The Guardian and Comments - April 2016

adding here my thread:
http://jothut.com/cgi-bin/junco.pl/replies/68594

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"In case you're new to the internet:"articles written by women attract more abuse/trolling than those written by men"" https://twitter.com/astrokatie/status/719852228320694272 - #media #comments - what's funny is that the media people who oppose comments on news sites also love twitter. #moronism
From: JR's : micro blog - Apr 12, 2016 - reply

16 replies
JR: women writers feel abuse from the trolls on twitter too. some media orgs ended their comments on their news sites because they believe that the real discussions occur on those great spaces of social media civility, such as twitter and facebook.
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: media person's tweet https://twitter.com/karenkho/status/719852876416344064 - "@mathewi I know you love and defend comments, but this really shows why they're horrible for women and POC." --- yet she uses twitter to broadcast her claim.
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: comments on media sites are not the problem. how the media orgs manage their comment systems is the problem. in my opinion, it's easier to create civil discussions on your own site than on social media. more barriers to entry are needed. it's not impossible. imagination is required.
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/04/the-guardians-web-we-want-series-will-analyze-abuse-on-the-papers-own-site/
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/08/the-guardian-wants-to-engage-with-readers-but-how-we-do-it-needs-to-evolve
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/11/the-guardian-view-on-online-abuse-building-the-web-we-want
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: http://mediagazer.com/160412/p7#a160412p7
- 2 hrs ago - # - reply

JR: "The Guardian, which receives more than 50,000 reader comments a day ..." - yowzer! i had no idea that the site received that money comments. the solutions for giant sites like The Guardian, NY Times, and WaPo will differ greatly from what might work for mid-sized metro daily like The Toledo Blade.
- 1 hr ago - # - reply

JR: quoting from the guardian stories now ...
- 7 mins ago - # - reply

JR: "The internet has a problem, and that problem is people." ---- Conversely, the internet offers a lot of good, and that good is people. Or better, replace "internet" with "world". The world has a problem, and that problem is people. The world has a lot of good, and that good is people.
- 6 mins ago - # - reply

JR: "Dramatic incidents of public harassment, abuse and threatening behaviour are never far from the news ..." -- that's not restricted to the internet only. violent behavior has existed in the world for thousands of years.
- 4 mins ago - # - reply

JR: "There is a widespread perception that these are problems that need to be solved, and many digital media sites - including Twitter, Facebook and many others - are actively looking for solutions." ----
- 4 mins ago - # - reply

JR: interesting. a lot of uncivil discussions occur on or via twitter and facebook, and yet some people are looking to those orgs for solutions. many media orgs failed to be innovative on how to manage comments with their custom solutions, therefore those orgs outsourced their discussions to Facebook.
- 2 mins ago - # - reply

JR: trading one cesspool for another is not a solution. custom solutions can work, in my opinion, if barriers are erected that deter the trolls and spammers. the users who want to create a true community won't mind the barriers. the media org must give such a system one to two years to grow.
- 57 secs ago - # - reply

JR: "For news organisations, the question is no longer whether or not we want to engage with our audience: no news organisation that wants to be relevant in the digital age would dream of retreating from social media, and engagement in many forms is vital to our survival."
- 0 secs ago - # - reply

In some places, news organisations are stepping away from comments, deciding that the costs outweigh the benefits, and turning to other modes of interaction instead - often away from their own platforms, in striking contrast to other industries which are eager to invite interaction that they can manage and own.

The Guardian is not making that retreat - but that means we do have to evolve and manage our comments deliberately. We are not like the 4chan message boards, where anyone can say almost anything without consequences. Just as Facebook, Twitter, Metafilter and many others provide spaces for different kinds of communities to gather, we want to create spaces on the Guardian for particular conversations and particular groups to speak - with each other and with us.

Glad that MetaFilter was mentioned. Too often when the topic of comments or user-contributed content is discussed, MetaFilter's barriers are not mentioned.

The issue of comments on news sites is often conflated with conversations about free speech - about the ability of individuals to speak their minds without fear of government censorship.

I've heard that argument often at Toledo Talk. Users have accused me of censorship and prohibiting free speech. But even 4chan has removed postings that violate the site's guidelines. Free speech does not exist at Toledo Talk nor at any of these other sites. Users have the freedom to start their own websites, and they can manage their sites anyway they want.

