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Moderating Presseurop

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Reader participation forms an essential part of Presseurop's mission to encourage debate on issues affecting Europe.

On the web, the simplest way of involving "the people formerly known as the audience" is to open articles to comments. The quality of the subsequent discussion, famously variable, will be influenced by the participants' goodwill and the technical nature of the forum, but also by editor moderation.

This article discusses some of the choices made on Presseurop.eu.

Towards a reader discussion forum

There has always been confusion over the purpose of user comments on online news sites. It seems that they were originally conceived to be "letters to the editor", intended only to provide complementary information on the article in question. Only later did site owners decide that discussion among commenters could be a legitimate objective in itself.

There is a tension between these two aims, on Presseurop as much as elsewhere.

  • "complementary information" implies activist moderation and encouragement for testimony of personal experience and expert insight, and is intended to benefit non-participating readers (a classic example is BBC News)

  • "discussion" means facilitating the free exchange of opinions, and aims to allow participants and others to modify their views in the light of the perspective of others (a classic example is Reddit and countless similar forums)

At the beginnings of the Presseurop project, we openly favoured the initial objective. But commenters were soon responding to each other as much as to the articles. Given Presseurop's mission, there was clearly an opportunity to move towards the second objective by building a unique discussion platform. So that is what we did, by launching a partial integration of comments on different language sites (2010), quoting with reply notifications (2011), full multilingual integration (2011), and finally automatic translation by Google (2012).

Tidying up

Success is difficult to measure, but our forum has regularly been praised for its uncommonly high level of civility

Presseurop uses "automatized moderation" inspired by urban geography. Research has repeatedly found that citizens treat public spaces better when the spaces are already well-treated. Applying this observation to online discussion, our commenting engine deploys a number of filters to ensure that comments appear presentable and serious. Success is difficult to measure, but our forum has regularly been praised for its uncommonly high level of civility.

Dealing with untranslatable language – a particular scourge in the presence of machine translation – proved impracticable by automatic filters, unfortunately. Correcting spelling and sometimes grammar is therefore the most regular kind of moderation we do, but certainly not the most challenging.

Moderation 101

Like all online forums we must deal with three classic moderation challenges: trolling (insult and provocation), libellousness (defamation) and hate speech. Thankfully none of these has been a major issue, due to the exceptional goodwill and consideration of Presseurop's community.

Trolling poisons the atmosphere, pushes the most thoughtful forum members to leave, and discourages others from joining. We have never hesitated to reject and cut egregiously insulting comments (of which there have been few), but difficulties arise with borderline cases. These include:

  • sloganeering and invective – phrases including words such as "criminal", "bleeding heart", "fanatic", "crazy", "EUSSR", "bankster", "dictator"

  • Godwinesque references to 1930s ideologies and politicians

We rarely delete or cut comments containing empty provocations of this kind, but often issue polite warnings. In general we ask readers to "stay factual and on-topic" – thereby sidestepping recriminations over the precise nature of the trolling.

Defamation is a more serious issues, because sanctioned by the law. We have been accused of publishing defamatory comments on very few occasions, never with reason – in part because the defamed party needs to be an publicly identifiable individual, which in general is not the case with our pseudonymous commenters.

Hate speech, by contrast, has been an occasional issue. Presseurop.eu is hosted in France and thereby falls under French law, which is relatively tough on online hate (and even sanctions simple insults). But hate is notoriously difficult to define. Should we reject a calmly-expressed argument against immigration based on overt pseudo-scientific racism and backed up by a study of national IQ levels? We allowed it. What about blatant homophobia expressed on the basis of religious or cultural norms – for example from a reader in the Balkans? We allowed that too. The same argument involving vulgar language? We deleted it.

In general, we have tried to err on the side of free speech

In general, we have tried to err on the side of free speech. This seems especially important on a site whose audience has widely varying cultural backgrounds, and indeed divergent understandings of free speech itself – all informed by different laws and different histories.

Tough challenges

In reality, the most intractable challenges for moderation have been less obvious. These are all insidious problems on online forums, and there are no obvious solutions.

