What’s in a name? Everything, according to some readers who’ve responded to Seven Days stories online.
Like many media outlets, Seven Days requires readers to create an account on our website before submitting a comment online, but we allow them to post anonymously. We won’t print a letter to the editor without a full name and town of residence, but online commenters are free to be whoever they want to be, so long as they keep the conversation civil.
Vermont Public Radio has a similar policy. Its commenters are required to register with the third-party platform Disqus, but the station doesn’t enforce a real-name policy on its website, or on its weekday call-in radio show “Vermont Edition,” noted Jonathan Butler, VPR’s director of digital services. “There are plenty of times when someone has something sincere, authentic and valuable to say, and they just won’t tell you their name,” he explained.
Seven Days’ online comments are moderated by a group of digital staff and editors who see everything posted to the site. As part of this team, I can attest that, over the past few months, numerous commenters have focused not on our articles but on the identity of the people responding to them.
Take, for example, the Off Message blog post “Burlington Mall Opponents Sue to Get Vote Result Tossed,” published on November 21, 2016. The first to comment was a reader who goes by the screen name “knowyourassumptions.”
“We love democracy!” this individual wrote sarcastically. “Until our side loses at the ballot box. Then we sue. This is the very definition of sore losers. D’ya think the pathetic communist wannabes at [Coalition for a Livable City] would be embracing and defending the results of this very same vote if they had won it?”
This comment caught the attention of Vermont state Auditor Doug Hoffer, who replied, “I’m curious why ‘knowyourassumptions’ doesn’t use his or her real name. If that was required, the author might be less inclined to use tired ad hominem phrases like ‘pathetic communist wannabes.'”
A spat over anonymity dominated the rest of that comment thread.
A similar debate erupted in the comments below “Tall Mall Looms Over Central District Council Race,” a news story from February 8. In it, Burlington resident Maggie Standley urged Seven Days to change its policy allowing anonymous comments.
“Pls 7 Days,” she wrote, “require commentators to use their actual names as does VTDigger.”
But would that raise the level of discourse on our website? Better serve democracy? Keep people from insulting each other?
Our comment-moderation team doesn’t think so.
For starters, real-name policies are nearly impossible to enforce. VTDigger.org makes a valiant effort. An editor reads and approves each comment before it’s visible to the public, said founder and editor Anne Galloway. When editors spot a suspicious commenter, they do some sleuthing on Google. “When you research someone’s name and the only reference is to a comment on Digger, you know you’re onto something,” she said.
Even so, Galloway admitted, “We can’t always guarantee that people are using their real names.”
Comment moderators at WCAX-TV and the Burlington Free Press said the same thing. Both wcax.com and burlingtonfreepress.com make commenters log in using a Facebook profile. The social networking site stipulates that users must register with a real name, but not everyone does. “Technically, we don’t have anonymous comments,” said Burlington Free Press reader engagement editor Aki Soga. “That said, you could be Bozo the Clown and create an account and comment.”
WCAX digital media manager Matthew Monahan also noted that anonymity isn’t necessarily the problem. He said he’s deleted plenty of vicious or racist comments from people posting under their real names, especially on stories about immigration and heroin. “It’s like, ‘Wow, you’re my neighbor? This doesn’t feel like Vermont,'” he said.
Making commenters use their real names won’t change the fact that some of them express racist views. And real-name policies can actually have negative consequences, according to research published by the Coral Project.
A collaboration of the Mozilla Foundation, the New York Times and the Washington Post, the Coral Project creates open-source software and best practices to help newsrooms navigate the online world. Seven Days has participated in its events and offered input on its projects.
In January, the Coral Project published “The Real Name Fallacy,” an article by MIT Media Lab PhD candidate J. Nathan Matias. He disputes the idea that removing anonymity improves community behavior — and, he argues, “forcing real names in online communities could also increase discrimination and worsen harassment.”
