How do we make the Guardian a better place for conversation?

 

Should commenting be for members only, or subject to stricter moderation? Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi for the Guardian

Across the internet, we have now reached a tipping point. For women, the abuse is often violent and sexualised, with direct threats to rape and mutilate. For non-white people, the abuse is often racist; for Jews, it is antisemitic; for Muslims, it is Islamophobic. To some extent, everyone online is affected. To the extent that our lives are conducted online, this is the water in which we all swim: it’s horribly polluted and it’s making a lot of us sick.Online abuse has been a problem since the earliest days of the web. Since the Guardian opened up its online articles to comments by readers in 2006, tens of thousands of conversations have taken place below the line between readers and journalists, and between readers and other readers. Many of these conversations have been excellent; thoughtful, engaged and rewarding. But some subjects – latterly Islam, refugees and immigration– have become magnets for racism and hate speech, while others – feminism, domestic violence and rape – can attract highly misogynistic responses. 

The focus is beginning to shift towards what we can do to reduce abuse and who should be taking responsibility for ensuring that this happens. The Guardian’s political editor Anushka Asthana this week reported that the Labour MP Yvette Cooper has called on police and prosecutors to unmask the true extent of online harassment, which she says is “stifling debate and ruining lives”.

The editor of the Web We Want, Becky Gardiner, and Mahana Mansfield, the Guardian’s senior data scientist, examined the 70m comments left on the Guardian since 1999, particularly those comments blocked by our moderators for abuse or derailing the conversation, and reported on what they found. The stark results offer proof of what many have long suspected: of the 10 regular writers whose articles have had the most comments blocked, eight are women (four white and four non-white, one Muslim and one Jewish) and two are black men. Three of the 10 most abused writers are gay.I would argue that the big digital players still need to bear more of the burden of the social costs of what they do (they have the deep pockets to pay for that). But news organisations aren’t blameless. With this series, we are acknowledging that the Guardian has a problem with abuse and harassment. That is why we took the very unusual step of publishing research on our moderation data, making us the first organisation in the media or technology industries to do so, andengaged readers in a discussion about how to have better conversations.

The response to this work has been fantastic – some commentators called it historic – although we also heard constructive criticism about how we communicate our moderation policy with readers, as well as the role of headlines in steering conversations. We hope that others will follow our lead in looking at their own comments, because effective solutions will be hard to find without data and dialogue. We are now exploring the possibility of sharing our data with academics working in this area, and hope others will do the same.

The Web We Want is not just about identifying the problem: it is also about trying to work out what can be done to make it better. Extreme abuse is rare on the Guardian thanks to our highly skilled moderators whose work ensures that comments abide by the community standards that are there to keep conversation respectful and constructive. But we need to maintain a supportive working environment for Guardian moderators and writers, and even low-level abuse can have a chilling effect on journalists and participation in the comments.

As editor, I think we need to act more decisively on what kind of material appears on the Guardian. Those who argue that this is an affront to freedom of speech miss the point. That freedom counts for little if it is used to silence others. When women and minorities don’t feel able to speak their mind for fear of insult, threat or humiliation, no such freedom exists.

Over the next few months, the Guardian will continue to explore, with our readers, the questions and challenges raised by these issues. Should we look at stricter moderation, or more ways of rewarding positive contributions to our site? Should we limit the number of comments we host, or make them a privilege of membership? In a time of challenge to the business model of journalism, moderation is not cheap.

In her book Hate Crimes in Cyberspace, Danielle Keats Citron compares contemporary attitudes to online abuse with attitudes to workplace sexual harassment in the 1970s. Then, it was normal to have your bottom pinched at work. It isn’t any more. Today, all kinds of bullying and aggression dominate much online conversation. Sadly, we can’t eliminate bigotry. But that doesn’t mean we have to tolerate it, much less give it a platform on which to thrive.