Tamara Littleton

As the recent Guardian experiment has shown, news publishers are starting to look for new ways to enhance their readers’ news experience. It’s no longer just about providing accurate, well sourced and excellently written articles for people to read. These days, people visit news sites for interaction and debate.

Back in 2008, Neil Thurman wrote a report on the adoption of UGC by news websites which highlighted some of the issues editors faced. For example, they wanted to ensure that editorial standards were upheld even in the reader comments. This meant time spend editing submissions for spelling and grammar. But more importantly, the report highlighted an example of why it’s so vital to get moderation policy right. The FT decided to publish only pre-moderated comments when editors realised that racist comments were being published live on the website.

Yes, offer readers the full, interactive experience, but remember that the brand has a duty of care – to protect the sites reputation and provide readers invited to read and contribute to the website with a safe, harassment free community to contribute to.

Emotive or legally sensitive subjects, such as articles about ongoing ethnic or religious tensions, dispatches from war correspondents or current political debates, will attract readers with strong convictions and so editors may wish to pay close attention to reader reaction. Of course, there should be no censorship of strong opinion. The opinion may be objectionable to some, but that doesn’t automatically make it worthy of deletion. It’s worth seriously considering increasing the number of moderators on such articles, or blocking comments completely.

Editors need to enforce the terms of the site and remove any comments that are abusive or threatening in nature. If the comments are highly emotive, but do not breach any site rules, the editor may wish to close comments under the article in question and move the discussion to a discussion forum where the debate can continue away from the main editorial.

There are four options for moderating comments:

Pre-moderation: all comments are moderated before they go live. This is obviously the safest route to take to protect the reputation of the organisation and is the one most news organisations opt for. However, it has a major disadvantage in that there will be a time lag and many comments may never be screened due to high volumes.

Post-moderation: all comments are moderated after they go live, and removed if they are abusive. This is slightly more risky, as inappropriate comments will be seen by the community, and associated with the media brand. Again, there is danger that high volumes may mean that not all comments are screened.

A combination of pre and post moderation. Reuters, for example, has ‘approved’ commenters – those who have a strong record of behaving well in the community and have had many comments approved. These community members have their comments go live on site immediately. There is a cost advantage to this approach, as you don’t need the same level of moderation resource.

Relying on the community to moderate comments by flagging them. This is the most risky strategy, and has the most potential to damage the brand. In the UK, however, unlike the US, there is still some confusion around who is responsible for user-generated content on a news site, and some news organisations take this route to try to cover themselves under the EU Commerce Directive hosting exemption. But in practice, legal rulings on the use of the Hosting Defence have varied: it's an extremely grey legal area. In the main, brands take their duty of care very seriously, and agree that it is important to moderate thoroughly, to protect the brand’s own reputation and, of course, its users.

Twitter feeds are another matter. While it may seem like a good idea for a news site to pull in tweets about trending topics, or create hashtags relevant to the brand, it can backfire spectacularly, as The Telegraph found to its cost. Of course, you can’t moderate what people say about you on Twitter, but if you’re going to pull in a Twitter feed to your own sites, moderation will avoid apparent endorsement of abusive tweets and the risk of ‘brandjacking’.

A news organisation that wishes to maintain its reputation and – importantly – protect its readers - has no choice but to develop a moderation policy and strictly enforce it.

Note

The first article on the theme, “Managing social media for news sites: part one - The importance of contributor guidelines”, may be found on the link below:

http://www.nmk.co.uk/articles/1833  

About the author and the company

Tamara Littleton is CEO at eModeration (www.emoderation.com), an award-winning social media management agency. Based in London UK, with offices in Los Angeles and New York, eModeration provides multi-lingual moderation and community management services, consultancy and social media crisis management training to clients in the TV, entertainment and digital publishing industry and blue chip clients hosting online communities.

Committed to ethical business practices and to the promotion of child online safety, eModeration's CEO Tamara Littleton recently worked with the UK Government department UKCCIS to produce its guidelines on how to moderate online environments for children.

eModeration contributes to the growth of knowledge in the social media world via its white papers, blogs and seminars, and has a strong roster of returning clients who appreciate the high quality of its services.

Relevant links

eModeration white paper: a guide to managing social media for news sites and media organisations – September 2011 - http://www.emoderation.com/about/publications