Dear Cambridge community,
We strive for Cambridge Day to be the trusted news source for Cambridge, with news that addresses the interests of the community in a timely, accurate and objective manner. We fully recognize there are different views on any issue of consequence, and there is obvious value in lively engagement from readers; that’s a sign of a healthy and robust community.
At the moment some of the comment threads contain more than just civil discourse, though; they have become vitriolic, mean, offensive or at the very least in bad taste.
We are not the only ones struggling with this issue. Many papers have been shutting down comments altogether. Bigger ones with resources can employ moderators who screen out ill-suited comments or suggest edits to the writer to remove defamatory or bullying language. Others will publish just select comments.
We also became aware this week of an aspect of Cambridge Day site functionality that revealed commenters’ email and their computers’ IP addresses to other commenters. We are removing that code and apologize to anyone affected.
To determine how best to move forward, we’re asking for your ideas. What’s the best way to reflect the diversity of opinion within the city, but also be a trusted space that fosters productive discussion and a civil exchange of ideas and opinions? We welcome your comments below. Here are some of the questions we’re looking for your help with:
- Do you think Cambridge Day should have comments?
- Should anonymous comments be permitted?
- What would you like to see in a code of conduct?
- Would you be interested in volunteering to help moderate our comments and screen out inappropriate ones?
- Please comment on this post and/or email us at comments@cambridgeday.com with your views!
Best,
The Cambridge News Inc. board of directors
Niko Emack, Raffi Freeman, Richard Harriman, Mary McGrath and Amira Valliani
With support from the Cambridge Community Foundation Local News Fund, Kristen Wainwright, Larry Kim, Lori Lander, Martha Bedell, and O. Robert Simha
Feature image by Kelly Sikkema via Unsplash.
A stronger
Please consider making a financial contribution to maintain, expand and improve Cambridge Day.
We are now a 501(c)3 nonprofit and all donations are tax deductible.
Please consider a recurring contribution.
I would look to existing online forums as examples of potential models.
– city-data has little moderation and has similar vitriol
– reddit subreddits usually have active moderators deputized to enforce a code of conduct
– would be very wary of adopting any position without an existing major precedent
– One option is that people who disclose an actual name can immediately post while anonymous is reviewed AND delayed by 24 hours.
– Another option is disabled comments
– Another option is donors are able to comment
– Look for enforceable standards rather than hopes and aspirations.
Anyone who doesn’t use a VPN as a matter of daily practice is dumb.
Anyone who doesn’t use a fake, disposable email address to sign-up for a site like this is dumb.
Any automated filter can be circumvented. Only financial contributors can instant commment? OK. Anonymous internet Visa card for 20 bucks coming your way! Totally worth it.
But first CD would need pay to have all that new development work done…so…maybe not automated filters.
Any human filter will be slow/expensive/unreliable and a PITA to manage.
The best path forward for CambridgeDay is to shut down the comments. It is the only way to protect the dumb from themselves….and me.
p.s. Seems like this kind of data breach needs more disclosure from CD…doesn’t it? I mean transparency in reporting and all…..yeah?
“We also became aware this week of an aspect of Cambridge Day site functionality that revealed commenters’ email and their computers’ IP addresses to other commenters. We are removing that code and apologize to anyone affected.”
Well first and foremost the Day should immediately and retroactively ban anyone doxxing another commenter
More broadly: comment sections on most news papers tend to be cesspools of toxicity on all sides of get political spectrum. It enables the worst forms of political discussion.
That said, unlike other papers, the Day sees a lot of legitimate discourse in its comment section. Much more so than other publications. For that reason, I think it should stay.
Given the history of certain residents of this city engaging in harassment campaigns against people they disagree with, requiring real names would discourage those who want to engage but are afraid of unhinged and mentally unstable people harassing us offline. Me included.
Please keep the ability to comment. While some conversations can degrade, the majority of the time it is great to hear opposing viewpoints on the letters you publish.
I strongly agree that comments should be moderated so that hateful posts and flame wars can be removed. I like seeing comments as long as they’re civil. I also think anonymous comments should be permitted.
As a pseudonymous poster, I would stop posting if required to use my legal name. Why? I don’t feel like being harassed by every lunatic with an ax to grind. It’s worth pointing out that the only poster credibly accused of making threats is using their full legal name.
This sort of behavior is unacceptable no matter if it comes from Theobald Wellington Bumberkin III or MyLittlePonyFan.
The ability to comment is an important one for the Cambridge Day, I think. There’s a lot of important nuance that can be learned in the comments that just can’t make it into the body of every article, it’s a valuable resource.
I was one of the people whose information had been obtained and used off of the platform, I wouldn’t describe what happened to me as Doxxing anymore though, now that I’ve learned that it was just simply a common configuration for Wordpress sites. I wish it had been made more widely known in the past, but the past is the past.
