Anjanette Delgado and Brian Smith, Gannett, and Talia Stroud, the Center for Media Engagement
Commenting sections have gotten a bad rap.
When news outlets first launched websites, comment sections were seen as a way to offer readers a place to gather and share their thoughts on the news. Over the years, many went unmonitored or relied on sub-par systems to moderate the comments. Instead of a place for thoughtful debate and engagement, they became filled with spam and vitriol.
At the Cincinnati Enquirer and the USA TODAY Network, we partnered with the Center for Media Engagement to study our options and find a better path. After extensive research and testing, sites like ours are keeping comments, but with a better system in place. Let us explain.
Why do we want you to comment?
Quite simply, because you know things that we don’t.
Every reader of our site has had a different life experience. You come from different backgrounds, work in different professions and have different viewpoints. We build community better when we can hear each other and learn from different perspectives.
If certain groups of people don’t comment, then their views aren’t represented. And we know from research that people can form impressions about what others in their community think on the basis of news comment sections.
We’re also listening to the comments to improve our work. The commenting section can be a place for you to let us know about new ways to think about a topic, to provide new information about a developing story, or to share new perspectives and ideas.
How are we protecting commenters?
Over the years, we’ve heard from readers who didn’t feel safe in our previous comment sections. Some didn’t like that they had to use their Facebook account to comment. They were concerned about repercussions in their professional or personal lives. Others had been harassed or verbally attacked for expressing their views.
There are a lot of issues associated with forcing people to use their real names to comment. And, our experience has shown it doesn’t result in a healthier comments section.
So, the first thing we did was remove the connection to Facebook. Commenters can now create an account on our website. They are not required to use their real names and can use a username instead. We hope this will make more people feel welcome and safe to contribute.
We’re also relying on a more sophisticated system and artificial intelligence to help us moderate. Our system listens for clues that a commenter might be attacking another reader or exhibiting threatening behavior. Instead of letting those comments appear on the website, it holds them back for a moderator to review.
The new system also puts control back into your hands. If you see a comment that you believe violates our community guidelines, you can report it and know that it’s actually going to a moderator in our organization to review. If another user negatively influences your experience, just click on their name and hit “ignore.”
Why do we remove some comments?
Most comments are removed because they are abusive, contain hate speech or spam, or have other significant violations of our community guidelines. We have zero tolerance for people who try to get around these rules or our list of banned words by using alternate spellings, abbreviations or special characters. Some comments are questionable, however. In that case, we look to our guiding star: making a better commenting experience. When in doubt, that informs our decisions.
In addition to removing a comment, we can warn, suspend or ban commenters outright if they continue to violate the community rules. Our goal is always to help people understand the rules and create a strong community. For a detailed explanation of this process, please see the guidelines.
OK, but what about the First Amendment?
Among the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment are the freedom of speech and of the press. But it doesn’t prohibit social media companies, digital sites or our newsrooms from creating some rules. Our commitment to you is that we strive to maintain a safe and welcoming commenting section. We’ll do that by having clear guidelines and enforcing the rules consistently.
What went into the new community guidelines?
When we decided to keep commenting, we put quite a bit of thought into the space we wished to create.
A big part of that was revisiting our community guidelines. We wanted these guidelines to be clear to everyone so that if their comment didn’t appear, they would have a good idea why that is.
Specifically, the guidelines in bold indicate changes to what is prohibited:
- Threats of violence or intimidation.
- Personal attacks, name-calling, abuse or harassment of other community members, subjects of our news coverage or our staff.
- Hate speech or language that abuses, disparages or discriminates on the basis of race, religion, nationality, ethnicity, gender or gender identity, sexual preference, age, region, disability, etc.
- Obscenities, vulgarities or any variation of such that suggests, connotes or contains indecent, offensive, pornographic or lewd speech, or ALL-CAPS shouting and punctuation marks.
- Advertisements/promotions, and fundraising/solicitations of donations.
- Spam (including multiple posts that contain the same or similar content).
- Plagiarized and/or copyrighted material of a third party.
- Off-topic comments, especially those that devolve into a separate conversation.
- Content that is false, promotes or advocates unfounded conspiracy theories, is altered, libelous or otherwise serves to misinform or disparage others.
- Usernames that contain swear words or vulgar terms, are offensive or threatening or impersonate another person, including using another person’s name as part of your username.
If you see a violation of these Conversation Guidelines, report it by clicking the "report" button beneath the comment in question.
How did we pick the new commenting system?
Newsrooms have tried out many different commenting platforms over the years. On many sites within our company, we used Facebook’s commenting tool. But we are always thinking about whether a different experience might be better for you!
We thought about whether turning the comments off or shifting to another platform would change people’s experience. During our research with the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas at Austin, we tested what happened to the commenting experience at 24 news websites in our company.
At random, some of these sites turned commenting off. Some kept Facebook comments. Some switched to a new commenting platform, Coral. And finally, some switched to the Coral platform, but only allowed subscribers to comment. Over a period of nearly two months in late 2019 and early 2020, we tracked what happened on these sites. We also surveyed people who accessed our sites both before and after we made these changes to see what they thought about the commenting experience (thank you if you participated!).
What we found was informative, and influenced our decision to switch to the Coral platform for commenting.
Turning off the comments didn’t improve people’s experiences. Even though many of those who had commented at some point didn’t notice, those who did notice thought that removing the comments wasn’t a good decision. We also found that people spent less time on our site, signaling that people do spend time with comments.
Switching to Coral improved the commenting experience. More people commented, and the comments that appeared were less toxic.
We still believe in offering readers a place to gather, debate and engage with one another, and one that is safe to be in. With our new commenting platform and an intentional approach to moderating, we are getting closer to that reality.
Brian Smith (Des Moines Register) and Anjanette Delgado (Detroit Free Press) represent Gannett’s newsrooms, and Talia Stroud is the director of the Center for Media Engagement and a professor in the Moody College of Communication at The University of Texas at Austin. Thank you to those who took part in this research, especially those who completed the surveys, the Gannett newsrooms that allowed us to randomize what happened in their comment space, the journalists who gave their feedback, the research team within Gannett, Coral, the Center for Media Engagement, and our funders, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, Democracy Fund, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
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