VANCOUVER - About a year ago, the Buffalo News in New York state did what every newspaper and website seems to be doing these days: it gave readers the ability to post comments below stories.
And the result was much the same — a few insightful comments from a handful of thoughtful readers drowned out by what one of the newspaper's staff once complained were "anonymous flamethrowers."
"We thought it would be great to have lots of lively and productive discussion about our stories, but really what mostly happened is people are able to vent the ugliest parts of what they think about things, and a lot of it has been racist, sexist," says the paper's news editor, Margaret Sullivan.
"They bring the tenor of our website and our reputation down."
That has prompted Sullivan's newspaper to do away with anonymous comments as of next month. It will become one of the first news organizations in North America to force users to sign their real names if they want to be part of the discussion, as newspapers and online news sites everywhere continue to grapple with the moral and legal issues of online comments.
News websites have started reining in the anything-goes philosophy that was once seen as the promise of the Internet, looking for ways to foster debate while minimizing the nasty and occasionally defamatory comments anonymity sometimes breeds.
A few like the Buffalo News and the Sun Chronicle in Massachusetts are trying to end the cloak of anonymity completely — the Sun Chronicle by requiring a credit card to verify a user's identity.
But most, including major news outlets in Canada, are taking a more measured approach, employing some form of moderation and in some cases letting the commenters themselves judge and rank each other.
Most large news websites in Canada allow some level of commenting, with differing approaches.
The websites for the Globe and Mail and CBC, for example, require users to sign up for free memberships before they can post and have a ranking system allowing users to say whether they agree with a comment. Users can then click a button to see the highest-rated posts first. CBC moderates every comment before it appears, while the Globe checks comments after they've been posted and removes any that violate the paper's policies.
Others, like Canada.com, still allow anonymous comments but include benefits for users who take the time to sign up for a membership.
In almost all cases, users are free to use pseudonyms.
CBC executive editor Esther Enkin says the national broadcaster has been constantly reviewing its online commenting system since it was added about two years ago and plans to continue making changes to ensure the right balance between free speech and intelligent speech — which, even in a fully moderated environment, aren't always the same thing.
"We're balancing freedom of expressing and wanting to create a community that belongs to our users with the reality of defamation and protecting people from being hurtful with their comments," says Enkin. "It's a balancing act."
Enkin says the CBC doesn't plan to get rid of anonymity, which she argues can encourage some people to participate in the debate who might be afraid to reveal who they really are.
However, she says news outlets are clearly looking for ways to raise the bar when it comes to the hundreds or even thousands of comments that sometimes appear below their stories.
"I think that everybody seems to be struggling for a way to honour that sense of openness and inclusiveness (of the Internet), but making it a higher experience," she says.
Hosting users' comments — anonymous or not — also raises a number of legal questions.
A few recent decisions have shown the courts are prepared to lift the veil of anonymity when comments cross the line into defamation. One of the most recent cases was this past April, when a judge in Halifax forced the city's alternative weekly newspaper and Google to hand over information about users who made potentially libellous comments against the city's top fire officials.
Toronto-based media lawyer Brian Rogers says online anonymity doesn't protect the user or the news outlet from the risk of a lawsuit, but he cautions against removing users' ability to protect their identity altogether.
"People relying on anonymity on the Internet should realize, at least in Canada, there's a frailty there, they can't ensure their identities are protected unless they take fairly extraordinary steps," says Rogers.
"Anonymity is something that has been important in the development of the Internet — the ability to participate without necessarily disclosing who they are. But anything you can devise that actually permits free speech is going to run into problems."
