Paul Alan Levy alerts us to the news of two recent rulings about internet anonymity, where courts refused to identify some anonymous commenters (in the second case, some were identified and others weren't). There are a fair number of twists and turns in those rulings, and you can read all the details at that link. But what struck me about this is that it comes just a few days after we saw a different story about a different court that agreed to unmask anonymous commenters using a much lower standard than other cases have used.
If you read through both stories you see that judges basically seem to be making it up as they go along as to what standards to use in deciding whether or not online anonymity is protectable. The famous case in this realm is the Dendrite case, but all of the judges seem to pick and choose what they like or don't like about the Dendrite standard, and we're left with a very unclear landscape in terms of understanding what is and what is not protectable anonymity. Basically, you have to hope you end up in a court that buys into the concept, and that seems dangerous for those who believe that anonymity is an important part of First Amendment protections.
It's no secret that many online publications struggle with how best to handle their comment sections. Should they allow anonymous comments? Should there be some kind of moderation? Well, it appears that the Sun Chronicle, which appears to be based in Massachusetts, has chosen to go to a pretty extreme position. Reader Shawn alerts us that The Sun Chronicle disabled their comment system a few months back, after it got upset about a few anonymous readers "disrupting" things. Shawn says "When the comments went away I found myself spending less time on the site but didnt care enough to complain." However, he recently went back and was surprised that, in order to comment you need to hand over your credit card, and the paper will charge you $0.99. Obviously, this is more to prove that you are who you say you are, but it does seem a bit distorted when the newspaper wants to charge people just to comment. Also, once charged, your name and hometown are automatically associated with your comments. I can't see how that's all that appealing to most people. The newspaper says this is "a necessary step," but I'm not sure how many people in the community will agree. Instead, they might just go elsewhere.
Someone who prefers to remain anonymous sent over this story about how Associated Press stories hosted on Yahoo News appear to have tons of comments from old stories. It's not entirely clear what's happening, though I have my suspicions (explained further down), but it appears that when new stories are showing up on certain topics, Yahoo is simply copying over older comments from previous stories on similar or related topics. The comments look as if they're about the story posted -- and the only way you can tell they're not is if you notice the date:
I'd go from one Yahoo article to another and notice that regardless of the subject matter, the first user comment was always the same -- at least on AP articles covering the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The comment that kept reappearing was posted by "Robert" and it was a one liner. "Hamas is now in control of the Gaza Strip after winning an election there against Abbas Palestinian Authority." That was it. Fair enough -- I've got no quarrel with the messenger or the message. But somehow that one comment generated an incredible 184 responses and, last I checked, readers had given it 3212 thumbs up and 2525 thumbs down.
I got a little curious about why Robert's one liner had generated so much controversy. I've written hundreds of articles and never got anywhere near that kind of attention. Frankly, I was full of envy. How did 'Robert' pull this off with one miserly line? Then I noticed the strangest thing: it was dated March 09, 2010. The comment was two months old and was the lead comment of 40,000 responses. That seemed a little high considering the fact that the AP article I was reading had only been posted for thirty minutes.
What were Yahoo and AP up to? The answer is simple; they were porting comments from one article to another and, in this particular case, they've been doing it for two months.
Oddly (and inexplicably) the author of that post, Ahmed Amr, does not link to Yahoo to show this, but it's not hard to find. Here's a story published on June 3rd, 2010 at 9:19pm. Yet, there's that same first comment, from March 9th, at 12:47am. And here's a story published on May 6th at 1:09 pm with the identical comments, also beginning with the March 9th comment. To let you see what they both look like before they change (and I'll explain in a second why I think they'll change) I've turned both of those pages into PDFs, which you can see below (you may have to either download or view at full screen and scroll to see the "comments" at the bottom):
I've also looked around and found really similar things on other stories. While Amr is suggesting there's something nefarious going on with the AP "manipulating" comments (and he specifically calls out the reporters from the AP who he believes are a part of this), I'm going to guess that this is more typical (embarrassing) incompetence on the part of Yahoo, rather than malice.
Take a look at the two links I put above to the Yahoo stories. The URLs (as found by a quick search for the comment string Amr mentioned in his post) are as follows:
Notice something similar? The last bit of the URL string is identical "/ml_israel_palestinian". The only difference is that the second URL, the story from May 6th, inserts two additional directories, with the top one being the date of publication. We already know that, due to a total disregard for the basic principles of the way the internet can and does work, that the AP limits its partners from hosting AP articles for very long. I believe on most sites you can host the articles for a month and then you need to take them down completely. With most sites, what happens is you get a 404 error or page not found (to this day, I can't figure out why they don't at least point you to a place where you can find the missing article). However, it appears that Yahoo decides to recycle the URLs in an attempt to make the URLs simple and understandable. So, any basic story about the Israeli Palestinian conflict might appear under that first URL. For all I know, by the time you're reading this, it's an entirely different story than the one that was published on June 3rd.
