Banish the trolls but online debate needs (a degree of) anonymity
This morning’s Observer column.
So the proprietor of the Huffington Post has decided to ban anonymous commenting from the site, starting in mid-September. Speaking to reporters after a conference in Boston, Arianna Huffington said: “Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats. I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and [are] not hiding behind anonymity. We need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up internet.”
Quite so. I can see heads nodding in agreement. After all, much anonymous online commenting seems to be stupid, nasty, vicious and ignorant. And that’s just the stuff that isn’t tangential to the topic of the article being commented on. If people have to take responsibility for what they say in public, then they will surely behave better.
That seems like common sense. Whether it is supported by evidence is, however, uncertain because at the moment there isn’t much research, and what there is seems to be mostly anecdotal…
There are, it seems to me, two kinds of problems with online commenting in its current form. The first is bad or pathological behaviour — trolling etc. As I say in the column, there are ways of dealing with that. And there’s always Anil Dash’s method — see his terrific post “If your website’s full of assholes, it’s your fault”. The second problem is that of harnessing the possibilities of online discussion as a way of enlarging and enhancing the public sphere. Many comments are thoughtful, informed and pertinent, and yet are submerged in morasses of incivility and webs of incomprehensible infighting. Which leads to the thought that perhaps the problem is architectural. Maybe web sites are providing the wrong sort of virtual space. After all, as someone once said, if you provide a boxing ring, people will fight.
Mat Honan has an interesting thought about this. For too long, he says, comments have been stuck in overlooked back alleys where anyone can leave digital graffiti on online real estate.
We’ve bought into the fallacy of comments so completely that they remain nearly universal—and universally terrible. A lot of people have tried to fix them. Yet, as Digg CEO Andrew McLaughlin says, “everyone who runs a commenting system ends up killing themselves or shooting up a post office.” It’s hyperbole, sure, but trying to wrangle online conversations is a messy, frustrating, and typically thankless affair that involves more time than most people have. Even a dedicated team of moderators can hardly compete with legions of trolls and spambots. Nonetheless, lots of people are trying to make you read the comments again—because in those rare moments when comments are great, they are some of the best parts of the Internet.
The most talked-about new system is probably Branch, which moves discussions over to its site and lets publishers select the best threads to embed on their own pages. Want to weigh in? You’ll need to be invited by a discussion’s host or one of its participants. That barrier to entry cuts down on toxic drive-by commenting. When people have to be invited, they’re less likely to be jackasses.
Meanwhile, Gawker built an entirely new publishing platform based on commenting. Called Kinja, it lets authors and readers isolate thought-provoking discussions so every comment isn’t just vomited up chronologically. But Kinja isn’t only about bringing civility; it’s also about moving the story forward by treating an article as a starting point rather than a product. This doesn’t happen magically—it takes work. Writers must actually dive into discussions to surface interesting conversations.
Both of these systems treat discussions as independent acts instead of afterthoughts. “If you want quality conversation, you have to elevate it,” says Josh Miller, who cofounded Branch.
PS: After writing this I came on a lovely cartoon in the New Yorker. It shows Moses reading out the Tablets to the assembled Israelites. At the back, a chap has put up his hand. “Does it have a section at the bottom for comments?” he asks.
Employee #30 leaves the stage
Astute Wired comment on Steve Ballmer’s departure (announcement of which increased the value of his Microsoft stock by three quarters of a billion dollars btw):
The 21st century doesn’t look good for the tech giants of the ’80s and ’90s. HP and Dell have lost much of their mojo to more nimble operations in Asia that are now building vast swathes of the hardware that drives the web’s most popular services. Oracle is struggling in the face not only of those hardware upstarts, but also a whole new breed of software makers and web companies offering tools that suit the modern internet in ways Larry Ellison’s aging software never could. And then’s there’s Ballmer and Microsoft, who had even more to lose — and lost it.
In some ways, it’s hard to blame Ballmer. Like HP and Dell and Oracle, Microsoft suffers from the innovator’s dilemma. It built such a successful business on the back of Windows — covering not only the desktop and laptops PCs we all used, but also the computer servers and other hardware that drove the modern corporation — it was difficult for the company to change course without undercutting its own bottom line. And the rise of open source software has hit the company right at the heart of its operation.
It’s notable that perhaps the biggest success of Ballmer’s time at the head of Microsoft, the Xbox video game console, wasn’t build on top of Windows, allowing the console to grow and morph on its own, without having to align itself with the Windows monolith.
Coffee morning, Provence
Getting the picture
A dedicated photographer in Cluny.
The virtues (and otherwise) of anonymity
I’m writing something about online anonymity and came across this intriguing talk by the founder of 4Chan.
The ultimate Web service
Sometimes, irony provides some consolation. The image is only a static jpeg, so click here for the full effect.
Why are so many British journalists so cowed by spooks?
Interesting to read this — in a German magazine.
It’s astonishing to see how many Britons blindly and uncritically trust the work of their intelligence service. Some still see the GCHQ as a club of amiable gentlemen in shabby tweed jackets who cracked the Nazis’ Enigma coding machine in World War II. The majority of people instinctively rally round their government on key issues of defense policy, sovereignty and home rule — even though the threat to the “national security” of the United Kingdom emanating from Edward Snowden is nothing more than an allegation at the moment. Those in power in Westminster have become used to journalists deferring to national interests when it comes to intelligence issues.
