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 ...
Comment one: BINGO!
> It can be safely said that Kevin Wallsten and Melinda Tarsi are mouth breathing, knuckle dragging morons using up precious air, and should have been aborted in the womb.
Now, now. Their souls are precious to G-d, even if we’re not entirely sure why.
What first amendment?
>>> “How can we punish dissent if we don’t know who you are?”
Ayup.
And exactly as with the content of any ‘professionally written article,’ readers of commentary are to use their own judgment with regard to trustworthiness. How arrogant of the publication to assume its readership is too mentally stunted to make a wise judgment call. Or is it that the journalist cannot withstand critique?
All of the above.
C-O-N-T-I-T-U-T-I-O-N, can the media spell it with me?
Are you sure on that spelling? :)
If a state wishes to mandate that commmenters shall not be anonymous, then let that state be put out of its misery, through however much force and violence may be required!
CNN pulled their comments sections over the weekend. I thought it was because of the heavy volume of the Ferguson riots situation, but this makes sense, now.
It was before my coffee.
.....Unless it is the alternate media.
Not really.
Good news! Americans are ARMED to the teeth, so I do not think so!
Use a nic.
Plus it is possible for someone to be tracked down via the internet?
Let’s end the secret ballot too and unsigned editorials.
The consolidated media elites have a singular ideology.....expand their own power. They push issues like eliminating the concept of privacy, gun control, political correctness, cultural fragmentation of America and expand marketing profits through Facebook and other marketing tools. Facebook officials have stated that anonymity is not good.
This movement is about stealing liberty from Americans at the benefit of the media elites. Allowing the media conglomerates to exist enables them to speak with a common forked tongue.
The left is making angry blowback all the more a reality down the road.
What reason would anyone in their right mind have for trusting the news media? Give me one! LOL
Bwaa ha ha!
LA Times photoshopping composite "war" images, CBS News and AP News running forged National Guard memos near the eve of a presidential election, The Boston Globe running sex website photos as "evidence" of US GIs raping women in Iraq...
THESE damage trust in the DNCMedia.
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