New commenting system at East Idaho News fights trolls, so you don’t have to
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I started my career as a newspaper guy, and decades ago, I always appreciated the opinion page, because it was always the most fun part of the newspaper to read. I loved—and still enjoy—a good conflict!
The best part about the opinion page, though, was that angry letters to the editor were vetted by the editor to ensure their authenticity. Plus, if something was too disgusting or disgraceful for the public, it never made the page.
But today, it’s way, way harder to prevent horrible words from getting out to the public, all because of the internet. Nowadays, everyone has an opinion, and everyone wants to share it online — from the insightful and intelligent to the depraved and despicable.
Let me compare the scale for you — in its heyday, a mid-sized daily paper might publish 12 to 15 letters to the editor or columns each issue. Today, a popular mid-sized news organization gets hundreds to thousands of online comments every day.
The process of vetting them all is next to impossible.
In the past three years, EastIdahoNews.com has had just under 300,000 comments on its website, over three million comments on Facebook, hundreds of thousands on YouTube and tens of thousands more on Instagram, X, and TikTok.
As you might imagine, with those kinds of numbers, dealing with trolls, bad actors, scammers, spammers, pornographers, and religious and political extremists is a full-time battle for multiple people.
Sometimes it can be hard to keep up! But we’re introducing a new commenting system to help.
Introducing Arena.im
Some of you may have already noticed that as of Tuesday, our system has switched from OpenWeb to Arena.im.
Arena.im is a community forum, driven heavily by artificial intelligence under the direction of our moderation team. It will better ensure that commenters are real people, connected with legitimate email addresses and social media accounts.
It will do a superior job automatically screening comments for those that produce hate speech, offensive language, or encourage violent acts, in addition to a plethora of other derogatory categories.
In essence, its goal is to make EastIdahoNews.com’s online forum a healthier, happier space for more productive dialogue by everyday people.
Other technical improvements that come with Arena include a system that adds interactive polls to our news stories, as well as a live blog and live chat options for content that requires constant updating, such as court trials.
We expect big things from this new platform and look forward to seeing your reaction as well.
Would you like to help with moderation?
One of the most oft-requested questions we get at EastIdahoNews.com is, “Can I help you with moderation?”
In the past, we’ve resisted volunteer moderators, but we’re going to give it a try. In addition to our staff moderation team, we’re going to enlist community moderators to help manage live feeds and online comments — particularly during large events. All of these people will be working under our lead moderator, Peggy “Momerator” Jeppesen.
Our hope is that this will be most helpful in places like Facebook and YouTube, where the number of comments reaches into the upper hundreds of thousands to millions every year.
If you are interested in being a volunteer moderator — please email me at nate@eastidahonews.com.
Why are you censoring me? What about the First Amendment?
A special note to the inevitable horde of trolls that respond to this column by saying that comment moderation is censoring Freedom of Speech and violating the U.S. Constitution.
Do we censor your bad behavior? Yes. Absolutely.
EastIdahoNews.com has always been extremely open-minded when it comes to comments. We let you say a remarkable number of things before we start deleting comments. We believe strongly that you should be able to say controversial things and have strong opinions — but many of you love pushing my limits.
Does censoring you on our own platform violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? No, of course not. EastIdahoNews.com is a private company that runs private forums subject to our own rules — found here.
The First Amendment, which we, as media, cherish, protects all Americans from government censorship of speech. EastIdahoNews.com is not a government entity, thus this doesn’t apply. If you don’t believe me, I’m going to post the First Amendment below. I can think of no better way than to end a column about comments.
Thanks, everyone!