No offense to our anonymous commenters, but I like this idea. Huffington Post is eliminating anonymous commenting.
“Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier and I just came from London where there are rape and death threats,” Huffington said in comments to reporters after a speech at Hubspot’s Inbound 2013 conference in Boston. The changeover will come in mid-September, she said.
“I feel that freedom of expression is given to people who stand up for what they say and not hiding behind anonymity,” she said. “we need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up Internet,” she said. The current Huff Po system uses advanced algorithms to moderate comments plus 40 moderators, but that is not enough now, she said.
In print, letters to the editor have to include a name, address and phone number in order to be printed. Anonymity, on the other hand, is a shield that allows total latitude to say anything without any personal accountability.
I don’t know whether we’ll follow suit here (we don’t have the massive volume of commenters found at Huff Post). But what do you think? Especially our anonymous non-troll commenters? Would you be open to something like this here?