Anonymous netizens should clean up their act

Letters: Time for moderation in the blogosphere | Technology | The Guardian

A letter from yesterday’s Guardian in response to the scandal over the unmasking of the “Night Jack” police blogger by the Times (the short version is: a policeman who ran an anonymous blog won an award, the Times found out who he was and decided to tell the world; meanwhile, his superiors disciplined him and he pulled the blog, and was named in the Times last week), in which the author pleads for people to clean up their act if they wish to continue being anonymous while online:

If bloggers and those who post comments on online forums are to be allowed to use pseudonyms, they must surely clean up their act. I rarely read such things because of the unpleasant, aggressive and boorish language that is used (even on Comment is Free – goodness knows what the Daily Mail’s forum is like). I thought at least a recent article about universities (Simon Jenkins, 12 June) would remain well-mannered. Some hope! Apart from the liberal sprinkling of statements that “this comment has been removed by a moderator”, I found comments such as “what utter shameless crap”, “you are a complete idiot” etc. Let’s face it – anonymity brings out the worst in people. Surely if someone has something to say, they should be prepared to say it politely, sign their name to it and provide a postal address? This is still a requirement of the Letters page.

He suggests having two parallel comment forums: a polite one, and an anything-goes one. Surely most serious bloggers just wouldn’t want to host an anything-goes forum anyway, but as anyone who’s ever read the comments appended to news stories on virtually every major news website can tell you, they are often filled with bile and comments like “if they don’t like it here, let them go home”, particularly when they have anything to do with Muslims or Islam. What I’d prefer is to be able to read the published articles without the comments.