Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity | Hacker News Reader

Huffington Post ends commenter anonymity

theguardian.com

34 points001sky44 comments

>I just came from London where there are rape and death threats

This is wrong on so many levels. Yes, anonymity gives people a wider range of expression and some use it badly. Did she stop to consider those that use it for good? Say goodbye to comments such as "I work for the government and I see so much waste everyday" or "I'm secretly gay, and here are some reasons why I don't feel safe coming out". We might as well ban driving because there was a horrific accident in London last month.

That anonymity also allows for people to make direct threats against other non-anonymous posters and gives leverage to people who doxx others. Its up to each site to weigh the pros and cons and it is totally legitimate to say that downside outweights the upside.

Anonymous threats doesn't harm anyone.

In the general case, this is true, but in the specific case, not so much.

While a threat doesn't actually do any harm to a person, it does ruin discourse.

Reason being that some people are more sensitive than others, and will not post things that they feel are controversial or personal since they feel they'll be challenged or threatened for it. Even if those threats are completely bunk and amount to nothing but trolling, the chilling effect on discourse is still there.

If discourse is the problem, what's wrong with some sort of HN/Slashdot/Reddit-like crowd sourced moderation?

That's the way to solve that issue.

That might work for a very small community, but past a certain size it fails. Even reddit has had a large number of times that doxxing or threat's 'slipped through', not to mention things like the white supremacist subreddit that encouraged it.

Once the post is there, the damage is done. It'll stay in its position for a while before being modded to invisibility. If it makes our hypothetical user think twice before posting, game's already over.

And if using a threaded system like HN,/.,Reddit, etc, if the threatening post is the only response to a comment, downmodding it doesn't accomplish anything.

That's absolutely, categorically untrue.

If you received a death threat on hacker news that listed your full name, and your kids' school addresses, wouldn't that give you a panic attack? I'd call that harm without a doubt.

> gives leverage to people who doxx others

because of the possibility that personally identifying information might be revealed, anonymity should be forbidden? eh?

I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and not hiding behind anonymity.

Because freedom of expression works so well when you make reprisals easier?

Well, this happened in the biggest media company in Sweden (Aftonbladet) back in 2011 when they required everyone to login and authorize Facebook access to comment.

The editor made the choice after the attack in Norway[1] and brought up that the norwegians handled the situation very good with more openness, more conversion and more democracy. He goes on saying that the hate is too much for normal people and if you want to say what you think, you should stand for what you think.

Blogpost in swedish from the editor: http://bloggar.aftonbladet.se/janhelin/2011/08/sta-for-vad-d...

Same blogpost translated to english: http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=sv&tl=en&js=n&prev=...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

I have a fake Facebook account for this exact reason.

In this world of big, perpetually stored data, I don't know why anyone would be interested in having their casual conversations tied to their real identity. I'm sure if you really wanted to, you could figure out who I am; I won't deny that. But I'm not going to hand it to you. So many things said, so easy to take them out of context.

I think, for the most part, general news sites shouldn't have comment sections.

I feel the opposite. Nowadays, I can't stand reading general news without a comments section. I think it's one of the areas where "crowd intelligence" actually works amazingly well: in uncovering fallacies, subtle agendas, propaganda, misrepresentation of facts, etc. I feel I might be polluting my mind when I read a piece of general news that is not being subject to commenting.

It all depends on how things are run. On some sites the comments are written by people who are borderline illiterate. On others the comments are insightful.

I am somewhat hesitant to say it, but a good policy might be to charge people a small fee (like $5/yr) to post comments. Much of the trolling and illiterate nonsense would be would be filtered by such a system, at least from what I have seen in places like Metafilter or the WELL.

Edit: or we could do things mailing list / Usenet style and just have people run spam filters on their own. Of course, some NGs are overrun with noise that makes them almost unreadable. Also, most computer users are not sophisticated enough to actually set up a killfile or spam filter on their own.

I'm not sure having people pay would give good results, in the french newspaper "lemonde.fr" for instance you have to have to be a subscriber to be able to comment. There are less comments than on other big new sites, but I can't say the quality is significantly higher. Better grammar, maybe.

If you feel that comment section shows that crowd intelligence works, you have different definition of works than I do.

Aren't HN comments 'crowd intelligence' ?

I have never seen comments on a news site that were worthwhile. It's always a train wreck. Any time I scroll down to look at them, I quickly ask myself "Why did I just do that?"

They give you a skewed perspective of the world. When I read Huffington Post comments, I have to remind myself that all liberals are not this obnoxiously stupid. When an article gets linked by Drudge, I have to remind myself that all conservatives are not psychotic hateful trolls.

>It's always a train wreck.

I take the opposite view. When it's a disaster comment section, I see it as: this is actually how some people think. Until there were options, like comments, that gave everyone a platform, it was impossible to tell what people thought about the message being delivered. Good or bad.

Most sites, including this one, the commentary has the best insight.

But if you look carefully, it's often a relatively small group of trolls burning down the entire section. Take Drudge-linked stories, for instance. There are about 6 super-trolls that aggressively post on every single linked story (the "Feds Made Sarah Palin" guy, the guy that talks like Zippy the Pinhead with all the CAPS).

The normal, level-headed people probably aren't posting at all, and they greatly outnumber the trolls who do.

"On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog"

Wouldn't it be better if we kept it this way? I agree -- the comments section of some websites is really bad, but anonymity is important. Look at Reddit -- the trolls don't even get a chance because the crowd sourcing works so well that relevant material is pushed to the top, while the hate comments are way at the bottom.