After the date of publication, breaking the basic principle of a link to a news story being a link to that news story alone, Yahoo moves the story to a new date-defined directory, and the original URL is freed up for the next story on that particular topic. If this seems stupid and confusing to users and destructive to the very idea of the "link economy" or valuing earned or passed links, you're right. But take that up with Yahoo and the Associated Press.
Of course, here's where the real level of tech incompetence comes in: It appears that Yahoo News' comment system doesn't understand that Yahoo does this. So, it associates the comments to that last bit of the URL string "/ml_israel_palestinian" and the same comments will appear every time that string is used as the final part of a URL string. It's bizarre that Yahoo would do this, but apparently, that's how Yahoo rolls.
Amr suggests that this is part of a planned bit of "corporate fraud" by Yahoo and the AP, perhaps to make it look like certain stories are getting a hell of a lot more comments than they are. He also suggests other conspiracy theories involving pro-Israeli operatives, saying that as far as he can tell, this only happens on AP stories concerning the Israeli/Palestinian crisis. I believe Amr didn't try very hard to find alternatives. On my very first attempt to find an example related to something entirely different, I found the identical behavior. I just picked a popular story that likely would have multiple stories over multiple days: the BP oil spill in the Gulf. Then I looked for an AP story hosted by Yahoo News... Bingo.
The first news story I found was published on June 3rd at 2:28 pm, but the first comment on the story? Why it's from May 1st at 2:06am. And the URL? The string ends with "us_gulf_oil_spill_947." You can find the identical comments on this story which was published May 21st, but ends with the string "us_gulf_oil_spill" suggesting that Yahoo's comment system also ignores numbers at the end of that final URL part in replicating its comments.
And here's another story about the White House's response to the oil spill. Published June 3rd at 11:57 pm. First comment? May 10, 2010 12:58 pm. URL string? "us_gulf_oil_spill_washington_9". And here's a story from May 17th with the identical comments at the end, with the closing URL string "us_gulf_oil_spill_washington_1." Yup, Yahoo seems to just match up comments with pretty simple URL hashes.
You can see all of that below as embedded PDFs:
So while it's easy and tempting to ascribe this to "manipulation" and suggest malice on the part of the AP or Yahoo or whoever else (Israeli operatives? Seriously?), it seems pretty clear that this is more due to technical incompetence on Yahoo's part, somewhat driven by the AP's ridiculous "delete this story after x days" licensing policies.
Update: The AP got in touch to make it entirely clear that this is entirely Yahoo's incompetence and not its own:
The Associated Press distributes news content to Yahoo! News, but the display of AP stories and the curating of comments are entirely up to Yahoo!
While undoubtedly true, in the comments we've heard from multiple people who work at news sites that license AP content, and they note that AP has a weird feed process, whereby it gives a simple slug like the ones used above, so that it can force update stories, often leading people to see stories totally change over the course of the day. This is clearly a Yahoo issue, but AP's policies don't help.
Earlier this year, the US's IP Czar (technically, IP "Enforcement Coordinator"), Victoria Espinel, asked for public comment on how her enforcement plan should work. While I had some trouble with the basis for many of the questions (which all seemed to assume that greater enforcement was, without question, a good thing), I still submitted my own comments. Soon afterwards, I pointed to an absolute must read filing by NetCoalition/CCIA, which was 23 pages of brilliance, picking apart the claims of various pro-stronger-copyright groups one-by-one. Since then, a few key reports have been released, and, in response, Jonathan Band, who wrote much of the original report, alerts our attention to the fact that NetCoalition/CCIA have filed supplemental comments with Espinel (pdf) based on those reports:
The filing talks about those three reports -- all of which we've discussed here previously -- to reiterate some of the key points made in the original filing. The first, of course, is the GAO report that debunked the claims from industry studies about all of the "losses" caused by infringement. Amusingly, that GAO report was required by the same law that created the IP Czar position in the first place, the ProIP Act. The filing notes, by the way, that the GAO's mandate for the report didn't even say it had to investigate copyright infringement -- just counterfeiting. However, the GAO appears to have been so troubled by the bogus reports out there that it decided to publicly call those studies into question. As this new filing points out, many of the comments filed by groups in support of strong copyright enforcement, relied on those reports that the GAO has since debunked. This should call into question the legitimacy of those filings entirely.
