UO journalism professor Peter Laufer has an Op-Ed opposing anonymous comments in the RG, here:
Anonymous online commenting irresponsible
What is the rationale — other than a lust for website clicks — when otherwise responsible newspaper publishers allow anonymous commentary to pollute news stories?
Professor Laufer is very good on the costs of anonymity, but he ignores the benefits. Fortunately the Op-Ed now has over 100 comments in response, some anonymous and some not. As might be expected, they combine to provide a vigorous defense of anonymity, which I urge people to read and won’t reiterate here.
I spend a lot of time tending the comments on this blog. My goal is to give everyone a place to engage in civil debate about things that matter at UO. I think this has been particularly important during crises such as the Lariviere firing, the basketball rape allegations and response, the GTFF strike, and the Board efforts to restrict faculty governance.
My definition of civil debate is pretty broad, and includes the sort of blunt speech that was used by people like Tom Paine (who published Common Sense anonymously) and even ad hominem attacks if backed by some evidence, such as “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” (T. Jefferson et al., 1776).
Of course not all commentary rises to the standard that was adopted by the Continental Congress after careful editing. At first I didn’t screen comments at all, then I tried the “one cuss word policy”, which people unfortunately interpreted as a min instead of a max. I tried using disqus.com, which essentially requires people to use a real name or a consistent pseudonym, and lets people see all comments posted under that name. It was clunky and people stopped commenting.
At the moment I am deleting more comments than ever – maybe 2 a day on average. While I don’t think I’ve ever deleted a signed comment, I delete many anonymous comments of the “what did you expect from those losers in JH” type. Same with attacks on me. If you want to see that posted make it funnier or more informative. I also delete comments if they are repetitive and trollish.
One commenter on another post provides two good reasons for using a pseudonym:
Pollyanna
Have to agree with SaveUofO on this one. We have seen plenty of employment-related retaliation at this institution, from rigged P and T evaluations to unconscionable firings.
That said, everyone can adopt a screen name, as UOM always urges, both preserving anonymity and allowing readers to build up an impression over time of the rationality and position of the commenter behind that screen name–like Hen, Dog, Just Different, Old Man, Awesome0, Honest Uncle Bernie…
Last, I turned off the thumbs up / down feature a while ago, because people were spoofing it. Which is just sad. I’ve turned it back on for now.
Anonymous commenting and pamphleteering have a long and distinguished history — look at the American revolutionary period — the Federalist Papers were signed by one “Publius.”
Galileo wrote anonymously on occasion, and his record is not too shabby.
Newton solved the two problems of Bernoulli’s challenge anonymously — giving rise to Bernoulli’s famous dictum that “tanquam ex ungue leonem” (we recognize the lion by his claw), which itself justifies the anonymity.
At a less distinguished level, I have posted many things here that I would prefer to keep anonymous.
My nephews enjoy my pseudonym, too.
I’d give you the comment of the week coffee cup for that Bernoulli quote, but my previous efforts to use that ploy to uncover your true identity have come to naught.
If honest uncle Bernies true identity is known, would that diminish or enhance his commentary?
Honest Uncle Bernie is right, anonymous pamphleteering has an illustrious history — deeper even than the Federalist Papers. The Protestant Reformation was accompanied by a tidal wave of single-leaf broadsides, containing scandalous imagery that mocked the pope, sometimes accompanied by doggerel penned by Luther himself. And during the English Civil War, royalists and parliamentarians assailed each other in newsweeklies that adopted a fictive, anonymous persona — Mercurius Aulicus on the royalist side, Mercurius Civicus on the parliamentarian side. Many historians have argued that the public battles between Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Civicus placed political disputation on display in a manner that contributed vitally to the formation of democratic culture in Britain.
Thanks. I’m now thinking of requiring that all comments be in Latin.
Obscuram vocem in deserto
Does “anonymous commentary pollute news stories”? It’s certainly arguable. I tend to say it’s not pollution, but revealing.
Two things about this issue as it relates to the RG and UOM:
1. The RG offered online reading and attendant comments for years before it went to pay-per-view, non-moderated comments. This not only screened out silly spamming and anonymous trolling but turned away commentary because people had to pay. A few years have passed and people still wonder at the level of commenting as though, somehow magically, every commenter “got manners” when they paid to blog. The RG is totally remiss, in my opinion, to offer un-moderated comments. Prof. Laufer should take on Oregon Live blogs and just HOPE he gets out with his life!
2. UOM is obviously not pay-per-view, and it’s moderated with some high expectation for appropriate comments. I’d say an average of 2 deletes a day is an astounding success, and a credit to followers here that, anonymous or not, we are minding our manners pretty well.
Online anonymity has plenty of problems, but what I see time and again is that virtually all of the people who are totally sure everyone should use their real names in these spaces are people who either would never criticize folks with power, or are people who HAVE power. Those of us who would like to make perfectly legitimate points and who also are vulnerable (at work, at home, socially, financially, physically, whatever) are mostly pretty damn clear on why the ability to manage one’s own identity and risk is critical to actually holding a conversation that is something other than a parade of yeses to whatever entity holds power. It’s not that we are hiding due to shame or (as is sometimes supposed) because we can’t back our opinions with recognized credentials; it’s that we are responsibly managing our own risk. This concept isn’t complicated.
The other related thing I see is that even folks who agree with the concept of people adopting a handle get cranky when they have more than one. I have at least four (wait, no, and this one. five) distinct online personae. They are distinct because I don’t need folks in a conversation about a political topic following me to a space where we are talking about crafting hobbies. Each one is genuinely me, but they are discrete so that I can choose when and where to tell certain people with whom I share (for example) my knitting patterns about my political activity or my church affiliation or whatever, and not allow any one handle to hold so much data that it’s easy to match it to me, my legal identity, without my intent to do so. This is also not complicated, but people who never experience vulnerability get super fretful about it. It’s a little tiresome, and I wish they would use the imaginations I expect they were born with to see if they can’t work out why this is a thing.
I call BS on Bill’s assertion that he only deleted comments that are offensive and troll-like. Many of my comments that were critical of UOM or other members of the fan club were never posted. If you want to wrap yourself in the 1st Amendment then you don’t get to decide who posts and who does not. Quite frankly, you are only a small step below JH when it comes to transparency. Talk the talk? then walk the walk.
Another supporter (surprise) for anonymity here. Some of the people decrying online anonymity seem to be sincerely trying to work out an ethical way to be online. But a lot of them seem to be of the same stripe as those who excuse NSA surveillance or police brutality by saying “if you haven’t done anything wrong you’ve got nothing to worry about.” I.e. they imagine that the world (the country, the state, the university) is a perfectly just place where an honest statement of unpopular or inconvenient opinion would never get one punished.
Yeah, I’d like to live in that world. But since I don’t, I post pseudonymously.