Thanks Crosscut, for putting up with anonymous postings. I enjoy your site and for whatever reason your comments section tends to be more civil and thoughtful than most other news sites and I often times find many gems of insight in the comments.

One more advantage of anonymity is the professional implications. I want to speak my mind, but I don't want my comments popping up on the top of a Google search for my name.

There is an element of people wanting their cake and eating it, too. They want the freedom to express their opinions without a crumb trail. This often leads to a wretched excess of invective and incivility. A good rule of thumb: would you say what you have to say in a comments section face-to-face? If yes, then post anonymously to your heart's content. If no, then perhaps silence is the better policy.
Laurence Ballard

If someone wants to weigh in on an established media site I say they can register as we do here. Our identification is concealed and confidential, but not anonymous. What good is an anonymous comment anyway?

This is so easy - just require anyone who wants to comment to provide a real name, verified with a credit card to which a one-time fee of $1 can be charged. The USPS does this to verify on-line change-of-address requests.

Joel Connelly over at the PI.com simply deletes any comments that contrary to his point of view. I have seen cited, verifiable links with reasonable comments disappear on a regular basis because they question the validity of Joels's postion or politics. As you can imagine, Joel has to delete a lot of comments.

I've weighed in on this topic before on this site, so I won't again. I just wanted to relay a story about a woman from the LWV in Kitsap County who recently started posting on the Kitsap Sun blog. She pretends to be so highly principled that she doesn't respond to the questions of veteran, well-known, anonymous posters, when in reality, she's actually been trolling the site for contributors to her private blog. The one she controls.

There's all kinds of creepy.

Back when I was in college I was the Online Editor of the school paper. My roommate sent in a letter to the editor and it was published. This was a fairly benign letter on religious freedom. No one in their right minds could disagree with it.

If I remember correctly, we had a little box indicating the most-commented stories, and there at the top was my roommate's LTTE. A nasty thread erupted, with two or three commenters going back and forth, denouncing each other and each other's views in the most vitriolic manner imaginable. At one point someone said my roommate would go to hell for his views.

I'm used to far worse. I'm of the Internet generation, after all. This was nothing, so I largely ignored it.

A few days later the editor in chief brought the matter up in the budget meeting. She wondered if we should take the comments down. I didn't think it was necessary. I felt that it wasn't our place as journalists to decide whose views were valid or obscene.

"Is there any way to find out who these people are at least?" she asked.

I knew I couldn't find their real names, but I said I would look up their email addresses, which our system recorded.

So I looked them up, and it was then that I realized that we had been trolled.

One of the emails in question was my roommate's (ie. the author of the LTTE) email. Another was his girlfriend's. Another was his wwu.edu account. Another was a junk account with his name in it.

He'd been having a conversation with himself the entire time.

It was a golden age, and AOL killed it when they "discovered" the Internet.

The only reason I'm identified here by my only my first initial and last name is that at the time I signed up, I was asked for a "user ID" which I interpreted as a login UID. If I'd have known that I'd be identified by that user ID, I'd have used my full name. But it's no mystery. Anyone with access to a web browser can figure it out pretty quickly.

I don't like cutesy-wutsey or phony names. They don't carry as much weight with me. An argument from "John Jones" carries much more weight in my mind that one from "Slap-Happy Sappy" no matter how well reasoned it is. And ad hominem attacks from phony names carry no weight at all.

In closing:

TIME-SPACE HAS INERTIA. EQUIVALENCE OF TIME-SPACE AND MASS1/T 1/log M =1(ABIAN) ALTER EARTH'S ORBIT AND TILT - STOP EPIDEMICS OF CANCER, CHOLERA, AIDS, ETC. VENUS MUST BE GIVEN A NEAR EARTH-LIKE ORBIT TO BECOME A BORN AGAIN EARTH

Hey, Tracy Record...you are required to identify yourself and provide an address in any sort of city related public hearing. You could lie, but you do have to identify yourself in those forums.
And as to Joel C routinely scrubbing the critical responses....that's a hoot. I am always stunned at the animosity around his columns and how many people make remarks about his weight and looks. That certainly adds credibility to the comment. Not. I hope they do take down the awful comments, but see no clue that disagreeing with Joel gets your comment pulled.