Second, this supplemental filing highlights that ridiculous Chamber of Commerce report that we highlighted recently as well. It was the one that couldn't pass the laugh test, because it lumped in pretty much every company in what it decided were "IP-intensive industries" and compared them to companies in what it considered to be "non-IP-intensive industries" and then assumed, with no proof whatsoever, that all of the benefits to those IP-intensive industries came from intellectual property laws. The report was so ridiculous that no one who actually read the details could take it seriously. But, that's the problem. Very few people actually do read the details. The whole point of the report is to just take the distorted headline and reuse it. Thankfully, Band and others in this filing are trying to make it clear to the White House that the Chamber of Commerce's report is not an accurate description of what's going on.
Finally, it highlights CCIA's own report -- using the very same methodology as those who claim the "copyright industries" contribute $1.52 trillion to the economy -- to show that exceptions to copyright (such as fair use) contribute much, much more to the economy. Who knows if Espinel, or others at the White House are paying attention to the details in these filings, but these two filings from NetCoalition/CCIA are incredibly detailed and well supported with evidence. Hopefully someone in the White House is paying attention.
Venom-filled anonymous internet comments are often a favorite target for politicians, writers and plenty of other folks who use them to represent everything that's wrong with the internet. Many sites have a love-hate relationship with comments, including news sites, which often want to encourage "participation" but don't get much out of the comments, including ad revenue, since many advertisers don't want their ads alongside them. Now, many of these news sites are rethinking their commenting systems, with a view towards cutting down in the bile that's often spewed by commenters on their site. Typically, these efforts amount to little more than switching comments off or forcing people to use their real names, with many publishers (and pundits) believing that the real problem is anonymity. But anonymity isn't the issue; the quality and tone of comments is. So if that's the real problem, why not seek to change it, instead of taking aim at a completely separate issue? As we've noted before, Techdirt gets a lot of comments, including the occasional unfriendly one from a jerk. Sometimes this jerk is anonymous -- but if they're a jerk, it doesn't much matter if they're anonymous or using their real name. With that in mind, it's nice to see that some of the sites in the NYT article above are actually looking at ways to tackle the real issue, and not just anonymity -- though there are plenty that still seem to think everybody will be nice if they use their real name.
With some newspaper folks claiming that anonymous comments are evil and somehow bad for America, it's nice to see someone from the business step up and defend the value of anonymous commenters. The Washington Post's ombudsman, Andrew Alexander recently wrote a good defense of anonymous commenters. The first half details all the bad that comes along with anonymous commenters -- the vile and nasty comments -- but then points out that an outright ban is the wrong response:
For every noxious comment, many more are astute and stimulating. Anonymity provides necessary protection for serious commenters whose jobs or personal circumstances preclude identifying themselves. And even belligerent anonymous comments often reflect genuine passion that should be heard.
He also points out that allowing anonymous commenters has helped to build up a much larger community at the WaPo site, where those users tend to be more loyal and spend more time, even if it's not known who they are specifically. But I think the point highlighted above is key. We all can remember the awful anonymous comments, because those stick out in our memory. But that creates this anecdotal belief that anonymous comments are awful. Yet, as I look through the anonymous comments that we get at Techdirt every day, the vast majority of them are quality comments. Yes, there are some terrible ones, which may be more memorable, but we have anonymous commenters who provide tremendous value -- and it would be a shame to cut them off, just because of a few troublemakers.
Remember the debate about whether or not anonymous commenters were good or evil? Well, let's take it up a notch. The Cleveland Plain Dealer -- who amusingly just recently told its reporters they needed to engage more in the comments on their stories -- had a persistent commenter, who was a bit vocal, and at times mean. After she posted a comment questioning the mental state of a relative of a reporter, the newspaper decided to look into who was behind the comments, and realized that it is a high profile local judge, who has actually been in the news a lot lately. The judge's daughter tried to claim credit for the posts, but apparently there's some evidence that suggests the judge made many, if not all, of the comments (it was her email address, and apparently it's clear that many of the comments came from her work computer). Some of the comments even came on cases she was involved in. Of course, it's also worth noting that she had threatened a reporter from the Plain Dealer with jailtime if he didn't reveal his source for a story (and, yes, this is why we need a strong journalism shield law), so the Plain Dealer may be seen as having an axe to grind.
Still this raises a bunch of questions that lots of sites struggle with. We've often wondered about it ourselves, as there are times when it's obvious who a commenter is -- and even here on Techdirt we've had high level execs pseudononymously comment (while doing little to hide their real identity) -- even at times about issues they were involved in. And, to some extent, those situations seem newsworthy -- though not everyone would agree. Along those lines, we've sometimes pointed out that two commenters may be the same person, though never revealing who they actually are in real life. But, again, does that reach an ethical standard? Of course, a few months ago, there were similar concerns when the online editor at StlToday.com called the boss of a commenter, leading the commenter to resign. But that was purely vindictive, and of no journalistic significance.