ToledoTalk.com posting guidelines :

ToledoTalk.com is NOT a free speech zone.

Some people think they should be allowed to post whatever they want on a message board that's owned and funded by someone else. And if these users are denied the ability to post whatever and however they want, then they believe the site owner is engaged in censorship. That's all wrong thinking.

I'll let other Toledo Talk users explain how it works.

photodan said in April 2005:

"jr has every right to make this site as closed or even as censored as he wants it to be. If he decided that the word, "it" was not allowed to be posted then that is his right. This is not free speech. We are only allowed to post here at jr's whim since he's the one paying for it. He owns the space we are scrawling upon."

psyche777 said in June 2005:

"There is no such thing as free speech on message boards -- they are controlled by those who own them. So unless you own your own? pretty much have to play by whatever rules exist."

When a user ignorantly plays the free speech card, then it's probably okay to ban that user.

Back to The Guardian story:

Moderation is not censorship, any more than editing is - it’s a careful process that aims to curate the best of the web and allow expert voices and thoughtful discussion to emerge.

When a person or an org funds the site, that org can manage the site however it wants.

We are going to be implementing policies and procedures to protect our staff from the impact of abuse and harassment online, as well as from the impact of repeatedly being exposed to traumatic images. We are also changing the process for new commenters, so that they see our community guidelines and are welcomed to the Guardian’s commenting community. On that point, we are reviewing those community standards to make them much clearer and simpler to understand, and to place a greater emphasis on respect.

We are also looking at how our moderation processes and practices work. We have already changed the structure of the moderation team to give them greater visibility and authority within the Guardian, and we are streamlining the process of reviewing moderation decisions for consistency and other factors. We’re examining our off-topic policy and will be moving to make its application more transparent.

More ...

Building a community is a difficult endeavour even under perfect conditions, and changing the way a community works once it has been established is even more difficult. Fostering constructive debate on topics that are often flashpoints for severe disagreement is harder still: it is easier to allow one side to drown out another, and for an echo chamber to form around those with the loudest and most persistent voices. Smaller communities are - for the most part - both easier to manage and calmer; one of the side-effects of the Guardian’s global reach is a global community below the line, which can come together positively or with great antagonism depending on the topic to hand.

Yep. The dynamics for The Guardian are vastly different than what exists for The Toledo Blade, which unfortunately uses Facebook's commenting system on its stories.

Since our change in strategy to reduce the number of threads open on contentious topics, there has not been a major reduction in the numbers of comments we receive - but we have seen some changes in tone. There are more diverse voices emerging in these threads, and while they are still divisive and divided conversations, there is (on the whole) more engagement with the issues, and less abuse. Of course, this is still a work in progress, and there is a great deal more to do.

Good move. Does every news story need to accept comments?

The Guardian's - The Web We Want - "How can we end online abuse, and have better conversations on the web?"

The Guardian should have added to "The Web We Want" the idea of faster, smaller, and simpler article pages.

We want a thinner web. We want a web that respects basic functionality that existed 20-plus years ago.

http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/apr/08/how-can-we-improve-the-guardian-comments-share-your-views

The Guardian website regularly receives more than 50,000 comments a day – sometimes over 70,000 – and we’d like to find out what you think about the conversations we’re hosting. If you’re a commenter on the Guardian, what inspires you to get involved below the line? What articles provoke great debate or just provoke? What makes for a good – or bad – commenting experience and how would you go about creating constructive and considerate discussion for all?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/11/facebook-twitter-google-urged-to-step-up-online-abuse-fightback

Facebook, Google and Twitter are working with women’s groups to challenge hate speech – but critics attack secrecy over scale of problem

But their attempts to foster a “counter-speech” movement to challenge the violent misogyny, racism, threats, intimidation and abuse that flood social media platforms have prompted some of the communities they are trying to empower to question whether they are ducking their own responsibilities.

What, no Ello issues?

What about Tumblr, Medium, and Snapchat?

Are the problems mainly associated with Facebook and Twitter because those are hugely popular discussion services?

Twitter, Google and Facebook refuse to publish information on how many agents they employ to investigate reports of abuse; the scale and type of reports they receive; or the level of satisfaction of complainants.

John Carr, a British government adviser on internet safety for children and young people, said: “There is a fundamental problem in this whole area and that is the complete lack of information about what is actually happening on these major platforms. These companies have become the 21st-century public utilities. It would be completely unacceptable for an electricity or water company or the police to say ‘we cannot give out that information’.”

“They need to be more open and straightforward about what the scale of the problem is, and their response to it. We do need more community engagement but we want to know what the companies themselves are doing and they are refusing to release that information.”

Research has consistently shown that women, in particular young women, experience the most severe forms of abuse, unwanted contact, sexual harassment, rape threats and stalking online. A study last month in Australia warned that the abuse of women online is at risk of becoming “an established norm in digital society”.

However, Nick Pickles, head of policy in the UK at Twitter, said hate speech and abuse were not something created by the internet, but existed within society. Twitter, he said, was striving to empower progressive counter narratives on its platform as a way of combating abuse.

“Tech companies cannot simply delete misogyny from society,” he said. “The idea that abusive speech or behaviour didn’t exist before the internet is simply false. Intolerance, in all its forms, is a deeply rooted societal problem.”

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/online-abuse-how-harrassment-revenge-pornography-different-countries-deal-with-it

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/how-we-analysed-70m-comments-guardian-website

We analysed 70m comments recorded between 4 January 1999 and 2 March 2016 (only 22,000 of these were recorded before 2006). We worked with these comments in a Postgres database running on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which is a clone of the Guardian’s production system.

Comments are typically only open for up to three days after an article has been published; once the thread is closed, comments are viewable but new comments can’t be added. We only included comments made on the Guardian’s website, not on Facebook or other social platforms.

Our list of authors contains the approximately 12,000 individuals who have written at least two articles for the Guardian, where we are only including articles that are viewable online (3,000 articles before 1998, 2m after). This data was obtained by running a SQL query on our Redshift datawarehouse, which contains the data in our Content API.

To classify our journalists by gender we first used this process, which allowed us to assign genders to 11,098 names and left 1,268 not coded. We then wrote a Perl script to pass the remaining names to this service. There were still a few names left unclassified, and we went through these manually. We stored these genders in a csv, and uploaded this to S3 in AWS.

To perform our analysis we had to join together three data sources: our Postgres comments database, our article information in our Redshift database and our csv of author genders in S3. Ideally this data would all be in one place, and our data technology team are working towards this by creating a data lake using Presto, but at the time of our analysis this was not the case.

We needed to find a tool that would let us query very large amounts of data from multiple sources. For some time we have been wanting to find a test project to try out Apache Spark, and decided that this seemed like a simple problem Spark should be good at solving. We wrote the code in Scala, and deployed it to an Elastic MapReduce (EMR) cluster on AWS. The code reads in the data from the various data sources, manipulates it and writes out the results to S3. Our source code is available here.

https://prestodb.io/

Presto is an open source distributed SQL query engine for running interactive analytic queries against data sources of all sizes ranging from gigabytes to petabytes.

Presto was designed and written from the ground up for interactive analytics and approaches the speed of commercial data warehouses while scaling to the size of organizations like Facebook.

Facebook uses Presto for interactive queries against several internal data stores, including their 300PB data warehouse. Over 1,000 Facebook employees use Presto daily to run more than 30,000 queries that in total scan over a petabyte each per day.

#programming #database

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-comments

Another way of looking at this, is that since around 2010 articles written by women consistently attracted a higher proportion of blocked comments than articles written by men.

Although the majority of our regular opinion writers are white men, we found that those who experienced the highest levels of abuse and dismissive trolling were not. The 10 regular writers who got the most abuse were eight women (four white and four non-white) and two black men. Two of the women and one of the men were gay. And of the eight women in the “top 10”, one was Muslim and one Jewish.

And the 10 regular writers who got the least abuse? All men.

How should digital news organisations respond to this? Some say it is simple – “Don’t read the comments” or, better still, switch them off altogether. And many have done just that, disabling their comment threads for good because they became too taxing to bother with.

But in so many cases journalism is enriched by responses from its readers. So why disable all comments when only a small minority is a problem?

At the Guardian, we felt it was high time to examine the problem rather than turn away.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/apr/11/the-guardian-view-on-online-abuse-building-the-web-we-want

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11479585