At the Online News Association meeting in DC over the weekend, one of the early sessions, hosted by Alicia Shepard of NPR, was “No Comment: Rethinking Online Commentary.”
No surprise—news sites everywhere are grappling with the climate of vicious comments on their stories. A few papers, like the Portland (Maine) Press Herald, have shut down comments altogether. NPR’s community discussion rules are here. HuffPo uses a badge system to give more weight to readers who flag comments that end up getting deleted by the site.
In short, there are lots of creative options for moderating online comments.
Here are a few tweets from the session:
You’ve certainly hit a nerve with this topic!
Fascinating to see your talent for analysis cast light on the debate about blog comments. Thanks for deepening the conversation in the universe of internet discourse!