Posted on 08/19/2014 7:44:13 AM PDT by Second Amendment First
Anonymous comments, even positive ones, damage trust in the news media.
Despite their ubiquity on news sites around the Internet, a movement against anonymous comments sections has slowly gathered steam over the past few years. The first call to action came in 2010 when the American Journalism Review said, “It is time for news sites to stop allowing anonymous online comments.” Since that bold declaration, a wide variety of media outlets, including ESPN, the Huffington Post, Popular Science, Sporting News and USA Today have either banned anonymous posts on their sites or eliminated comments sections altogether.
In August 2013, the New York state legislature even debated an ambitious bill that would have required all Web site administrators to pull down anonymous comments from “social networks, blogs forums, message boards or any other discussion site where people can hold conversations in the form of posted messages.”
This “no anonymity” movement is motivated by two assumptions. First, when Internet users are allowed to post their thoughts anonymously, online discussions inevitably deteriorate into uncivil flame wars. The idea that anonymity can breed negativity is, of course, not new. Indeed, Godwin’s Law, which states that as anonymous “discussions grow longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1” was first articulated in 1990.
More recent assessments of anonymous comments sections have not been more complimentary. In 2010, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Leonard Pitts argued that anonymous comments sections “have become havens for a level of crudity, bigotry, meanness, factual inaccuracy and plain nastiness that shocks the tattered remnants of our propriety.”
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
>> Anonymous comments, even positive ones, damage trust in the news media.
The MSM is the Country’s greatest threat.
What's you real name?? I demand to know who said that! Not that I'd bring down the wrath of a Fascist and corrupt and complicit government on you or anything like that.
The MSM’s been singing this song since the start of the internet... What they want is to shut down the voices of everyday people.
If the Washington Post wants ‘trust’ they can start by NOT printing letters from paid DNC professionals... letters generated in war rooms. If they have doubts how that’s done, they can ask George Stephonopolis... or anyone else who’s run a war room for Democrats.
The part about things devolving into “Hitler and Nazis” was especially amusing.
Hey, if the Nazi and Hitler label fits, it needs to be used without a restrictor plate.
O’Bummer...Hitleresque (made up word)
Lois Mussolini Lerner....total Nazi.
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