“[T]oday, our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office,” Sulzberger said in the memo. "We are dramatically expanding our commenting platform. Currently, we open only 10 percent of our articles to reader comments. Soon, we will open up most of our articles to reader comments. This expansion, made possible by a collaboration with Google, marks a sea change in our ability to serve our readers, to hear from them, and to respond to them.”
The trend is not in this direction.
The experience with page-story comment moderation at News24 reminds Bevan Lakay,
community editor, of a time that was particularly hard. The volume of
comments was enormous and hate speech in particular was prevalent. To
make moderation easier and more efficient for journalists, the media had
an automatic filter in place. Moderators would choose the words for the
filter to watch out for and ban. However, it did not always work. He
says:
“These guys were clever and quite meticulous. We banned one [offensive] word and the next day it would be a version of a different word. It was hard to keep up with it.”There were several journalists in charge of moderation but the budget was still limited. Even though users had to comment through their Facebook profiles, it would not discourage them from posting hateful comments and some would slip through the careful monitoring of journalists.
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