Upholding and Updating Ethical Standards

Digital media companies need to host the community conversation. They also need to consider what the standards for that conversation and how they can enforce those standards and how they distinguish the community conversation from journalism that is held to higher standards. As Kelly McBride, leader of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute, says, we need to want to strive more for dialogue than diatribe: “An Internet mob is generally ruthless, fueled by the ease and anonymity of posting.”

News organizations are seeking and accepting content provided by the public in three primary (and overlapping) ways:

• Opinion. Just as newspapers have long welcomed opinions expressed in letters to the editor, we are welcoming opinions online in a variety of ways, including comments on stories, discussion forums, community blogs, comments on staff blogs..
• Citizen journalism. Increasingly we are inviting the public to help us tell the story in a variety of ways, helping produce news content that in many ways is barely distinguishable from our own journalism: entering calendar items, sharing their accounts of news events, submitting photos and videos of community events, posting their own stories about neighborhood events that journalists are not covering.
• Conversation. In niche sites focused on moms, young adults, sports fans and other audiences, we are inviting people to seek and give advice, trash talk, share humor, argue and otherwise share their lives online.

Some of the ethical challenges of community content are peculiar to the type of content and some are universal in the whole field of user-generated content.

Identity vs. anonymity

 We are at an odd and contradictory time in journalism ethics when the credibility of our journalism has been harmed by journalists’ overuse and abuse of confidential sources. And yet anonymity is common and expected in many online exchanges, and we want to build online audience, so we explore what is the right balance between transparent identification and complete anonymity. As with many decisions, this is a matter of trade-offs. Anonymity brings more participation, and perhaps more traffic. But it also brings more objectionable content and more unsupported statements, which can harm your credibility and turn some users off. You can consider various levels of identification:

• Require people to register by verifiable names and use those names in any comments or contributions on the web site. This decreases participation but raises accountability and helps people judge the credibility of comments and tends to elevate the level of civil discussion. This also requires some work on your part to verify identity. In the context of online conversation, where anonymity is prevalent, a requirement of identification might keep your site from gaining the traffic and the level of conversation you want, especially if other sites in the community allow anonymity. You may need to promote harder to generate discussion if you require identification in all instances.
• Require people to register with a verifiable name and email address, but let them use a screen name. This allows you to warn people about misconduct or contact them for interviews if they indicate they have significant knowledge.
• Encourage people to create user profiles. The profiles may not disclose actual names, but tell more about the user, or include a photo that some people will recognize.
• Link to previous comments by a user (these can be a link from the user profile or from each comment). Even without identification, this gives users a way to judge the credibility of a user’s contributions. If this person has reviewed a dozen restaurants and liked a couple that I like, but doesn’t like every place, I will place more credibility in the review of a place I’ve never eaten before. And I’ll be more confident that this is not a chef reviewing her own place.
• Require different levels of identification, depending on the context. For instance, you might require full name and/or a user profile for bloggers, calendar contributors or people who contribute news content, but allow more anonymity in story comments or conversation sites.
• You might allow anonymity online but require contact information so you can seek identification if you want to reverse-publish some online comments for a print product.

What about staff members? If you allow the public some level of anonymity, you need to determine also whether to allow your journalists then to comment anonymously. If your answer is no, is it no in all circumstances? Or are you blocking them only from commenting anonymously on their own stories or on your own site? Can a staff writer have a personal blog on a personal site that has nothing to do with his beat, writing under a pseudonym? Can a government reporter comment anonymously like any other sports fan on a sports site?

User-generated content

 Citizen journalism and user reviews. User-generated content presents opportunities to use your web site for partisan, promotional or commercial purposes. Consider how you want to guard against this or to disclose contributors’ interests to your readers. Is it OK for the spouse of the high-school drama teacher to submit a review of the high school play? Can restaurant employees review their own restaurant? Do these relationships need to be disclosed? If so, how do you police them, especially if you aren’t requiring identification? You may not cover the meetings of the Kiwanis Club with your staff, but welcome online accounts of the meeting submitted by the president or secretary. Does that require any sort of disclosure or disclaimer? Political interest groups routinely send out mass-produced letters to the editor that editorial pages can screen out pretty easily. If you let readers post to your web site, is this sort of plagiarism acceptable? Do violators get banned? Is it enough to post a disclaimer that you don’t vet reader contributions the same way that you vet content provided by journalists? If you invite people to post events to the calendar, how do you ensure accuracy? How do you contact the contributor if a user points out a contradiction or possible error? Can you improve accuracy of calendar postings and citizen announcements or news stories by automatically emailing them a request to reread and verify the finished product online?

Comments and discussions. Should you allow anonymous comments by web site visitors? If so, how should you police them? What won’t you allow – vulgar language, personal attacks, unsubstantiated allegations? You can screen for objectionable content in a variety of ways: You can read comments before they appear online, though this slows the flow of discussion. You can moderate discussions and remove objectionable content, but this takes staff time. You can use software that screens for foul language, but trolls can foil the software by using asterisks and look-alike symbols – 0 for o, $ for s, @ for a, You can ask readers to flag objectionable content, which you can then review and decide whether to remove. You can empower users to remove objectionable comments themselves – at least until you can review them. You can appeal for civility. You can let the users police themselves and let the trolls know they aren’t welcome. You can have different areas with different levels of moderation, so that people who enjoy the free-for-all gather in one corner of your site and the civil discussion carries on in another corner. None of these solutions is perfect. Discuss these issues in an editor’s blog, on some of the discussion forums and in public appearances, so you find the right level(s) of transparency or anonymity for each kind of exchange on your site.

You have legal considerations as well as ethical and logistical considerations in deciding whether to monitor and edit reader comments. Your legal liability grows if you edit material. But legal considerations are not the same as ethical considerations. Don’t let the law force you into a free-for-all if you believe that will undercut your credibility.

When comments become news

Should you report about anonymous comments on blogs – whether your site’s blogs or someone else’s – if they might play into a news story? Do these comments have to meet the same standards as other unnamed sources? If you require registration so you actually have a way to contact people, you can verify (or refute) newsworthy disclosures or assertions, so you can deal with them in your news content.

A 2006 Poynter Institute conference on online ethical issues, as reported by Rick Edmonds, listed these questions to ask in assessing how to handle specific user comments and user comments generally:

• Are there personal safety and privacy issues?
• Will it increase the flow and exchange of ideas or enhance the diversity of conversation by allowing anonymity?
• Do you have the capacity to monitor or clean up inappropriate posts?
• Are there categories of content where anonymous, user-generated content is essential? Where it is unacceptable?
• Is the community clear on the conditions under which the anonymity is granted/limited?
• Does anonymity damage the credibility of the information or debate?

Protect your credibility

If you are not holding all your content to the same standards, explain your standards frequently in a variety of ways – editor’s notes, editor’s blogs, warnings, disclaimers. You also might separate the journalism that meets high standards from the comments that meet lower standards. Instead of allowing (and publishing comments on the same page as a story, you have a link to the comments (and a disclaimer there, explaining that your standards for fairness, identification of sources and verification of information for the story are not the same as for the comments.

When reporters are interviewing people about sensitive or controversial topics, especially if the sources don’t deal regularly with the media, you should discuss whether the reporters should warn sources that they might become targets of unkind anonymous comments.

Online polls

 Online polls are fun but they aren’t scientific. How should you characterize the results? Should they always be labeled as unscientific? If you don’t block repeat voting from the same computer, you should not report the results as the number of people voting, but as the number of responses or votes for a particular point of view.

Helpful resources:

Guidelines on user-generated content, developed by a 2006 Poynter conference: