Steve Gillmor, Japan, and the Trojan Horse called Facebook Comments

 

There are increasingly few areas in which my professional background in print publishing comes into play when discussing digital distribution, but one area offers me the opportunity for a direct, and quite important comparison: the new Facebook commenting system.

Rolled out recently, and adopted by a number of high profile websites, the comment system requires you to log in with your Facebook account credentials. If you do not “have” Facebook account credentials, you simply cannot comment. This gate keeper commenting dynamic, along with the comment field’s design that looks far more like a Facebook page than a customized solution for sites using the system, immediately raises the question of “whose content is it?” Facebook’s or the participating site’s?

The oft-repeated value proposition of using Facebook comments on one’s site relates to the notion of accountability and credibility. In other words, when people are forced to use their real name (which is connected to all their real world connections on Facebook), trolls, comment spam and anonymous screeds will vanish. A look at new Aol acquisition Techcrunch would seem to prove this point, on the surface.

Overnight the site went from having posts that averaged at least 60 (and often upwards of 150-200) comments to a new average of about 20. Were two thirds of the comments really just worthless trolls hiding behind anonymity? Of course not.

The value of anonymous comments on Techcrunch was proven recently when one of the site’s columnists, Steve Gillmor, posted an essay that many opined was rambling and without merit (judge for yourself). As the mostly critical comments piled up, the story shifted from the point of the article, to the more general point of what constitutes a relevant think-piece on a tech site. In the end the article had around 268, mostly passionate (positive and negative), comments. Comments on Gillmor’s latest think-piece using the new Facebook comments? 26 comments. Indeed, the comments are now strangely devoid of the bombast, sarcastic wit, and pithy screeds that once characterized Techcrunch comments. 268 comments equals a conversation. A conversation equals an engaged community. An engaged community equals a more relevant channel. That relevancy is why the site was purchased by Aol for millions of dollars. But by integrating Facebook’s comments into one’s site, a site owner essentially passes the power of that community signal into the hands of Facebook, thus removing one of the most important components of value from a media brand—audience engagement.

I know this to be true not based on pure theory, but from my real world lessons in print media. As recently as 2007, when I was Editor-in-Chief of New York Press (a weekly newspaper), my favorite part of the day was opening paper (gasp!) mail from readers writing in to comment about a particular story they had seen or wanted to see. The letters, often anonymous, ranged from the laudatory, to the downright mean, but I read them all and published many of them, complimentary or critical. What then happened was that other readers would read the letters page, form their own opinions on the opinions of fellow readers, and then send us their own response letters. Sometimes reader-to-reader conversations like these went on for months.

Similarly, when I was Editor-in-Chief of The Source magazine (a music/lifestyle magazine) some of my strongest memories came from the mail bag. Letters came from everyone including politicians (I still have my letter from President Bill Clinton congratulating us on a strong tech issue), incarcerated readers hoping to have a voice, vocal business leaders and of course devoted, and often anonymous, regular readers.

For me, the letters were one of the most concrete methods of detecting whether or not we were properly serving our readership and more importantly whether we were publishing stories that had the kind of immediacy and relevance that inspired commentary. Reader letters are not only fun, they are essential to an editor as she/he constantly works to effectively curate and steer the direction of a publication.

And while anonymous trolling comments are indeed one of the troublesome aspects of featuring comments on certain sites, on the right sites comments, anonymous can be an incredibly effective way to fuel reader engagement. Of course the most important aspect of anonymous comments and letters is the voice that it can give to whistle-blowers who need to reveal important information about a major systematic injustice or impending action that, because of their sensitive position, they can only reveal anonymously.

In a world where anonymous comments vanish, we risk the self-censoring climate of many less interesting sites and even nations in which speaking raw truth publically is a rarity due to a community cowed into silence by fear of retribution against them or their families. Just last month we had a front row seat as to the importance of anonymous comments as major networks such as CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera featured live anonymous commentary via phone from people calling from within the danger zones of violence plagued Egypt and Libya.

To further understand the importance of anonymity to comments, consider the phenomenon of Mixi, one of the Japan’s largest social networks with around 20 million users. In a country that is based on largely on the concept of tatemae (maintaining your polite public face) the site, which allows anonymous accounts, is one of the few places you can be exposed to Japanese citizens expressing their honne (raw, true opinions). The very fact that Facebook pushes users to reveal their real identity when creating an account is a major reason for the site’s slow adoption in privacy-conscious Japan. In fact, one of the most trafficked tech news websites in Japan, Asiajin, is led by an editor who appears at reader meetups in a mask to protect his identity. While some might bemoan such tactics, in Japan such a tactic surprises no one.

So yes, in some cases, anonymous comments are quite troublesome, and sometimes may even cause a site to shut down. But in the aggregate, keeping ownership of your comments and allowing the anonymous comments to flow generally encourages more valuable reader engagement rather than fomenting negativity or the appearance of comment trolls. Facebook comments are a Trojan Horse that will inevitably lead to the abduction of your readers—don’t know open the door. 

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