Misunderstanding is a classic pitfall of all discussion:

–I never defended it. Can you tell me where I "defended" it? What impertinence!

–You wrote "that's enough". I have the right to express myself and I have never asked you to shut up.

–Express yourself, please. Come on, be happy and less bitter.

–I am very fulfilled and not at all bitter. You are full of bitterness and say nothing but insulting banalities.

In this (real) case, on an otherwise civil discussion thread, communication has broken down because of accumulated misunderstandings. Without eye contact and body language it can be hard to keep a discussion from going off the rails in this way. One user deals with the issue by regularly signing his comments with smileys. It is imperfect but perhaps there is a certain prophylactic effect. :)

Negativity and cynicism are similarly difficult to moderate, since there is no outright abuse going on. But their effect is to drag debate into the gutter:

European democracy? You are joking I trust!

This throwaway remark, on an article about the European Parliament, admits no response and can lead nowhere. Whether the sniping is against politicians (in Brussels or not), or elites and their "propaganda", or bankers, or journalists, or even scientists, the result is the same – to lower the tone, to discourage contributors with more sophisticated ideas, and ultimately to send discussion into a dead end. In general we have responded with the staple tactic of asking readers to back up their assertions with documented facts.

We do not have the resources to fact-check every assertion, but regularly call on readers to justify them

Misinformation has no place on a serious news site, and yet is also an inevitable feature of informal online discussion. We do not have the resources to fact-check every assertion, but regularly call on readers to justify them. Some, however, some stand out as particularly problematic:

It is difficult to justify global "warming" when in recent years records for freezing temperatures are being broken worldwide.

This is all but certainly a factual falsehood. Denial of anthropogenic global warming seems an especially good candidate for moderation for several reasons:

  • it is partly the result of a deliberate campaign of misinformation by powerful interests, in which no news organisation should be complicit

  • the complexity of the science makes the allegation all but impossible to falsify by non-experts (of whom none are to be found among our contributors)

  • its effect is to derail the discussion so that the topic of the article – as intended by its author – is not debated at all

Many would accept the case for rejecting reader submissions which deny or minimize the Holocaust. But only a few news outlets – a notable example is the LA Times – have such a policy for climate denialism, despite the potential consequences of misinformation. We decided to limit ourselves to "health warnings" on individual comments.

Disproportionality of viewpoints is a peril faced by all discussion forums. In televised political debates, speakers are invited in rough proportion to the popularity of the views they represent. In less formal settings such as our site, there are no such controls. The risk is therefore that certain viewpoints will overwhelm others. The situation is even more complicated on Presseurop, given our need to balance not just divergent political standpoints and attitudes to European integration, but also multiple languages and nationalities.

Inevitably, though, certain viewpoints have been under-represented in Presseurop's forum

In absolute terms we have rarely achieved this delicate equilibrium, but there have been small successes. For example, the first 9 comments on Martin Schulz's recent blog post were written on 9 different translations of the article. Inevitably, though, certain viewpoints have been under-represented in Presseurop's forum. Judgements are subjective, but candidates might include:

  • center-left voices from Northern Europe

  • fiscal hawks from crisis-hit countries

  • moderates, centrists and euro-agnostics from all countries

  • opinions from Central and Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and the Balkans

One particular forum contributor, unfailingly polite but also unswervingly constant in his condemnation of EU economic integration, has written well over 6000 comments, including 31 out of the 81 on one article. On the other hand, out of 120 comments on a recent brief about monetary policy, there is relative balance – 20 might be construed as pro-austerity, 17 as anti-austerity, with a handful condemning the entire single currency as beyond repair. (The rest are offtopic, but include an interesting discussion on European news sources.)

Like the other challenges, a disproportionality of viewpoints is somewhat inevitable on any online forum. But even if opinions are unequally distributed, listening to them can always be beneficial. As one particularly thoughtful Italian forum member once wrote to a forthright German contributor:

Your latest comments are very valuable and I believe they can convince people in both northern and southern Europe. This forum can be a learning opportunity for the readers who participate in it.

We think so too.


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