Soapboxes in cyberspace: how can the media facilitate debate online?

Daniel Mermelstein: How can the media facilitate debate online?

The challenge set out at this event may not be a problem we can solve

At the BBC we did have a business model for ‘Have Your Say’: we produce 300 stories a day and we want to encourage people to comment on the issues of the day. But we didn’t have technical constraints. We have very good engineers and could implement the solutions we needed. On the issue of design, we have people such as Paul Sissons who understand visual design, information architecture and user experience. One issue is the cost of moderation, as we had to build something that would not break the bank.

We see ‘Have Your Say’ as being more of a soapbox: users post and move on. We designed out many community features, such as threading, to encourage people to reply to the forum. We recognised that 90% of people are there to read. We don’t expect all users to create debates. We have a recommendation system, but it is not complex. The entry point is low: you don’t need to register. We have flexible moderation: pre- and post-moderation.

We have tried technological solutions to improve quality, but get complaints of censorship. This challenge is not really susceptible to technical fixes or clever design. We should ask why we don’t have a punch up here at this event. There are also issues about scale.

We should recognise that the BBC promote informed debate just by providing the facts. Tool-based solutions will always a bit of a compromise. This is not necessarily a problem we can solve.

Another model we need to be aware of is linking out to other places.

Pre-event position statement

Is this a challenge of business models or technical constraints? Lack of understanding of users or failure to design the right kind of spaces? Or the product of broader social phenomena we have yet to understand?

I would argue that from the point of view of a large media organisation like the BBC, the problem of facilitating debate online is definitely not one of either business models, technical constraints, lack of user understanding or failure of design.

I’d like to talk about my experience of developing the ‘Have Your Say’ area of the BBC News website. So this is very much focussed on one are of the vast BBC offer in terms of interactivity, community or whatever you want to call it, that is debate around the news that we produce.

We certainly had a business model: we produce around 300 news pieces every day. We think that, in general, our users can add a lot of value to that content: they can point out mistakes, they can add fresh insights from their own experience, they can provide eyewitness accounts about the stories. User generated content is invaluable in that respect and particularly for a site like ours which has readers literally in every corner of the world. And they come to us in droves, wanting to tell us what they think. So we wanted to harness all that in some way and provide a means for our users to communicate with us, and with other users. And we wanted to do it in a way that was scalable and sustainable over time.

We didn’t particularly have any technical constraints: we could, within reason, build or buy any system and adapt it to our needs. We are lucky to have very clever software engineers who know a lot about many things.

We think that we understand our users, and are learning more about them every day. We can do user testing, we can do focus groups.

And we also have very good designers who understand user experience, information architecture and many other things.

And we’ve been thinking about this quite hard. When we started on the current Have Your Say system 3 years ago, we decided that this would not be a community as such, more of a soapbox platform if you like, where people came and gave their opinion, but did not necessarily engage in long-running arguments with each other. We did not want a vociferous minority to intimidate the majority of our users. So we designed out many aspects of community, like threaded discussions and personalised avatars and things like that. In effect, we were asking everyone to reply to the forum, not to each other. And we did not allow users to start their own debates, we kept control of that.

We also wanted people to help us sift through the large volume of content that we receive and decide what stuff was good and what wasn’t. A sort of distributed moderation function. So we allowed users to recommend individual comments and we present a view of the comments sorted by number of recommendations. But again, this was not a complex reputation system that would give the savvy or the committed an incentive to game the system, or make some users more ‘valuable’ than others. It’s basically “if you like this comment, recommend it to others, if you don’t, just ignore it”. And everyone could recommend as many comments as they liked.

We also wanted to keep the entry bar as low as possible, so you don’t even have to be a registered user to send a comment. But you do have to be registered to recommend – I suppose this was a technical constraint, as it was the only way of preventing abuse to the recommendation system.

We also gave ourselves flexibility on the moderation front – we could make some debates pre-moderated, so everything had to be accepted by a moderator before being published to the site; and other debates reactively moderated, so that as long as you were a registered user you could post your comment directly to the site. And we had some long internal debates about that, because to this day ‘Have Your Say’ is the only place in the whole of the BBC News website where stuff can get published without any editorial oversight. That was a big step for us to take, and it was not an easy decision to make.

So now you could have a pre-moderated debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and a reactively moderated one about your favourite ABBA song of all time.

