Do Real Names Lead to Civility?
It has long been thought that using real names in Internet comments increases the civility of the comments. Here is a large-scale study purporting to demonstrate that this is true.
Anonymity and Online Commenting: The Broken Windows Effect and the End of Drive-by Commenting
The abstract:
In this study we ask how regulations about commenter identity affect the quantity and quality of discussion on commenting fora. In December 2013, the Huffington Post changed the rules for its comment forums to require participants to authenticate their accounts through Facebook. This enabled a large-scale ‘before and after’ analysis. We collected over 42m comments on 55,000 HuffPo articles published in the period January 2013 to June 2014 and analysed them to determine how changes in identity disclosure impacted on discussions in the publication’s comment pages.
We first report our main results on the quantity of online commenting, where we find both a reduction and a shift in its distribution from politicised to blander topics. We then discuss the quality of discussion. Here we focus on the subset of 18.9m commenters who were active both before and after the change, in order to disentangle the effects of the worst offenders withdrawing and the remaining commenters modifying their tone. We find a ‘broken windows’ effect, whereby comment quality improves even when we exclude interaction with trolls and spammers.
Does this finding justify the increasing number of websites that require commenters to sign in via social media identities?
Presumably civility is not the only value. Free speech, particularly when the speaker (writer) may suffer serious consequences from his/her ideas, may require anonymity.
Anonymity in speech is constitutionally protected in the US. Is it in Canada, or should it be?
[h/t Steven Clift’s democracy online news service.]
What a thought-provoking post and raises many questions, at least in my mind. For instance, the statement “[f]ree speech, particularly when the speaker (writer) may suffer serious consequences from his/her ideas, may require anonymity” seems ironic in a democracy — one might ask, well what about personal responsibility? After all, “with great power comes great responsibility.” At the same time you point out that “[a]nonymity in speech is constitutionally protected in the U.S.” could this be why the NSA finds it necessary for their surveillance methods and procedures? Would such surveillance be necessary if anonymity in speech wasn’t protected? And finally, does Canada “need” such a constitutional protection?
I find statements like “anonymity in speech is constitutionally protected in the U.S.” to be unhelpful. There are many instances where an anonymous speaker’s identity is required to be revealed in the United States, both within private actions as well as criminal proceedings.
Generally, in Canada, the use of the right of privacy to shield anonymous speakers in third-party lawsuits especially, has been on the rise. CIPPIC has a good, very brief summary.
Funnily enough the best online communities all allow users to post under creative aliases.
Verna,
The consequences don’t have to flow from the state as implied in your comments. They are more likely to flow from one’s family, community, or employer. There are times in living memory where espousing a belief in equal rights for racial minorities (and more recently homosexuals) could get a person disowned, ostracised, or fired. Some were brave and faced the consequences of their beliefs, others provided additional evidence and in support for those causes through anonymous speech and semi-anonymous action.
Avoiding consequences,
Thanks for your comments. I agree that anonymous speech can be a tool to provide protection for those who would face dire or dangerous consequences for their stance with regard to certain issues or causes. In my earlier comment what I had been thinking about basically was the abuse factor in terms of personal responsibility. That is, using anonymous speech protection for the use of either inciting violence or promoting hate while using the “constitutionally protected” anonymity to avoid the consequences and not having to be held responsible or accountable for what ensues. The argument is often made that free speech on its own allows for hate speech – although in some jurisdictions including Canada there are limitations, but with the addition of anonymity this just seems so much more dangerous. It appears this is the dilemma facing the U.S. in this Internet age where information can be rapidly and widely disseminated — a different world than when their constitution first came into being of course others might argue otherwise. Anonymous speech should be protected but with limitations. Should this be a constitutional protection quite frankly I’m not sure or does the Charter and other legislation already suffice to provide protection as needed?
The need (desire?) for anonymity in an online context has as much to do with the ‘memory’ of the internet and the potential for consequences years later. An argument for a position that today is an acceptable disagreement, a few years from now can be interpreted drastically differently – and that comment can haunt someone, as do indiscreet pictures on social media by immature youth.
Managing the balance is difficult, but has a model in internet forums. As a previous commenter said, however, some of the best online forums allow for creative handles – backed up by real registrations, allowing for consequence if necessary by the moderator/ owner of the system, but allowing frank, anonomized discussuion in the meantime.