It's easy to just say that no publication should ever reveal such info -- but if it has journalistic value, and the commenter has done little to hide their actual identity, it certainly reaches a gray area. I can see the arguments on both sides of this issue. In the end, I don't think it's a good idea to "out" commenters' true identities, but if there is journalistic value in the information, rather than just doing it out of spite or anger, I don't think it's as clear cut as some are making it out to be.
This sort of debate comes up every so often among folks who run news/commentary sites, and it seems to have boiled over again recently, as a bunch of newspapers/blogging folks got into a nice little discussion on the goodness or evilness of anonymous comments. Not surprisingly, I side with Mathew Ingram on this one. Since we began, we've always allowed anonymous comments, and, for the most part, find that we've benefited tremendously from allowing that sort of level of speech.
Does this mean we prefer people comment anonymously? Not at all. In fact, we try to encourage people to identify themselves in some manner, but we generally do so by providing greater and greater benefits for those who have verified accounts (with a lot more on the way). However, we recognize that there are times when there are benefits to having people comment anonymously, and we see no reason to take away those benefits.
Does this mean that people don't abuse this privilege? Again, not at all. However, it is actually quite rare that anonymous commenters abuse their ability to be anonymous. It does happen at times, and, in our opinion, there are ways to deal with this that don't involve banning anonymous commenters at all. Some of these methods we have not implemented yet, but we're working hard on them (and, yes, this blog post will hopefully act as a push to those doing the coding...).
Techdirt gets an awful lot of comments, and we've been at this for a long time. We've seen no evidence that anonymous comments, by themselves, are a problem. You can have an occasional annoying commenter at times, but on the whole, the quality of the discussions we see in the comments here is much better than on many other sites that do not allow anonymous comments, and seem to stall out with just a few comments on each story (even on sites that get a lot more traffic than us).
There is a bit of a balancing act that needs to go on. At times, people start demanding we moderate comments (when a particularly annoying commenter hijacks a thread, for example), but then, when a legitimate commenter accidentally gets his or her comment caught in our spam filter, suddenly they get angry and ask "how dare you moderate comments!" Of course, as we explain, if you have a legitimate comment and it gets caught, we free it up within a few hours. If your comment is blatant spam, however, it gets deleted -- and at times, we have noted that "pure trolling" is spam (i.e., comments that don't advertise anything commercial, but are so far off-topic that they are designed solely to send the discussion off-topic). We will never block commenters just because you disagree, however, no matter how wrong you might be or are anonymous. We did have an issue for a while, where our UI confused some commenters into submitting totally blank comments (which automatically get held as spam) because two submit buttons could be seen, and some people clicked the wrong one -- but we recently fixed the comment UI to solve this. Unfortunately, this did confuse some people, including some people who accused us of moderating legit comments, and we apologize for that UI confusion.
On the whole, we have a pretty great community of folks around here -- including those of you who I regularly disagree with. It makes for a fun conversation. Sure, every so often, an immature person tries to cause trouble, but those are few and far between, and it's not because they're anonymous, but because they're jerks. The vast majority of our anonymous commenters (even those we disagree with) add value to the conversation, and blocking them completely seems counterproductive.
Last month, we wrote about a local news website in Illinois that was getting frustrated with the dialog in its comments, and it instituted a "cooling off period" where it shut down its comments for a while, hoping that it would drive away the less desirable comments. The whole thing made no sense to us. Those types of commenters would eventually come back, and the solution should be offering better incentives and better overall discussion for commenters, not blocking out everyone. And yet... (without giving credit to the site that led the way last month), it looks like super popular gadget blog Engadget has done the same thing, apparently after comments over the whole iPad thing got too heated. Engadget, of course, is owned by AOL -- and you would think that if there were any company out there that understood group dynamics online by now, it would be AOL. Honestly, I'm still really confused as to what this will actually do, other than make Engadget a lot less interesting for those readers who took part in the community.
Via Romenesko we learn of local Illinois news site Pantagraph.com that has suspended comments on local news stories as a "cooling off period" after it felt that the comments had become too uncivil. I'm wondering how this will actually help. This is the internet that we're talking about here, and once the comments are turned back on, I would imagine that they'll quickly return to the same level of civility (or lack thereof) pretty quickly. If you want to create more civil commenting policies, a "time out" doesn't do that. Putting in place better incentives does.