Like Schneier said [1], "Beware the Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse: terrorists, drug dealers, kidnappers, and child pornographers. Seems like you can scare any public into allowing the government to do anything with those four." Coming soon to the list, internet trolls?

[1] - http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2005/12/computer_crime...

Their site, and therefore they can do anything they want with it, but real name policies are like a bur under my saddle. I would never comment on a site that required me to give my identity beyond the ones I expose by choice (and all the ones I expose without, IP etc).

I really hope that we can figure out this whole "people being absolutely terrible on the internet" thing.

A lot of people say that it's just because this is how people really are, but I'm not convinced. I know for a fact that I'm a lot ruder on the internet than I'd ever want to be in real life, regardless of consequences. I've found that "real name" policies help (not necessarily forcing a real name, but at least trying to encourage it, while still allowing for pseudo-anonymity).

The stuff that's happened in the gaming community is disconcerting too

It's not just the internet.

What's going to happen on HuffPo when the nasty comments don't go away? Use the State to bludgeon the offensive speakers? Where will that end?

Historically you lose your right to free speech when you start making death threats.

If you've read the news recently you'd see a lot of very violent stuff being thrown at people. Internet or not, people are not allowed to say they are going to rape your corpse and harass you over and over. So "using the State to bludgeon the offensive speakers" seems like a reasonable reaction to these people.

Some of the stuff (that bomb threat twitter thing) is a bit much, but there's a limit to freedom of speech.

There are other ways:

* Spam filters -- if we can spot viagra ads, we can spot rape threats. A paid moderator can review posts that are flagged by the filter but which are not actually threatening.

* Charging people for the privilege to post comments on the site. You are free to make commentary on your blog if you do not want to pay, and a small fee (e.g. $5/yr) creates just enough of a speedbump to keep most trolls off the site. This can also help cover the cost of a paid moderator.

* Upvote/downvote systems, though these tend to descend into mob rule / groupthink / downvote-because-I-disagree.

ok I don't think that the gov't should be moderating huffpo comments. Upvote/downvote stuff might be good at least for trolling stuff (but it too can be abused in the right situations).

However, actions are actions. Just because it's easier to do something on the internet doesn't make it more legal.

Obviously the seriousness of it all has to be judged , but if you're harrassing someone constantly on the internet (even if it's "just" making a bunch of online accounts and commenting extremely viley everywhere), you do not have my sympathy.

If I were putting hateful messages into your (snail) mail box every day and sending your friends photoshopped pictures of you in compromising situations, would I be pardoned? Doing on the internet shouldn't either

Don't TechCrunch encourage real names and still get snark in response to start-up announcements? There's more anonymity on HN and people are generally more civil.

A karma system can help, IMO.

I feel like the culture of HN encourages people to be relatively open to their identities (probably because its small enough to where anyone can reasonably use it as their soapbox).

"Snark" is one thing (enough people are rude in this industry no matter what the medium), what I'm more concerned about are the things like the death threats, or just outright racism and bigotry out there. The really vile stuff. That needs to get stopped

It's not the anonymity, it's the lack of consequences. In big cities, people are casually rude in traffic even though they can see each others' faces; but they'll probably never meet again. The clerk at the DMV treats you as shitty as they can get away with. By contrast, an anonymous seller on eBay may go to great lengths to make you happy beyond the terms of service, just because your review will stay with them.

Look at sites that use Facebook for comments. People have no problem posting utterly insane and threatening things with their real name, with a picture of them smiling with their kids.

I'd say that happens a lot _less_ on facebook though compared to a site like reddit, because more people are cognizant that they're using their real life identity.

People also post pictures of their shiny new credit cards to twitter, it's not because they don't care about fraud, they're just not aware of how twitter works.

Some small portion of people really don't care and will gladly threaten to rape you under their real name, but I'm guessing that the majority of the ones you see are people who just aren't very internet saavy.

I'm not sure it can be solved.. This problem will always exist as long as the 3 pieces are still there:

http://img509.imageshack.us/img509/4650/intratnetdumbqv9.jpg

(nfsw language)

How much effort will they put into assuring you will sign up with your real identity? Any info on that?

It's nonsense. What can she possibly do? Make you create an account with the government, verify your SSN & Tax ID and then you post comments with your legal name? By that point someone else will just make a mirror of Huffpost; scraping the content and allowing anonymous comments... or even more likely people just won't bother with HuffPost anymore.

> She said: "Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats."

What?

Man held after banknote campaigner receives rape threats on Twitter

Police say man arrested on suspicion of harassment offences, after shadow minister criticises Twitter's response to abuse

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2013/jul/28/man-arrested-...

I'm sure that this change will mean that HuffPo's comment section will live up to the high quality established by articles such as "Lady Gaga nude video" and "Amanda Bynes tweets something crazy."

Huh. Centinel, Federal Farmer, Brutus, and Cato[1] would all have issues with this policy.

http://www.constitution.org/afp/afp.htm

>"I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and not hiding behind anonymity."

Only a privileged person can think like this. So what happens to all the people who live in places where sharing a conflicting opinion can get them in trouble? I say that as if USA is not of those places, but lately....

Even a privileged person should not think like that. When you are looking for a job, do you want a controversial political opinion from 10 years ago to get in the way? Ward Churchill learned this lesson the hard way:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ward_Churchill_September_11_at...

The trolls are winning.

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