I don’t know that the Cambridge Day needs pro-active moderation, but a clear Code of Conduct and a way to report misbehavior would be helpful, so long as parties acting in bad-faith don’t abuse those avenues of reporting.
It feels like there’s been an uptick in people making a fuss about anonymous commenting, but I hope that “real names only” isn’t the chosen direction. Similar conversations on Facebook, Nextdoor, and “verified” Twitter clearly prove that real names don’t guarantee civility. In fact, the worst recent example of misbehavior among commenters here (in my view at least) came from someone using their real name.
Anonymity certainly can be abused to create sockpuppets or alt accounts to skirt moderation, but as far as I can tell, that hasn’t been an issue here? And banning anonymous comments comes with its own problems – for example, there’s people I’ve criticized or disagreed with here who have a reputation for going after others and the last thing I need is for someone to show up where I live and look into my windows/through my mailbox (which one of these people actually did to someone else, as per a Cambridge Day article ~2 years ago).
Also, while Cambridge Day’s scope is local, it is a public website accessible to anyone on the internet. Of course expecting 100% privacy is unrealistic, but if some random creep wants to track me down I certainly don’t want to make it extra easy for them to do so.
IMO the “stable pseudonyms” approach strikes the best balance of accountability with privacy. And I try (though not always successfully) to comment in a way that makes it clear I’m local/invested in these issues, did my research, and am willing to engage in good faith if others are.
Finally, it also seems impractical from a logistics standpoint: what’s to stop someone from making up a plausible sounding “real name”? Will Cambridge Day start asking for verification as other platforms like Facebook do, such as a photo of an ID document? If so, can it be trusted with that kind of information, given that this same post mentions a long-standing privacy flaw that was only fixed recently, and that even large companies with substantial cybersecurity resources regularly see data breaches these days?
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For a code of conduct – good idea in theory, will be threading a needle in practice. I would encourage the board to look at whatever comment threads prompted this call for ideas in the first place, and think very carefully about how one would (and whether it’s even possible to) craft language that prohibits the comments you’ve deemed “vitriolic, mean, offensive or at the very least in bad taste” (this alone seems quite broad and unenforceable) without catching others in the crossfire. Examining precedent/examples from similar forums could also yield ideas, including potential intermediate measures – for example, if a discussion starts getting too heated, a common moderator tool is locking comments for a day to lower the temperature, without having to wade into thornier content moderation territory.
If Cambridge Day does discontinue the comment section, then at the very least, the bar for editorial fact-checking/vetting on op-eds should be MUCH higher. The most frequent reason I leave a comment is to correct misinformation contained in a published op-ed. If there isn’t staff capacity for this, then maybe (for more “controversial” issues at least) could make things debate-style and reach out to opposing viewpoint(s) for a response or op-ed of their own and publish them side by side? Though this could get messy as well.
Get rid of the comments section (and I say that as someone who comments here fairly often).
They are a mechanism for discourse to descend into vitriol. They serve no useful purpose unless you moderate them extensively, and at that point you might as well ban the comments and re-direct that manpower to more productive purposes, such as reporting more news or spiffing up the website.
If anything, perhaps you could establish a portion of this website to nothing but comments; and leave the articles alone. Then compel people to sign in with social media accounts such as Facebook or Bluesky, even though that still doesn’t address the problem of anonymous commenters engaging in trash.
Commenting is fun, to be sure; but it’s not good for us and it’s not good for news. If I really want to express my opinions, I’ll write you a letter.
I have not noticed a correlation between anonymity and quality of comments
I tend to agree with the person who suggested dispensing with the comments section, as unfortunately it seems to be mainly a vehicle for vitriol. I’ve been the target of many personal attacks, solely for having expressed views that a couple of others don’t agree with. If the comments section is retained, perhaps each commenter could be restricted to one comment per article, since that would put the focus on the content of the article and not on those who might be responding to it.
There is a difference between personal attacks and political disagreement. Some people seem to be demanding the silence of political disagreements by claiming personal attacks that don’t exist, while ignoring far more uncouth behavior from people they agree with. None of these proposals seem to do anything to address the one person, using her real name, who sent threatening emails and doxxed several other commenters for daring to disagree with her. What these proposals are far more likely to do is chill speech and restrict discourse to the already over represented.
and ponies for everyone!
I suggest keeping the comments. I sometimes find them informative and useful. Possibly limiting the number of words, such as with the Globe restriction of about 250 words, could be helpful. As a frequent reader of Cambridge Day, I am able to choose whether to read the comments or not.