@ Jon Sayer
You are right on! In the early internet's when I was bored, I did such childish things. Even helped a guy make several "profiles" with pictures and fake info. Amazing how some people open up when you present them with what they want to see and believe. Our last stunt was making a bot with an anonymizer to stuff the hits at a local paper. When a paper "forces" you to out commenter's names, they are not listening to their IT departments. The most basic servers log the IP of hits and posters. It is an easy matter of tracing the IP's to know where the comments come from, particularly when people try different user ID's. Bojack.org has frequently outed government employees trolling his blog on the taxpayers dime.

Why don't you ask him Kathleen13? I am sure he is proud of it. If you post something that makes him look silly, or if you post against one of his favorite candidates by mentioning something he finds offensive Like Patty Murray sells earmarks for campaign cash as proven by local investigators at the Seattle Times( The Favor Factory) or on ( Frontline with Bill Moyers) he will drop you like a bad habit.

Ted VD already covered this oddly hot topic several weeks back. So, when we see a column on the corrosive effect of anonymous comments by politicians, staff, lobbyists, and others in that orbit to put out lies or misleading spin to a credulous press who seem to have misplaced their duty as fact-checkers? Certainly comment threads at the PI, Times, and elsewhere can be pretty unfriendly and not advance dialogue, but it's without cosequence, unlike the easy way smears are advanced in the national press.
In the meantime, what Behi Bonsai said. Unlike those of you that are paid to have opinions, many of us work or may work for people who unreasonably care about expressed opinions of their workers whether they apply to the work or not. Does our wanting to make a living in this cruel world trump our desire to speak up, or is that right only for the comfortable and the comfortably-placed?
Finally, the Federalist Papers, you blind horses.

I used to read (and comment in!) Publicola regularly, and there were some disturbing trends in their comment sections that go a bit beyond the nasty anonymous comment mold.

Most of Publicola's content relates to Seattle and Washington issues, but I noticed that when Publicola posts articles related to hot-button national issues (climate change, immigration, etc.), unknown names crop out of the woodworks and flood the comment section. Some of them are long, bitter rants that are only tangentially related to the topic at hand. It appears that individuals, or even bots, are simply searching for articles in which to spread their gospels.

I thought that this was an exclusive phenomenon to the far right, but then I got an e-mail from the Democratic Party (I think the state party--at any rate, I am quite active in the party and get many such e-mails) calling for a volunteer media relations team. The duties of this team would be to function as plants at public meetings or town halls, call into radio programs, send letters to the editor, and monitor and post in comment sections.

The purpose of these kinds of trolling operations is not to advance the dialog, but to do the opposite: to raise the emotional temperature to such a level as to discourage people with reasonable things to say from participating. That adds an entirely new dimension for editors to contend with.

More important than whether a news website allows anonymous posts is whether or not the forums or reader reaction posts are moderated and too what extent. At one time one Seattle daily newspaper allowed staff bloggers to cull comments that were off-point, repetitive, meaningless and hateful. At the same time the rumor was another newspaper website felt it should do little to cull the trolls on advice of lawyers who feared libel suits. The open question remains: is a website liable for the words or posted under its stories?

I like anon comments. It makes me read them and think about the content and the words, rather than think about what I already know about a particular writer.

Humans are very judgemental. When we know the person writing, we might diss them as being 'too stupid to agree with' or whatever, but if that same person writes incognito, something deep and meaningfully brilliant, we might actually be impressed and thoughtful.

I'll use that moron Sarah Palin as an example. No matter what she says or writes, I'm going to be judgemental. But if she was anon, who knows? Maybe I wouldn't think she was so creepy.

The unintentional irony in these comments is thick enough to cut with a knife.

This is exactly the kind of thoughtful, civil discussion that helps add depth and understanding to such debates. At www.wanewscouncil.org, the Washington News Council's new, improved website, you'll find more topics like this. You can join our community and take part in groups and forums. Yes, we ask you to register, but your public comments may be anonymous. We'd like to see real names, but it's your choice. We'll moderate comments to the extent possible, but our hope is to encourage vigorous and enlightened exchanges -- like those here on Crosscut.com. We welcome feedback on our new website, including suggestions of media-related topics. The WNC for 12 years has been a public forum for open discussion of media accuracy and ethics, and we're expanding that role online.
-- John Hamer, President, Washington News Council (206.262.9793)

Quinn, I've seen that video before, and it is funny. It's also ironic, in that Shatner himself is often parodied for being overly dramatic. What I found ironic in the comments of "common1sense" is that [he/she/it] speaks glowingly of the virtues of anonymous posting, rhapsodizing about the transcendent nature of moving rhetoric for it's own sake, then jumps down into the gutter to throw some gratuitous jabs at Palin. That is even funnier than Shatner! But I suppose that if you have to explain a joke, it's not funny.