The problem is, and this goes back to the original point, how long does it take for a thread on ABBA songs to degenerate into an ugly row about how Israelis are all fascists and Palestinians are all terrorists? The answer is, not very long, unfortunately.

So we tried more technology: we applied a software fix to restrict the number of posts any one person can make in a given amount of time. So that helps, a bit, but mostly helps in controlling the moderation overhead of having reactively moderated debates.

But then obviously, some people complain that we are restricting their ability to have their say. Which is true, but you can’t win, can you?

So I can’t see how technology, design or audience insight will necessarily help in answering the question of why, if we are all sitting in this room talking about ABBA songs, we don’t end up within a few minutes having a fistfight about Israel and the Palestinians, but online people do exactly that.

I suspect, as many other people have pointed out, it has to do with net etiquette, anonymity and lack of social control or punishment online, etc. But I will leave others to speculate on that.

The BBC does have a role, in fact a duty, to promote civic participation and informed debate. We certainly do more than most in providing the information that people need to be able to consider the issues and take a view. And we go some way in providing some basic tools for that debate. And we will keep working on those tools, but they will always be a compromise. What we probably need to do a bit more of is recognise that there are other places on the internet where the debates can take place, and be more open about linking to these places instead of trying to be a sometimes uncomfortable host to all the conversations.

Meg Pickard

We are focused on creating happier, more productive communities. We look at community development, proposition development, user experience.

Blog comments [on Comment is Free] are not just an issue for us. See the Washington Post blog shutdown caused by this.

People are aggressive... but they’re also passionate: they care. But, if you were in a pub and people started hurling things around you would want to leave. People perceive the anonymity of the platform is an excuse to lash out.

Socialness is a string of individuals. This is different from community.

Even if the majority of comments are constructive and well-thought out, it only take a handful of troublemakers to change the environment of a thread. This makes it broken as a user experience

Solutions:

1. Human Solutions (e.g. Moderation): The ‘whack-a-mole’ approach and the ‘naughty step’ don’t make for good behaviour, they just help to clean up bad behaviour.
2. Technical solutions: need comprehensive moderation platform, get users involved in moderation of their own community, so they start caring about it. Make it a conversation. Digg.com as an example of community shaping of content. But there is also the danger of ‘gaming’ the system. Aggregate activities and collect them so “I am not just sniping in random areas”, instead “it is recorded against my username” – but not in a bad way. Turns users into creators (of conversations). Reputations are valued and valuable. As with Ebay reputations, you don’t want to have to earn those points again.
3. Editorial solutions: look at the way the way the debate is framed

Don’t just throw comments at the bottom of everything. “Blogs and articles should be treated differently”. Not everything should be commentable. News stories tie up things, blog post should leave some things dangling.

Danger of top-down mentality makes users feel like they are being preached at (power imbalance). How you set up a debate influences how people respond. Provoking them is the wrong way. Journalists might need to learn a new style of writing for blogs, as well as learning ways of engaging with users and a new way of reading. There is a need for education, training and guidelines: for users as well as authors.

Consider what is driving user commenting behaviour: Are readers responding to the writer or to each other? Are they creating some kind of digital graffiti? Social not the same as community.

Mainstream media organisations are moving from objective reporting and commentary to re-think what journalism means and what is reported, with perspectives gathered and context provided as part of story.

Pre-event position statement

People are using the internet not only to commune with each other about cats, sandwich fillings, race relations and environmental policy, but coming together (and sometimes coming to blows) with and via media organisations in discussion of topics which they care about. These kind of discussions were previously much more segregated, with talking heads noodling in late-night TV studios and bylined in comment sidebars in print, while passionate people – citizens – talked about the same topics (and the coverage of it) in their own communities at work, on blogs, at the pub... Read Meg’s full post on her meish dot org blog

Lee Bryant

I am enthusiastic about potential, but also in some respects a skeptic. Some of what we are doing is over-blown.

Pseudo-academics layer on the idea of community. Community is a given. You don’t join the Guardian community. Real communities demand deeper commitment and carry costs as well as benefits to the individual.

On needs and constraints: there is no spam in Samizdat literature: it served a very human need . “It wasn’t just something you would do when you get back from the pub” – it demanded commitment.