“Gender- and race-based harassment are only possible if people know a person’s gender and/or race, and real names often give strong indications around both of these categories,” he writes.
Matias also cites a 2016 study that found 43 percent of online harassment victims have changed their contact information, and 23 percent disconnected from online networks to protect themselves. “One study on the reddit platform found that women, who are more likely to receive harassment, also use multiple pseudonymous identities at greater rates than men,” he writes.
Marginalized people, Matias suggests, are particularly at risk of being harassed. In liberal Vermont, that category can include conservatives.
Reached via email, “knowyourassumptions” — who has left 478 comments on the Seven Days site over the past three years — expressed “fear of being attacked/assailed for saying anything critical of the Bernie/progressive/politically correct orthodoxy that dominates in Vermont and is, in my view, intolerant of and hostile to any criticism.”
All the comment moderators reached for this story agreed that hosting online conversations is time-consuming and challenging — because the technology and best practices are constantly changing, and because people say things online that they’d never say in person.
All of us interact with our regulars at some level, and delete comments that violate our guidelines. But most believe that giving readers a place to talk about stories is, as Soga said, “a really vital part of journalism.”
Comment moderation “is a messy thing,” he added. “It’s kind of like democracy, right?”
This article appears in The Media Issue 2017.
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hmmmm….interesting. I understand why anonymity is allowed, and I agree it’s impt to protect one from discrimination and harassment. But, recently some of those using anonymous user names were doing the harassing, sometimes subtly and other times, not so much. 7 Days, do you feel the recent comments that raised this issue at all, met the below standards from your policy?
“Be respectful. We encourage debate, but it must be respectful, civil and calm. Address the argument, not the person. Dont resort to name-calling, bickering or personal attacks. Dont be mean-spirited.”
What keeping a conversation “respectful” means is the question. Disagreement and dialog is healthy when it pertains to the issues. When it gets into the likes of “Us” magazine standards, not so much. Perhaps there is a middle ground. That if one chooses to remain anonymous, their comments must meet a greater level of civility. Some recently were so low it was disturbing, and unfortunately, revealing…
To each their own- anonymously or not! Thks for covering this. I would love to have some other stories covered, such as: Composition and process for selecting volunteer Board and Committee members in Burlington. Is an Ethics Committee needed for Burlington’s local government when few checks and balances currently exist? Who makes up the DRB, Development Review Board, and what do they do?
This is a great conversation to have; thanks for the article, Seven Days!
Maggie Standley, I am having this conversation with another user on a different article. Because the conversation began from a city council race, there is a good chance I am talking to my neighbor. Whoever this person is is remarkable polite but what they are doing is asking for “civil discourse” to not include my views or the views of others who agree with them. No one has been vulgar or resorted to name calling, etc. This is a great example of tine policing and how comments like: “can’t we all just be civil,” or “let’s just discuss this calmly” are actually meant to silence those who are expressing oppression and do not have the energy to expel on tone.
That is not to say that online harassment and bully aren’t incredibly important topics that need to be addressed. And I just want to thank the Moderators for reading all the nasty comments so that we don’t have to. But there is a finer line between making sure that the message board doesn’t contain harassing language and making sure that the victims of the harassment aren’t being silenced because of tone policing. It’s important to get this right, so thank you, Seven Days for thinking it through!
Very interesting reading . I understand that hiding behind an alias is not ideal but the alternative might be worse . Would it be better to have a stilted conversations where only the boldest would comment or those who have spent the time to construct a fake identity . I don’t think so even with the risk of shielding extreme commentators.
BTW this is my real name and photo .
I applaud Seven Days for allowing anonymous comments. In an era where angry protesters think it is their right to picket someone’s home if they hear something they don’t like, it allows people to voice their opinion without fear of reprisal. Can anonymous posting be misused or abused? Of course. But Seven Days can delete anything that’s not civil. We already have enough censorship from media outlets like Vermont Digger.