HuffPost Bans Anonymous Comments, But Will It Work?
The Huffington Post announced this week that anonymous commenters will no longer be allowed as of September.
One small step for HuffPo; one giant leap for the Internet?
HuffPo reportedly gets 25,000 comments every hour, and like pretty much any popular website that allows comments, most of them are not well-reasoned arguments and civil to the writer or other commenters.
“Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats,” Founder Arianna Huffington said in Boston, according to Gigaom. She was referring to the case of Caroline Criado-Perez, the woman who successfully campaigned to put Jane Austen on money in the U.K. and earned violent threats on Twitter for her trouble.
It’s hard to prove online trolls are getting qualitatively “worse,” and not everyone is convinced a strategy like HuffPo’s will help eliminate them.
South Korea might provide a good test case, according to TechCrunch. That country mandated real names to be used online for years, only to face a problem with hackers apparently out to steal all those real identities.
It was also expensive and didn’t make a big difference to the level of discourse. Huffington’s invocation of Criado-Perez is a terrible example for an argument to require real names, in fact. Sure, many of the threats tweeted at her may have come from anonymous users, but she was easier to find because she was tweeting under her real name.
Joanna Geary at The Guardian defends anonymity as a big reason Twitter became a tool for Egypt’s Arab Spring. She’s also unconvinced a ban on anonymity helps solve the
problem Huffington named:
Putting aside the important point that implementing such a system is technically complex and virtually unworkable, anyone who has watched two friends mud-slinging below a Facebook status update knows real identities don’t bring instant politeness.
But who cares about research and anecdotal evidence when we all know it’s just un-American to ban anonymous commentary? Michael Morisy at the Boston Globe helpfully points out Founding Fathers wrote anonymously. Benjamin Franklin even assumed a fake name in order to write op-eds.
It worked for Franklin because by hiding his real identity, he minimized the editor’s (his brother) bias and highlighted the brilliance of his written argument. If Franklin were writing today, he probably wouldn’t be commenting on HuffPo. But maybe he’d be on a platform like Reddit, where (in the best case scenario) the best content floats to the top
through a crowdsourced review process. Now there’s a system that can make anonymity work for everyone.
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