See Comment is Free discussion of Russia that is wrong-headed, an no one picks up a clear error in it, and other piece on Serbia by an informed commentator that with three insulting comments. Intimacy is needed for political debates, eg: RIIA Chatham House rules, Question Time, debates “with almost painful politeness”. See George Osborne’s thoughts about the social web – great ideas that may yet inform future policy, but we need to consider how to do this in large, open, public spaces (see the Tragedy of the Commons). We need some new rules. Simple, open MySpace-type setups may not be the way forward, but rather smaller, more intimate spaces where people have a greater degree of common purpose.

How do we do this? I don’t know. But when I consider a real-world online community I am studying centred around a Bosnian town that was destroyed during Serbian ethnic cleansing. This community was absolutely necessary for the re-establishment of the town, and as a result even people who strongly disagree had an interest in keeping debate constructive, and the community would rein people in when they became too argumentative. This is a case where the human need for community is tangibly real – it is “not the kind of community where people do drive-by commenting” just because they can.

Recommendations: create artificial scarcity, nurture debates in intimate settings and then, when a community is sustainable, you can begin to scale it up. Don’t start with big, open spaces, as people are either too scared to contribute or too ready to take cheap, polarised positions. In this room, I am restrained from insulting you as [you can retaliate]. Watchwords are intimacy, scale and common purpose, with feedback loops to regulate behaviour. Limit participation in some respects as well, grow by demand.

I suspect in future, we will try to think about the social architecture and how we can map behaviours in the real world onto online spaces. How are people incentivised to behave? It is important to map social dynamics to real world behaviours.

Self-expression is important. Participation is not being invited into a place, asked what you want and then being pushed out again. Instead, especially where we are thinking about citizen participation with government, we need to instead create a neutral space and vest into it some power, information and tools so you they co-create value. See the Flickr model of ‘object-based’ socialisation – this is a useful model as people often find it easier to talk about something rather than directly about each other. Also, why is Flickr so polite compared to YouTube? Where did its culture come from? Did it just grow up from early adopters and then later joiners were forced to either share it or leave? Also, how do we turn around failing communities?

Pre-event position statement

Newspaper blogs and online initiatives led by mainstream media have played an important role in the development of online debate, but the quality and tone of many of the debates they host lags behind the best that the real world has to offer. In real life, I have enjoyed many high quality debates, seminars under Chatham House Rules, panel discussions and indeed episodes of Question Time and other highbrow BBC current affairs output. Much of these have been characterised by almost painful politeness and mutual respect even among people who might violently oppose each other outside such a context... Read Lee’s full post on Headshift blog

Dr Andrew Calcutt: Problems and possibilities

Since the disaggregation of the political realm around 20 years ago, disconnection has been – and still is – the problem of our age. But reconnection is not a technicality.

Don’t under-estimate the changes that have taken place, from political representation to media representation

Debate used to be about contestation and transformation, for or against. Without the expectation of transformation it is doubtful whether debate online constitutes modern politics, or even debate: it may be a different way to recognise ourselves and each other, comparable to self-promotion and self-recognition via MySpace or YouTube.

‘Come on in, the participation is lovely’ say media owners who want to monetarise it
It is easy to overestimate the emancipation of the user as opposed to the reader. [Key] But ‘dear readers’ were never mere readers. They expected their response, as actions, to be reported in the media. In other words they expected to be subjects in the outside world. Whereas ‘users’ can only expect to be subjects of their own discourse, so perhaps in the user we are witnessing a diminution of the reader/citizen. [Key]

Note the disjuncture: we have had 10 years of online debate co-existing with the one party state of New Labour. These two could not co-exist without disconnection between online discourse and the rest of social reality.

Comment is almost free: for many editorial managers it makes economic sense to dispense with expensive, original enquiry and promote comment which is cheaper to produce. The tendency is towards a slimmer volume, a thinner base of reporting and tomes of comment on top – disproportionate if not parasitic.

