When news sites invest in staff to vanquish the trolls whose offensive comments chase away thoughtful readers, it pays off in cleaner comment threads and stronger community. And that can pay off in a stronger Web presence. 

“Some editors take the view that this whole comment thing is just a time suck. It can be,” said Jack Lail, Director of Digital for the Knoxville (TN.) News Sentinel. “But our editor does not take that view.”

“Newspapers thought [comments] were free content and weren’t taking into account the fact that there are costs to managing comments,” said Lail, who develops and executes digital strategies and websites for the Sentinel, an E.W. Scripps newspaper and www.knoxnews.com. “It easily takes a person and maybe more. That’s a precious thing in a newsroom,” Lail said.

Keeping the comments clean

In the Sentinel’s case they’ve developed a system that keeps the comments clean, even with anonymous users. 

During the recent gun control debate, the Sentinel’s site was hammered with hundreds of comments expressing a spectrum of opinions, Lail said.  The editors kept out of the specifics related to the weapons because it's hard to know all the details. One error can start a flame war.

“We used our normal management system except we knew this was a contentious issue. It was toward the weekend so we kept a very close watch on those stories,” Lail said. “If they got out of hand we just shut down the comment threads.”

If a thread is contentious, the editors will shut it down at around 250 comments. But unfortunately, often the trolls will just move to another story, continuiing the cycle of contentuiousness and editorial containment.

Other newsrooms might soon be following the Sentinel's example.  

New research on how trolls polarize

New scientific research indicates the trolls and the negativity might be doing more than harming a news' sites analytics; they might actually be interfering with readers' perceptions of important issues as this comprehensive article from Scientific American points out. New research from the Journal of Computer-mediated Technology found that "exposure to uncivil blog comments can polarize risk perceptions." In other words, nasty, nonsensical or uncivil comments color our perception of what the article discusses and polarize our viewpoints before we even read it.     

The first decision a news organization has to make is whether or not to allow anonymous comments. Increasingly, publishers are saying "No."

Anonymity can make the already difficult task of moderation even more difficult, which is why sites like the Sentinel will soon be tying the ability to comment to a paid subscription, i.e. a credit card. 

That’s the way it works at The WELL, which was founded in 1985 by Steward Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog. It’s one of the oldest moderated online forums and its members are not anonymous. 

“Anonymity can help people be better or worse,” said Gail Williams from The WELL, who has been moderating online communities since 1991.  “It can help people step out of their daily identity and they could be a secret superhero wonderful person or they can step out and be as bad as they can be.”

“It can be a kind of game. One of the games to play is ‘Oh, I will be the villain. That’s kind of fun.’  That’s one of the things that goes on for people,” she said. “That’s one of the reasons it helps to tie an online identity to a known quantity.” 

In the Sentinel's upcoming policy, subscribers will be allowed screen names, but once banned, it will be harder for them to come back because their identity will be connected to an ID.   

The community meeting in your living room

Think of a comment thread on an article as a community meeting in your living room. It’s not necessarily a gathering of like-minded individuals, but it is a gathering that you have called together. General civility and politeness might exist as long as you are in the room but if you step out for an hour and the factions start going after each other, mayhem can result.

That's why it's important that you, the newsroom, set the tone.  

“You can really improve content from readers if you let them know that they are stepping into something special,” Williams said. 

At the Sentinel, they’ve been setting the tone by using a manual moderation system for the past five years.

The Sentinel’s process for managing its comments is rigorous. The editors know almost instinctively which articles will bring out the trolls – any politically charged issue, such as immigration, gay issues or serious crime stories.

The paper depends on readers to flag offensive comments. All the top editors weigh in with the staff moderator daily on comment watch and on weekends.  When readers flag a comment multiple times as offensive it goes into a comment mailbox and is auto redacted. The paper keeps an eye on rooky users, holding their comments until they can be approved. 

It’s a manual, time intensive process.

They also have a classification for users who are causing trouble, called “sketchy” users. “They can post — their posts go up — but that generates an email to us,” Lail said. “We don’t want to keep a whole bunch of people on sketchy.”

The editors take the full range of action against users who abuse commenting privileges. They’ll remove the user’s  comments; ban the user; and make all the user’s comments disappear.

Lail said the same people come to the site every day.

“Our audience is close to talk radio, except on talk radio the callers cannot yell at each other, “ he said. “They get to know each other by their screen name. They are more aware of the multiple identities than we are,” he said. “They are reading more closely everything that they are writing. “ 

“We shut them down when it’s become a mud contest between three or four people. And they won’t stop. We let people criticize the Sentinel heavily,” Lail said. “I’ve been called just about everything. It’s when they start attacking other people and calling them names” the editors step in.

Sometimes bringing the reporter into the thread to discuss the story can defuse some of the emotion. 

“We probably don’t do that enough,” Lail said.

Despite the emotional cost, it’s important to keep the moderation going, Lail said. “A lot of us are thinking about the survival of newspapers. If we are no longer the centers of community conversation, then that’s a dangerous thing.“

Jack Lail's personal site has an excellent set of links to articles he’s curated on comment moderation. The WELL’s community guidelines are useful for understanding their longstanding, time-tested process of community building. 

This is first of two parts.  Next post, moderation tools, comment platforms and the audience as blogger.

It’s your living room… so you set the tone

Some tactics for encouraging civil disagreement

1. Channel the conversation – Model the kind of comments you’d like by engaging with users who make thoughtful contributions to the conversation.
2. Encourage self moderation among community leaders – this could be as simple as the Knoxville Sentinel’s approach – which is to count on the community to flag inappropriate comments  or as complex as appointing official ambassadors.
3. Set clear boundaries. Name calling is not allowed. Disagreement is.
4. Immediately remove vitriol, name calling and rancorous attacks on community members or story subjects. This is YOUR living room and you set the tone.
5. If comments about a story indicate disagreement with its angle or content, reframe the angry statement as a question and see if you can bring the emotion down a notch to get to the heart of the disagreement. Engage in a conversation to understand the difference in opinion.
6. Intervene by bringing in the editor or reporter when readers are angry at the content of the article itself.
7. If anger against the reporter continues unabated, invite the angry poster to email or telephone to address the issue.

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