Facebook may be the best example of how the internet has transformed from a land of anonymity to a place where users must take responsibility for their comments. Though individuals are free to choose their social media name, they must attribute it to a profile and a circle of friends who presumably wouldn't accept friend requests from someone they didn't know. Thus, every comment users make on Facebook is easily tracked, not just to the writer's name, but typically to a variety of personal information.
"It's not so much that our offline lives are going online, it's that our offline and online lives are more integrated," Mark Lashley, professor of communications at La Salle University in Philadelphia, told the Seattle Times.
Numerous online publications and websites, motivated to end hateful comments by anonymous users, are following Facebook's lead by requiring visitors to register with the site and include their full name and other personal information before leaving a comment, the Seattle Times reported. YouTube, famous for its volatile post-video discussions, demands users to sign in through Google Plus before leaving their opinions. The Huffington Post requires commentators to register through their Facebook profiles.
Nearly half of the U.S.'s 137 largest newspapers now ban anonymous commentary, according to the Seattle Times. The practice forces users to stake some part of their reputation to their opinions, or at least weeds out those who'd rather not go through the trouble of creating a fake email account. According to the Huff Post, which also monitors published comments quite fastidiously, "registration before comment-ation" has been relatively effective.
"We are reaching a place where the Internet is growing up," said Jimmy Soni, managing editor of the Huff Post. "These changes represent a maturing (online) environment."
The Seattle Times, author of this story idea, bans comments all together, as do other online publications, such as Popular Science, because, as its editor Suzanne Labarre wrote in a blog post, they are "bad for science."
As you can see below, University Herald gives users the choice of whether to register through the site or log on as a guest. Let the commentary begin...(or not).