Apart from managers undermining editorial values, some journalists are doing it to themselves. When they volunteer that ‘there is always someone who knows more about the story than me’, this is stating the obvious. As a reporter, of course there is always an extra item of information that eludes you. But since when was reporting tantamount to information gathering. The latter is a precondition for the former, but not a sufficient definition of it. There comes a point in the construction of every story when the point becomes re-ordering events not as they occurred but in an order of priority (in news = new, typically last first). [Key] To go one step beyond events and re-order and abstract, with your material, worked up in this way, and held up for scrutiny, measured against the public interest (known in Media Studies as ‘news values’; on the job it’s the desk editor’s gut feeling about what is going to work) – that was the expectation of the reporter in the age of politics. ‘Now the temptation is to get into bed with being embedded, as if attachment is the only plausible position for professional journalists. While the ostensible aim of this position is to democratise journalism – amateurs and professionals alike, it says, we are all users now – its effects are anti-democratic. This is because to reject the capacity to stand back from events in order to reconstruct them (professional objectivity), is also to reject the possibility of standing beyond immediate self-interest in order to formulate a coherent political position which lays claim to the interests of humanity (historical subjectivity).

Different sites will need to develop diverse criteria according to their own interests and concerns. The important thing is that there should be criteria, that space in which to speak should generally be conditional on having something new to say.

However, on a more positive note, we are better ‘tooled up’ today than ever before. Whether journalistic or academic, social inquiry – inquiring into the nature of the world we have made – can occur more readily and more rigorously with this technology, and without the dead weight of failing institutions.

Pre-event position statement

The problem of our age is the difficulty we have in re-connecting after the disaggregation of the political realm. This was the territory of contestation but it was also common ground; and now it has been swept away. In its absence, the problem of re-connection is ever-present. As editor of Rising East, a magazine which looks at the re-making of East London, I spend time with urbanists for whom the answer is cultural regeneration based on location, location, location. But my magazine is an online magazine, and this brings me into contact with champions of the global conversation afforded by Web 2.0, for whom the answer lies largely in digital dis-place-ment. Both responses are too easy, as if there could be either a traditional or a technical fix to the problem of social solidarity after politics; or as if participation might be a sufficient end in itself.

The problem with many global conversationalists is that they see themselves (and extrapolate from themselves to everyone else) participating in the extension of politics by other means. But one of the constituent elements in modern politics is now missing, namely, the expectation of social transformation. Accordingly we have moved from modern political representation – for or against transformation of social reality – to postmodern participation in mediated representation and self-recognition. The trend is towards narcissism – clearly discernible in the D-I-Y celebrity of MySpace and YouTube, where large numbers of fairly ordinary folks become published personalities in whom others are invited to recognise themselves. But similar trends may also be at work in ‘debate’. For if online discourse has little or no consequence beyond itself, if it avoids the kind of centralising mode or mechanism which might make it conclusive, then despite a more progressive gloss, much of it may be just another mirror in which to rehearse identities. Do I exaggerate? Well, the Web decades have also been the years of New Labour, just now coming to an end with Tony Blair’s imminent resignation. Throughout this period, it seems to me that online debate has been so heavily trumped by its absence elsewhere, that it is at least debatable whether in the UK such ‘debate’ has been much more than an attractive notion – a different device for self-recognition.

Similarly, it is problematic to assume that the move from readers to users is an expansion of our social role. It could be; but in current circumstances it may not be. Historically, readers of news were never simply readers: they read in order to act in the world beyond media, as they also modified their actions in the light of what they read in the media. Now there is endlessly variable digital discourse and a parallel, non-media universe of seemingly shady, not-quite-people living impenetrable, predetermined lives. Do we all go to Hades when not online? The separation of Media Heaven from Non-Media Hell strikes me as a sign of humanity’s diminished confidence in our own Earthly Powers.

There is a problem of parasitism: comment is almost free while facts are much more expensive. Opinion is attractive to editorial managers not least because it is cost effective in the short-term; but we need big media to spend big money on reporting, or else ‘news’ will become parasitic on an increasingly slim volume of externally-oriented inquiry – a trend that mimics the relation of the financial economy to the industrial production from which it is derived.