The spies expect preemptive subservience and discretion from the country’s press, and they often get what they want. There is no other explanation for the matter-of-factness with which government officials and GCHQ employees contacted Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger to demand the surrender or destruction of hard drives. What is surprising is the self-assurance that led the powerful to believe that none of this would ever come to light. According to the newspaper, after the hard drives had been destroyed in the Guardian’s basement, an intelligence agent joked: “We can call off the black helicopters.”
Those words reflect the government’s need for chummy proximity. Journalists must avoid such attempts at ingratiation from the powerful, even if it means that they are occasionally denied information and exclusive stories from intelligence sources.
Yep. It’s all part of British elites’ inability to get rid of Imperial afterglow. And it’s also why so many journalists are hostile to people like Glenn Greenwald and Wikileaks. They view them as uncredentialled interlopers on their precious professional turf.
Undermining democracy in order to save it
Members of my (baby-boomer) generation will remember the grotesque logic sometimes used by the United States in the Vietnam war when US and South Vietnamese troops declared that they had “to burn villages in order to save them” from the Viet Cong. There’s an element of that kind of logic in the wilder justifications for comprehensive surveillance we’ve laboured under ever since 9/11: we have to undermine democracy in order to save it. In that context, Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute has a very informative blog post on “Lawful Interception Capability Requirements” which concludes with this observation:
The European Court of Human Rights has not previously shied away from dealing with intelligence issues, commenting in Leander v Sweden on ‘the risk that a system of secret surveillance for the protection of national security poses of undermining or even destroying democracy on the ground of defending it’ [Application no. 9248/81]. It is not inconceivable that the UK’s sweeping Internet surveillance activities will be found, as the Court did in S. and Marper with the UK’s National DNA Database, to ‘constitute… a disproportionate interference’ with privacy that ‘cannot be regarded as necessary in a democratic society’.
Democracy as a ‘game’
The big question, to my mind, is whether the kind of comprehensive surveillance deemed essential by the national security state is compatible with democracy.
The answer I’m heading towards is “No”.
Jay Rosen nudged me further along this path last night with a wonderful post on “Conspiracy to Commit Journalism” which highlights what’s at stake now. “The battle”, Jay writes,
is not a simple matter of the state vs. civilians. It’s not government vs. the press, either. It’s the surveillance-over-everything forces within governments (plus the politicians and journalists who identify with them) vs. everyone who opposes their overreach: investigative journalists and sources, especially, but also couriers (like David Miranda), cryptographers and technologists, free speech lawyers, funders, brave advertisers, online activists, sympathetic actors inside a given government, civil society groups like Amnesty International, bloggers to amplify the signal and, of course, readers. Lots of readers, the noisy kind, who share and help distribute the work.
Which brings me back to Alan Rusbridger’s chilling account of what led, in the end, to the pointless destruction, under the supervision of British spooks, of a MacBook in the basement of the Guardian newspaper. In the course of his account, Rusbridger writes this:
A little over two months ago I was contacted by a very senior government official claiming to represent the views of the prime minister. There followed two meetings in which he demanded the return or destruction of all the material we were working on. The tone was steely, if cordial, but there was an implicit threat that others within government and Whitehall favoured a far more draconian approach.
The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the centre of government telling me: “You’ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.” There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.”
Rosen translates this thus:
That’s the government telling the editor of a national newspaper: Time’s up, no more of that journalism stuff! We’ll decide when there’s been enough debate. Stop now or we’ll make you stop.
(Rusbridger’s response: We will continue our careful reporting of the Snowden material. “We just won’t do it from London.”)
When I first read the Rusbridger article, with its coded references to “a very senior government official” and “the centre of government” I assumed that his interlocutors were spooks in the Cabinet Office, the standard-issue hard men who see rendition and waterboarding either as necessary evils or as tools of their trade. These are people who see journalism and public debate as a pain in the ass, something that they have to put up with while they get on with the real work of protecting (running?) the State. The sentiments are chilling, of course, but only to expected from people like that. My journalistic colleagues who reported the Troubles in Northern Ireland often knew British security officials like that.
The tone of the reported conversations is, for me, the key factor. What it suggests is a worldview which says that free media, whistleblowing, the exposure of questionable and/or illegal behaviour by government, and public debate about same are, somehow, frivolous activities. Just look at the words used: “You’ve had your fun“. And: “You’ve had your debate. There’s no need to write any more.” [Emphasis added.]
But, as I said, this kind of Weltanschauung is only to be expected from certain classes of spook. This morning, however, we learned something new. A report in the Independent reveals that
David Cameron instructed the Cabinet Secretary Sir Jeremy Heywood to contact The Guardian to spell out the serious consequences that could follow if it failed to hand over classified material received from Edward Snowden, it can be revealed.
Senior Whitehall sources confirmed to The Independent the Prime Minister’s central role in trying to limit revelations about UK and US intelligence operations contained in information the whistleblower received from the National Security Agency.
So here’s my question.
Were any of the phrases quoted by Rusbridger used by the Cabinet Secretary? He is the most senior civil servant in the United Kingdom, who acts as the senior policy adviser to the Prime Minister and Cabinet and is the Secretary to the Cabinet, and is responsible to all Ministers for the running of the government. Is this really how the most powerful mandarin in the government thinks about the role and responsibilities of the media — and, given that free media are essential for democracy, about democracy itself? Does the Cabinet Secretary, in other words, see all this as a kind of game in which journalists have “fun” exposing the dirty linen of security services and embarrassing those in charge of the United States’s overseas security franchise?