June 19th, 2010
Who the anonymice are
By Andy Schotz
For the Boston Globe’s Sunday magazine, Neil Swidey looked at the people who post anonymously at Boston.com.
Is posting after stories a fun, lively outlet for outspoken people?
Or a haven for the brash and insensitive?
If you think one way or the other, or somewhere in between, this might be the most telling detail in the story: In one day, Boston.com had to examine 1,330 comments flagged as possibly being over the line (whatever that line is).
Does your newspaper have the staff and time to police hundreds or thousands of comments a day to weed out the sludge? Isn’t that a waste of everyone’s time?
Remember, the 1,330 were only the comments that were flagged.
And that’s at one point in time. The cesspool under each each story has the potential to grow all day, every day.
Tags: Anonymous comments, Boston Globe, Boston.com, Neil Swidey
July 25th, 2010 at 8:37 am
There are anonymice, and there are anonymeisters. Anonymice are the twits that they appear to be: they are closet cowards (i.e. frustrated tyrants) who like to fling their bile from under the safety blanket of anonymity. Anonymeisters are professional provocateurs, who only pretend to be twits: they are paid by the military-industrial-government complex to provoke animosity between people based on race, faith, gender, political affiliation and other “wedge” lines in order to undermine democracy and boost arms sales. The anonymeisters set the tone which the anonymice dutifully imitate.