I’ve already paraphrased – mangled – CP Scott’s adage: comment is free but facts are sacred. I’d also like to pay homage – do damage – to Max Weber’s fact/value distinction. The distinction between fact and value is important, but so too is their relation. In my estimation there has been a dialectical relationship – push and pull – between on the one hand the ambition of the professional reporter to give ’em the facts by standing outside the events s/he has witnessed and standing them up against a measure of public interest – known in Media Studies as ‘news values’ and represented on the job by the desk editor’s nous; and on the other hand, the role of political subjects in reading the story and responding to it not only according to self-interest but also in terms of the public interest. Of course what constitutes the public interest is contested – a contest related to competing self-interests but not confined to them. Claims and counter claims on the public interest have been criteria for substantive debate. In both the debate over values and the attempted grasp of the facts which is the precondition for that debate, human subjects, reporter and reader/citizen in turn, have been constantly under pressure (professional and political pressures, respectively) to stand outside their immediate circumstances and concerns in order for their contribution to stand up in the public realm and be made accountable to its standards. This last is what’s meant by objectivity, and this whole process has thus comprised a dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity. Yet in the recent assumption that subjectivity is nearly all we’ve got, that in generating content we’re all users now, professionals and amateurs embedded alike in our own attachments, there is a wilful de-professionalisation on the part of journalists, which not only diminishes their role but also tends to undermine the subject position of citizens. Deprofessionalisation is disempowering even when it sees itself as democratising; and not only journalists have been diminished by it. I see its effects on some of my journalism students, who have been reared on relativism and find it hard to depict events they are meant to be reporting on in anything other than the order in which those events occurred. Left to their own devices their take on the world would remain at the level of a webcam. By contrast media organisations will be most effective in promoting substantive debate and in re-configuring the immature epistemology of young people if they harness technical and other devices to reinstate objectivity as both a qualification for continued participation and a key quality in human subjectivity.

But for all these pitfalls, there are as many possibilities. Those who want only to connect will find their connections remain empty (contentless) and frail, whatever technologies they are facilitated by. But those who have something definite to say, who are offering something substantial for others to gather around, now have ways of saying it better, louder, and with less dependence on obstructive or failing institutions. Both journalism and academia are equipped like never before to conduct more and more rigorous inquiry into society, and to prompt a more intense debate on humanity’s transformation of the wider world we have made for ourselves. We have the technology. How many, I wonder, have the conviction, the character, and the content?

Olivier Creiche

Half our revenues now come from media industry – so you are important to us

We develop our product by listening to our clients, including journalists started using our tools, initially without authorisation.

Newspapers are now providing blogging tools for readers

The recent French elections were first in which blogging was a big event. Nicola Sarkozy gave blogging tools to supporters. By contrast, Ségolène Royal’s had a site asking people tell her what to think. The mobile phone filming of Royal’s comments on teachers, in a private event, was considerable. One user can make a big difference. There was a high level of online interaction with candidates.

Most people are still looking at the main news publishers’ sites rather than those of individual journalists.

Observations:

1. Most people are lazy and have no particular talent for writing. New YouTube-like services won’t be created every day. Don’t give them sophisticated tools. The better solution is to give people limited access, with interaction in slighter way, such as comment, voting, ranking.
2. We will see the merging of newspaper and blogging tools as latter becoming content management systems and newspapers want to experiment with new forms
3. Smaller media companies will be more important, such as the Social Media Company in France, with non-full-time writers, who are finding business models around advertising. See also experiment by ex-Libération journalists.
4. It is not really about technology. It takes a lot of drive and imagination. You need people in between journalists and technologists, for instance to manage community. You need to determine if the management has the right objectives (for instance, not just increasing page views). See Le Monde, which has focused on being good over being big. Bringing in external professional writers, editorialising and making material editorially attractive, and training people to do moderation.

• How might we understand the dynamics pushing online debate, particularly around established media?
• What are the possible business models around online debate? What metrics are being used to judge success?
• Should we be moving from “objective reporting and comment to incorporating different kinds of journalism which can be open to or encourage reader response and reaction”, as Meg Pickard argues?
• What can we learn from successful models of debate in the ‘real world’? And what is unique about online as a space for debate.
• Can we identify the human factors that facilitate creating successful spaces for online debate (social, cognitive, contextual)? What are the successful on- and offline design models and patterns we can employ (profiles, threading, visualisation, notification)? How are these solutions best evaluated and tested?
• What are the technical issues constraining models of online debate (comment spam, identity, etc)?
• Which are the key editorial considerations when creating and managing such a space? How much is the character of these spaces determined by the general attitude and editorial product of the media industry?
• Rather than host debate, should the media sector seek to guide people to and contextualise interesting debates taking place elsewhere?
• How great is the scope for the media industry to use innovation to create a valuable political commons online?