Anonymous publication is a time-honored tradition that has figured prominently in America's literary and political landscape. Early American political philosophy was heavily influenced by Thomas Paine's anonymous pamphlet Common Sense, and by Cato's Letters, which were anonymously published by British writers John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon. Some of America's greatest literary works have also been published under pseudonyms—for instance the works of Mark Twain, who we know today as Samuel Clemens.
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2008/03/lawmakers-attempt-to-criminalize-anonymous-posting-doomed.ars
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dbrennaman, it was intentional. The key word was maybe.

If a website decides to ban anonymous posters, that's fine by me. What irks me is when writers for websites that do allow anonymous posts get all bent out of shape when someone leaves an anonymous comment on their stories.

If Joel Connelly doesn't like anonymous posts, he should get his company to ban them. If John Hamer doesn't like anonymous posts, he shouldn't bitch about them on his crosscut articles. Crosscut allows anonymous posts. Unless and until it changes the rules, its writers shouldn't bitch and moan.

You spoke to Bob Payne? The guy is blatantly right-wing and routinely deletes the accounts of anyone to the left or even moderate. He once deleted my account for using the word "teabagger" for Heaven's sake.

Payne has ZERO credibility in this market, and the Times comments sections are a right-wing cesspool as a result.

And yes - my real name is used here.

-Jeff Welch

Anon posts will become less and less as people that spend more time online differentiate between their personal selves online and their public selves online.
Ever see somebody with two cell phones? One is from work (work identity) and the other is personal (personal identity).

I think we will eventually see people regularly hold two main identities, the public, and the personal.
The public persona, much like the "handle" is that repeated identifying name a person uses in most public spaces.

Me, I just don't care who knows my name. I do not have a public persona to protect, since I construct that split between the online sides of me, personal and the public.

This is what I studied, Com: Technology & Society, and these are my poorly formed thoughts a year removed from completing my B. A.
I was fortunate enough to have some brilliant teachers, you might want to contact one of them to write a superior column on this subject.

Ask Crispin Thurlow what he thinks.

As far as what kinds of groups form on your sites, why, and what breaks groups you could talk to John Gastil.

My two cents on self revealing information, identification, and elements that lead to superior discussion; that all is a result of trust, who they can trust in the group, those observing the group, the rules and authority. I would say that if the authority has a personal face, like Crosscut, Weekly, Publicola, HA (yes, even Goldy) then you get a sense that an actual person is interacting with you and will consistently enforce clearly defined posting rules.
The Seattle Times is a nameless, faceless underpass, that is the target of poor graffiti.

This is nothing new. I wrote this piece http://crosscut.com/2008/06/28/media/15407/You,-anonymous/ two years ago right on this very site. This may be a bit like blowing my own horn, but that's the nature of the Internet. If I don't blow ot, no one else will.
The new version takes my version to the next step, but I wish the author had managed to connect with the Kitsap Sun, which has the liveliest comment board I've ever seen,

As to journos deleting posts they disagree with or find offensive: Not sure about PI.com, but it's not possible at the Seattle Times, where writers have no access to the comments section. We not only can't delete comments, we can't see the email addresses that generated them -- even if that might be beneficial for news-gathering purposes. (We are told this would be "too big-brotherish.")

Times writers, just like the public, can "suggest" removal of a post that is blatantly offensive -- or, more important, contains factual errors that contradict correct information in an article. But in my experience that's a distinctly hit/miss process.

Comments, in general, are great for journalism. Offensive comments, or those that intentionally mislead, add nothing to the public discourse, and in fact detract from it. Everyone in journalism knows this. But IMHO, few are willing to sacrifice the cheap, easy page hits to achieve a comment section filled with the former. Which is too bad.

Ron Judd, real name
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