that young people are doing the same things online as we all did as kids in other places where we gathered with our friends. They’re hanging out. They’re messing around with each other. They’re socialising. They’re flirting. They’re gossiping. They’re joking around, and much of this is perfectly reasonable teen stuff. Some of it is problematic. Some of it is glorious.

But the kinds of places young people used to gather are no longer accessible for a variety of reasons. The first is a level of fear and anxiety that exists, the result of 24-7 news, where there’s a sense that there’s terrible things happening to kids everywhere. We’ve transferred all that fear and anxiety to their online lives, but to them it’s a release valve, to finally find a place where they can hang out. It’s not that they’re addicted to the technology. It’s that they want a place where their friends are.

Q: You write that too many young people live genuinely high-risk lives, but you conclude that most of those risks do not originate with technology. Can you explain?

Boyd: There are young people who are living high-risk lives, period, end of story. They are being abused every day at home. There are young people who are struggling with poverty, with addiction, with mental health struggles. They make that visible online.

One of the challenges becomes how do we intervene to help them? Unfortunately what we tend to do is we try to make the internet go away instead. We hope that if we make the visibility go away, the problem will go away. But that’s not true.

Q: Why do young people share so publicly?

Boyd: Young people are trying to be in public, but that doesn’t mean that they want to be public, and that distinction is really important. There’s a mistaken understanding that they want everything about themselves to be recorded forever, and that’s not true at all.

They’re really frustrated when all of this material is stored away and gets them into trouble. Young people face an unprecedented level of surveillance. Not just by the institutions of power, but by their parents. Most of them are sitting there going: ‘‘Why do these people feel like they have a right to be in my business?’’

Q: Can you explain social steganography?

Boyd: It’s actually an old cryptography term. It basically is the notion of hiding in plain sight. So the old notion is that Greeks used to tattoo messages on the heads of their slaves, let their hair grow out and then send them off to places, and only if you knew where to look would you know where the message lies.

What’s really funny is that young people have started encoding everything they’re putting up online, so you can read it literally but you have no idea what it means. It’s a song lyric but you don’t know the reference because the reference is really about the friends who got together last weekend and they had a cool in-joke for which the song was playing and hahahahaha.

Just because you have access to the content doesn’t mean you have access to the meaning. It’s never been the case that parents got to listen to everything, but the thing is parents have demanded now that they have the right to listen to everything. I think it’s a little ironic that teenagers are using the same tactics as political dissidents.

Q: What is your best advice for parents struggling to understand the networked lives of their teens?

Boyd: Step back, try to stay calm and try to listen to your kids. What are they trying to achieve? How are they trying to go about this, and how can you give them the space to do it? We forget how stressed out this cohort of young people is. That’s not because of technology. That’s because of the amount of pressure that we put on them.  AAP