“If Cambridge Day does discontinue the comment section, then at the very least, the bar for editorial fact-checking/vetting on op-eds should be MUCH higher. The most frequent reason I leave a comment is to correct misinformation contained in a published op-ed. If there isn’t staff capacity for this, then maybe (for more “controversial” issues at least) could make things debate-style and reach out to opposing viewpoint(s) for a response or op-ed of their own and publish them side by side? Though this could get messy as well.”
I strongly agree with this. There are far too many op-eds published on here with blatant falsehoods coming from the same usual suspects, who already have disproportionate influence relative to their numbers and the strength of their arguments. Removing the ability to directly correct these mistruths, especially without other changes to the editorial standards, would be a major mistake and would be far more likely to drag down the quality of local discourse than improve it.
Any regular commenters who subscribe to follow-up comments (and therefore used a real email address) already saw what some of them now breathlessly describe as a data breach. Is it because someone else used the information? I am unaware of any doxxing, but I have heard that some of the people who make a habit of nastiness and insults weren’t at all happy to learn that one of their favorite punching bags pierced their anonymity. Do they think that’s the first time it’s happened, or do they think it’s perfectly okay if it’s their buddies doing it?
My opinion on anonymity is that I use my real name on a local site like this, and elsewhere I use a screen name that is recognizable as me to people who know me. I’ve already been cyberstalked and otherwise harassed by people around here (Cambridge, not Cambridge Day), and at least one of them has invited nationwide, if not global, harassment of me for saying a true thing that they didn’t like under my real name in a zoom meeting. Misogyny is alive and well on the internet, and too many leftier-than-thou men find it great sport.
That said, I try very hard to educate myself so that what I say is based in reality instead of ideology. I have no problem with owning and correcting my mistakes, but the bald assertions of anonymous “experts” on Cambridge Day aren’t proof. I value the fact-based contributions of people who agree with me and people who disagree with me because that’s how I learn. I’m sick to death of the arrogant insults that have become all too common, especially among the anonymous commenters around here.
Heather, I was the one to first say that I had been doxxed. I don’t necessarily agree with that characterization of what happened anymore though, as I’ve learned my information was shared through the normal use of Cambridge Day. I’d consider it still an unintentional data leakage, since it wasn’t made clear that that information would be shared publicly, but I also understand that’s not an uncommon feature for Wordpress sites like this one.
That said, I do think it was a very inappropriate use of that data, by a user of this platform. I received a somewhat threatening email naming my home and IP addresses, asking me to stop participating in Cambridge Day discussions because the author of that email perceived my comments as bullying, and as a “crime”, nevermind the fact that I never attacked the email author’s character, only disagreed with their comments publicly.
I agree, insults and personal attacks have no place here, but it’s the behavior that matters, not whether someone uses their real name or not.
Heather Hoffman the apologia for your fellow CCC members nasty behavior shows how little you actually care for decorum.
“Is it because someone else used the information?”
Tracking down multiple people’s personal info and sending them emails saying “I know where you live and work” is very clearly a thinly veiled threat.
“I am unaware of any doxxing, but I have heard that some of the people who make a habit of nastiness and insults weren’t at all happy to learn that one of their favorite punching bags pierced their anonymity.”
You are literally describing doxxing but you think it is fine because you don’t like the people targeted. The person who did it was very clear she shared personal information with others (information that was not in fact available on this site), while accusing them of extremely overblown allegations that don’t hold up to any basic scrutiny and demanding their silence. That you seem to revel in this says a lot about you, frankly.
“Do they think that’s the first time it’s happened, or do they think it’s perfectly okay if it’s their buddies doing it?”
Just because doxxing and internet harassment are unfortunately common does not make it acceptable. You also seem to be the one who thinks it’s perfectly ok when your buddies are doing it. Just a stunning lack of self reflection or sense of irony to say this while justifying your friend doing it.
I am sick to death of the cry bullying by those with more privilege than they know what to do with.
That comment is a perfect example that some people are perfectly comfortable tossing out unfounded accusations and insults while excusing the terrible behavior of their friends under their full legal name.
You all have poisoned the discourse, constantly throw out insults and baseless accusations at anyone who disagrees with you, threaten livelihoods, but still attempt to claim the moral high ground. Considering the disproportionate influence these individuals and groups have, and the unsavory tactics they employ to silence critics, it is no wonder why many who dare to disagree with you publicly prefer pseudo/anonymity.
The comments are educational for me. People who don’t like them don’t have to look.
For me, the gold standard of local on-line journalism is the New Haven Independent, and this includes their curation of comments. I’m sure the editor, Paul Bass, would be happy to share his approach and what makes it work; I would love to lend my services to Cambridge Day if you decide to go this route.
I’m grateful that the Day allows comments. I too have learned from them. But I like the idea of a word limit and some kind of moderation. The conversation on this thread so far is a perfect example of how people can get grumpy so quickly that the nuance gets lost and it stops being fun to read. Still, really good comments from some of you, so thanks!