One Way of ‘Turning the Page on Anonymity’

Thanks to the diligent efforts of Dr. Estés, comments here at The Moderate Voice are generally civil and responsible.

This is not always the case at other web sites.

One of those sites has been the Huffington Post where I also post and where one could come across some vile, vicious, crude and offensive comments, despite their comments moderating.

One contributing factor to such a phenomenon, in my opinion, is the ability to comment anonymously — there may be other reasons.

Recently, I have been pleasantly surprised to see those kinds of comments drastically diminish or virtually disappear at the HuffPost. Last week I noticed that a “not-so-pleasant comment” had been removed from one of my posts.

Today, I discovered that about a month ago Arianna Huffington had implemented some measures to reduce the number of such comments:

Now, as Arianna Huffington announced earlier this year, we are going a step further to evolve our platform — which has always been about community and engagement — to meet the needs of the grown-up Internet. On December 10, after weeks of fine-tuning our commenting technology and platform, we are pulling the switch in a way that will keep the best parts about commenting on HuffPost while bringing more civility and accountability to the experience.

The way the HuffPost is doing this is by either linking one’s comments to a verified Facebook account or, if one does not want to link one’s Huffington Post account to Facebook,

… you can still log in to your account and fan and fave other users and their comments. And if, for whatever reason, you fear posting a comment under your name — if you are a whistleblower, or fear harassment, or any other reason — you can apply for the right to comment anonymously by filling out this form.