Dispatches from the living amongst journalism's walking dead

Tag: commenting

Facebook comments can’t guarantee a lack of anonymity

There’s a conventional wisdom out there in the online journalism world that: 1.) News site comments will automatically be better if people have to use real names, and 2.) Using Facebook for your comments will accomplish this.

I’ve said many times before that I don’t think anonymity is the problem. My campaign on that seems to be a lost cause so far. As a former comment moderator and current manager of social media accounts, I know for a fact that people have absolutely no problem spouting hateful views and violent rhetoric under their real name. I see it every day.

Aside from that, there’s also all kinds of evidence that Facebook comments aren’t the end-all, be-all answer on this front.

As my friend Jeff Sonderman recently wrote at Poynter, Facebook comments can be a boon to news sites in lots of ways: Increased Facebook traffic referrals, fast page load times, an easy out-of-the-box comment solution.

One thing Facebook doesn’t do, however, is prevent anonymity (as the same article and several others insist).

While there is a rule on Facebook that one has to use their real name, it’s not always followed. I have several Facebook friends who use false names for various personal reasons – and they are all, essentially, anonymous. That said, they are still identifiable to their friends, which still keeps some people in check with their online comments. (Though this certainly doesn’t apply to everyone.)

The biggest threat to the alleged transparency and decency of Facebook-powered commenting lies in the same tool many news organizations use to communicate with readers: Facebook Pages.

Just speaking anecdotally here (if you have stats to back me up, please help), I’ve seen an uptick of abusive posts and trolling on Facebook ever since it rolled out its new pages in February. That rollout included the new ability to use Facebook as a page.

This change made it possible for just anyone to set up a fake character on Facebook – and then use Facebook as that character. On The Huffington Posts’s pages (on which I am an administrator) and the pages of other groups and news organizations, I’ve seen these fake accounts spreading spam, trolling the page’s regular users and making hateful statements under the guise of a made-up character.

Here’s a view examples of some alias accounts I found on news pages (or skip below if you want):

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Even before this change, there was a history of false profiles spamming and trolling Facebook, the addition of Use-As-Page to the toolbox only gave trolls a new way to stay in business. Facebook has staff that deals with those accounts when they are found or reported, but it certainly can’t be easy for them to keep up with people who are dead set on being trolly.

(Related aside: When I worked as a comment moderator for the Cincinnati Enquirer, a troublesome site user with many usernames emailed me to say, “I’m retired and have nothing else to do but create new accounts every time you block me. I can make your live miserable.” This is just a sampling of the mentality of trolls, folks. Here’s another.)

Now, I’ve got no doubt that some news sites have seen higher quality discussion after installing Facebook commenting; it’s definitely better than many of in-house or other out-of-the-box solutions I’ve seen on news websites. It likely is the best option for those sites that don’t have the technical expertise and manpower to host and manage a heavy flow of onsite comments day in and day out – so long as they don’t mind handing a big part of their community to Facebook.

I’m just warning that news sites shouldn’t assume that Facebook on its own will solve their commenting problems. Users can and will still be anonymous (or even identifiable) hateful trolls. To make it work, you still need a daily moderation workflow and a newsroom-wide commitment to not only reading story/blog comments, but responding to them.

 

Link roundup: Demographics, Quora, Instagram and news from old media

File under “Good to Know”

  • In not-at-all-shocking news, a Pew study shows the Internet Gains on Television as Public’s Main News Source . Since 2007, the number of 18 to 29 year olds citing the internet as their main source has nearly doubled, from 34% to 65%. Not surprising numbers, but notable nonetheless. This should have TV stations that rely on their newscasts as the sole breaking news source shaking in their boots.
  • Twitter Media gets into what makes good hashtags work. As someone who frequently struggles with the issue of deciding when and how to use hashtags, this post on the well-known hashtag work of 106 & Park really underscores why theirs work so well. For one, they aren’t forced news tags.

New-ish Tools for News

  • Last week, online media watchers wet their collective pants over Instagram, an iPhone photo-sharing application with a built-in social network, when Mashable highlighted how NPR is using it to connect with its audience. NPR, as usual, is out connecting on another app before everyone else – but whether this experiment will pay off is another story. As of right now, the app is only on iPhone, but it’s user base is growing by leaps and bounds. Judging from the comments on the Mashable post, those using it aren’t pleased at the prospect of influx of media.
  • On a related note, The Atlantic’s Alexis Madrigal gives a good and personal explanation of Instagram’s appeal.
  • I didn’t wet my pants, but I fell in love with Instagram too. I’ve started using its nice filters on my personal Tumblr project, 365 Snapshots.
  • I’m not sure where it started, but there was also a new media gold rush last week to Quora, an online question-and-answer oriented discussion site. Everyone wants to know how it could be used for journalism, especially since it is such a tame, smart (on the surface at least) community that is curating information. My colleague Daniel Victor blogged about some potential uses and started a topic on Quora looking for ideas (very meta) and. We’ll see where it goes. I know my coworkers at TBD are hard at work on this one.

Paywalls, paywalls!

  • The Dallas Morning News is taking a lot of content behind a paywall, with the old argument “because we have to” and “other newspapers do it”. The comments do not belie a supportive readership. The monthly digital-only price seems quite high to me.
  • The Daily O’Collegian, the campus newspaper for Oklahoma State, is also going behind a paywall for non-local readers. This may be the one instance in which I think a paywall makes perfect sense for a newspaper. It does make me feel for the student journalists who will try to use their links there for clips, however. Maybe they can give out a special coded version or something?

Real names are the answer – again

Fun Project

  • NY Times project Mapping America: Every City, Every Block allows users to browse local data from the Census, based on samples from 2005 to 2009 on an easily understood map. I’m in love with it and wish TBD had the budget to build something similar.

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