Anonymity and Online Commenting: The Broken Windows Effect and the End of Drive-by Commenting

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.

[1]  Todd R. Davies,et al.  Online Deliberation Design: Choices, Criteria, and Evidence , 2011, ArXiv.

[2]  A AndersonAshley,et al.  The "Nasty Effect , 2014 .

[3]  G. Michael Weiksner,et al.  Democracy in motion : evaluating the practice and impact of deliberative civic engagement , 2012 .

[4]  Jennifer Stromer-Galley.  Measuring Deliberation’s Content: A Coding Scheme , 2007, Regular Issue.

[5]  Patrick Weber,et al.  Discussions in the comments section: Factors influencing participation and interactivity in online newspapers’ reader comments , 2014, New Media Soc..

[6]  Edith Manosevitch,et al.  Reader Comments to Online Opinion Journalism: A Space of Public Deliberation , 2009 .

[7]  P. Resnick,et al.  Building Successful Online Communities: Evidence-Based Social Design , 2012 .

[8]  Natilene Bowker,et al.  Dicing with Deception: People with Disabilities' Strategies for Managing Safety and Identity Online , 2006, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[9]  Lawrence Pratchett,et al.  e-Citizenship: Reconstructing the public online , 2009 .

[10]  Eun-Ju Lee,et al.  What Do Others’ Reactions to News on Internet Portal Sites Tell Us? Effects of Presentation Format and Readers’ Need for Cognition on Reality Perception , 2010, Commun. Res..

[11]  L. Connors,et al.  The Washington Post , 2003 .

[12]  John Suler,et al.  The Online Disinhibition Effect , 2004, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[13]  L. Laineste.  FUNNY OR AGGRESSIVE? FAILED HUMOUR IN INTERNET COMMENTS , 2013 .

[14]  A. Acquisti,et al.  The More Social Cues, The Less Trolling? An Empirical Study of Online Commenting Behavior , 2013 .

[15]  John Naughton,et al.  Anonymity and Online Commenting: An Empirical Study , 2015 .

[16]  J. Wilson,et al.  BROKEN WINDOWS: THE POLICE AND NEIGHBOURHOOD SAFETY , 1982 .

[17]  M. Steenbergen,et al.  Deliberative Politics in Action: Analyzing Parliamentary Discourse , 2005 .

[18]  Ji-Young Kim,et al.  The impact of Internet use patterns on political engagement: A focus on online deliberation and virtual social capital , 2006, Inf. Polity.

[19]  Helen Yannakoudakis,et al.  A New Dataset and Method for Automatically Grading ESOL Texts , 2011, ACL.

[20]  R. Spears,et al.  Knowing Me, Knowing You: Anonymity Effects on Social Identity Processes within Groups , 2001 .

[21]  Christopher D. Manning,et al.  Incorporating Non-local Information into Information Extraction Systems by Gibbs Sampling , 2005, ACL.

[22]  Stephen Woolworth,et al.  “Destroy the scum, and then neuter their families:” the web forum as a vehicle for community discourse? , 2004 .

[23]  E. Friedman,et al.  The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms , 2001 .

[24]  Dominique Brossard,et al.  The "Nasty Effect: " Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies , 2014, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[25]  Vhe Corp.  syrian electronic army , 2013 .