In all the years that I’ve been blogging, I can count the number of non-spam comments that I’ve deleted on one hand. In all cases they have been egregious trolls, and in all cases they have been by a person or persons who have used fake names and email addresses. Not all anonymous posting is motivated out of spite, of course. Whistle blowing is on the other end of this spectrum. Most often, at least in the context of this blog, the motivations of anonymous posters fall in the gray area in between those two ends of the spectrum. It’s usually somebody who wants to make a critical comment but fears some sort of negative response. I can appreciate that concern. Sometimes its legitimate. Sometimes it’s just cowardly. And sometimes it’s a bit of both.
This puts me in a bit of a dilemma. I want to encourage people to make honest, useful comments without fear. On the other hand, I also want to encourage—in fact, I want to insist—that people take responsibility for the statements that they make here on my blog.
So I’ve come up with a new policy. From now on,1 if I see a comment that I suspect is being made under a pseudonym, and it is not immediately obvious to me why the commenter has a legitimate and compelling reason to remain anonymous, then I will send an email to the address provided by that person requesting an explanation. If the person responds with even a halfway reasonable explanation, then I’ll let the comment stand. But if I don’t get a response, or if I discover that I’ve been given a fake email address, I will delete the comment immediately, regardless of the merits of the content. To reiterate: If you want to comment on e-Literate and you choose to conceal your identity from e-Literate readers, you must (a) make your identity known to me by giving me a real email address and (b) be prepared to convince me that you have a compelling reason to remain anonymous. The burden is on the anonymous (or, more accurately, the pseudonymous) commenters to convince me that I should let them wear masks when they are in my house and talking to my guests.
This isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s the best one I can come up with.
- I won’t apply this policy retroactively to comments that have been posted before now. [↩]
I have no idea of the specific context here, but I’m not unsympathetic to the general issue. And ultimately, it is *your* blog, so it’s your call to make. My perspective though is that preserving the right to anonymity trumps the discomfort it can cause. I’m not certain I’m personally ok with demanding people justify their need for it, but I do get that it is an attempt at compromise. Another approach would be to simply require something like OpenID to comment which is much more likely to be attached to a real identity. It is not foolproof, but by accepting any entry by default in your comment area, you do seem to be leaving the door wide open for pseudonymous comments. At the very least, perhaps amending the text on your comments template with such a policy statement would at least let people know your stance before they post.
I agree with your concern and lean toward being permissive. I don’t require a login of any type precisely because I want to keep the barriers to commenting low. This is an infrequent enough of a problem that I feel I can manage it case-by-case but frequent (and serious) enough of a problem that I feel I need a policy. But the bottom line is that if people are uncomfortable revealing their identity even to me, then they probably shouldn’t be making a public comment on my blog. They don’t have to live with their comment being attached to their name forever and ever, but I do.
I like the idea of embedding the policy in my comment template but, being completely inept at all this web development stuff, I have no idea how to do it.
If you are on your own server (or have access to edit your theme) look for your comment.php file. Search for text like
and then right before that (which is the big textarea block where comments go) you could place some text linking out to a comment blocking policy.
Cheers, Scott
Apparently the comment script stripped out the code I put. Anyways, it should be the only “textarea” on that script. Good luck.
Thanks! I’ll give it a try when I’m feeling brave.
Michael, this is an excellent discussion. I too have had very few situations where I needed to make a call on this. The policy I adopted (so far) is that I don’t insist on knowing the person’s identity. But I do insist the comment is particularly well-written, particularly on topic, particularly respectful, aware of both sides of the issue, shows clear understanding of the topic at hand, and is a useful contribution to the discussion. Comments that are purely critical, or attack a person, or seem like simple barely related flameage get the quick bit-bucket. If it is well written and may help the discussion or dialog, I let it stand. So my message to anonymous writers is that they better be good writers to get published. Oh and by the way, which we are talking, was it you who made those two comments on my blog a few weeks back 🙂 ?
I’m way too much of an exhibitionist to comment anonymously.
Hee hee – me too. And how can one increase their place in search results if you hide all traces of yourself!
Hi Michael – you might find the following discussion interesting – all about this issue and how it’s being handled by NYT and FB. Posted on a site called Social Media in Organizations on 12/21/10 by the site owner, Courtney Hunt: http://linkd.in/gJhRNF
BTW, this came from a LinkedIn group I belong to, so not sure if the link will work independently – hope so! Let me know if it doesn’t.
Thanks, Allison. The link did work, and the article is pretty consistent with my current thinking. I’m going to take Scott’s suggestion and figure out how to embed my policy someplace prominent.
Are you just trying to justify deleting the comments “Finn Q” made on the Duke post? Or is there something else I missed?
I haven’t deleted “Finn’s” comments. I haven’t deleted anyone’s comments yet; as the post notes, this is a policy going forward and is not retroactive.
Many thanks to Allison Wood for referring you and others to my post on this subject. I’m glad it was helpful to you, Michael. Please feel free to add a comment there linking folks back to this post, which provides a living example of the “moderator’s challenge.” Good luck!
Courtney Hunt
Founder, Social Media in Organizations (SMinOrgs) Community