Huffington Post to ax anonymous comments
Arianna Huffington told reporters that the vitriol and trolling of no-name commenters aren’t part of the ‘grown-up Internet.’
Those numbers may drop off fairly substantially come next month, though. Site founder Arianna Huffington, after speaking at a HubSpot conference in Boston on Wednesday, said HuffPo will phase out anonymous comments by mid-September.
“Trolls are just getting more and more aggressive and uglier, and I just came from London, where there are rape and death threats,” she said, according to GigaOm.
She added: “We need to evolve a platform to meet the needs of the grown-up Internet.”
HuffPo has been using an algorithm named “JuLiA” (Just a Linguistic Algorithm) and about 30 full-time moderators to deal with comments. There’s no word yet on exactly how the system will change once anonymous comments aren’t part of the mix.
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