Earlier this month, I explained why, several years ago, I stopped allowing readers to leave comments on this site. Now, some sites with a slightly larger readership — Huffington Post, YouTube, CNN, many newspapers — have decided that allowing anonymous vitriolic idiocy to run rampant is no longer a good idea, so they’ve taken measures to curtail it, too.
Nearly three-quarters of teens and young adults think people are more likely to use discriminatory language online or in text messages than in face to face conversations, according to a recent poll from The Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research and MTV. The poll didn’t distinguish between anonymous comments and those with real identities attached.
The Huffington Post is also clamping down on vicious comments. In addition to employing 40 human moderators who sift through readers’ posts for racism, homophobia, hate speech and the like, the AOL-owned news site is also chipping away at anonymous commenting. Previously, anyone could respond to an article posted on the site by creating an account, without tying it to an email address. This fall, HuffPo began requiring people to verify their identity by connecting their accounts to an email address, but that didn’t appear to be enough and the site now also asks commenters to log in using a verified Facebook account.
“We are reaching a place where the Internet is growing up,” says Jimmy Soni, managing editor of HuffPo. “These changes represent a maturing (online) environment.”