Many publisher business models rely on reader engagement to drive ad revenue. As toxic conversations pervade their forums, reader engagement falls, and ad revenue diminishes…
— from a story in ‘The Current’ on Jigsaw.Google.com
Daily Post readers may have noticed that there’s no ‘Comments’ section at the bottom of my humor columns.
There’s a good reason for this.
Toxicity.
The internet was supposed to be a place where we could be nice to each other, from a respectful distance. But then toxicity happened.
Sorry, folks. If anyone is going to be toxic on my page, it’s going to be me.
Google is one of the companies concerned about toxicity, for obvious reasons. (e.g. ad revenue.) A few years ago, they convened a group of researchers to figure out ways to stop the spread of online toxicity, and they called the research group “Jigsaw”.
With an increasingly connected world, the internet has become the primary place where people go to share their thoughts, ideas, and opinions. But as more voices join the conversation, toxic comments can crowd out healthy dialogue. Hateful speech and online harassment make people less likely to participate online… Toxicity is a global problem, and has potentially dire consequences for freedom of expression.
Google and Jigsaw define toxicity as rude, bullying language aimed at intimidating a fellow internet user, and they’ve come up with a free computer application news organizations can install that — hopefully — can identify toxic comments and presumably prevent them from being posted. The aim is to ensure that everyone is talking nice, or not at all. The application is called ‘Perspective’ and it has some problems, apparently. Like, if you are writing about toxic speech and you’re quoting an example (that someone else posted) the computer gets all flustered and thinks you are a hateful person, when actually you’re just trying to point an accusing finger at some other dirtbag.
Or maybe… you were just trying to be funny? Can’t people take a joke these days? That’s a big problem with computers: they can’t tell if you’re joking, or being sarcastic. (A lot of humans also can’t tell, as I have learned.)
According to 2015 data from the United Nations, women are 27x more likely to experience toxic online attacks than men. That’s kind of scary. If I were a woman leaving comments in an online discussion forum, I would probably use a man’s name as my avatar. I understand that’s not the best solution — what woman would want to be a man, nowadays? Considering how toxic men are?
Again, from Jigsaw.Google.com:
Many publisher business models rely on reader engagement to drive ad revenue. As toxic conversations pervade their forums, reader engagement falls and that ad revenue diminishes. This could mean that smaller publishers can’t afford the increased costs of providing high-quality moderation on their platforms, putting further strain on local new organizations that are already struggling…
The Daily Post definitely fits the description of “smaller publishers”. You can hardly find a smaller publisher that the guy who publishes the Daily Post. I think he stands, like, about 5 foot 5? With his shoes on?
But as small as our publisher might be, he’s in good company. Some really big publishers — like Vice, The Atlantic, and Reuters — have shut down their comments sections. Even The New York Times reported that the challenge of moderating their forums, “has forced us to close comments on stories sooner than we would like simply because we didn’t have the resources to sort through them all. Many of our best stories are never opened for comments at all.”
And lately, with toxicity reaching 27x for women (according to the United Nations), the increased cost of high-quality moderation — or even low-quality moderation — would put stress on this local news organization. At least, that’s the excuse I’m given, whenever I ask why I don’t have a ‘Comments’ feature for my columns.
Who needs stress?
“My columnists are stressful enough,” says my publisher.
I suppose he’s referring to me. But it sounds… slightly toxic…