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Trolls Be Gone? Knight, Mozilla, NYTimes and WaPo to the Rescue
The Knight Foundation announced funding Thursday to build a free, open-source tool to help newsrooms “turn comments into community,” in partnership with the New York Times, Washington Post, and non-profit Mozilla.
This might matter far beyond news organizations. Townhalls are vital to democracy — and are sorely lacking.
“This isn’t another commenting platform for publishers; it’s a publishing platform for readers,” Greg Barber, director of digital news projects at The Washington Post, said in the release.
News media once served, albeit inadequately, as platforms for debate in our global villages, providing op-ed pages, letters to the editor and call-in radio and TV programs. Many of those platforms vanished as outlets moved online, and were replaced with comment sections. They’re not nearly enough. The New York Times‘ moderated comment section is, almost uniquely, superb. Most media comment sections are virtual versions of cage fights, infested with anonymous trolls. Without resources to hire moderators, many media outlets have resorted to Facebook, insisting that commenters identify themselves with Facebook accounts and — bizarrely, in my opinion — turning control over to one massive American company and creating a host of accountability, censorship and privacy issues.
I think the promise of social media for “townhall” sharing of information and discussion has faded. As the companies that own the platforms have become publicly traded they are — no surprise here — aggressively commercial. Not only have ads become pervasive but, as our ProPublica post yesterday explained, the privacy of citizens is compromised. In addition, some social media companies now not only charge journalism outlets to share posts with users who “like” pages, but they now essentially compete with journalism Pages with their own news feeds, like Facebook’s “FB Newswire” which shares content posted publicly by Facebook users.
The joint project announced today cannot meet all needs, and it will not replace massive social media — but it could play a major role in raising the bar or, as Alberto Ibargüen, president and CEO of KnightFoundation said, “elevating civil discourse.”
“The Web offers all sorts of new and exciting ways of engaging with communities far beyond the ubiquitous –and often terrible — comments sections at the bottom of articles,” said Dan Sinker, head of the Knight-Mozilla Open News initiative.
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation will donate $3.89 million to the online community platform, which aims to be freely available to any and all news organizations. The design aims to allow “readers to submit pictures, links and other media; track discussions; and manage their contributions and online identities. Publishers will then be able to collect and use this content for other forms of storytelling and to spark ongoing discussions by providing readers with targeted content and notifications.”
An excerpt of the release:
— Deborah Jones