Deliberation and Identity Rules: The Effect of Anonymity, Pseudonyms and Real-Name Requirements on the Cognitive Complexity of Online News Comments

Abstract

How do identity rules influence online deliberation? We address this question by drawing on a data set of 45 million comments on news articles on the Huffington Post from January 2013 to May 2015. At the beginning of this period, the site allowed commenting under what we call non-durable pseudonyms. In December 2013, Huffington Post moved to regulate its forum by requiring users to authenticate their accounts. And in June 2014, Huffington Post outsourced commenting to Facebook altogether, approximating a ‘real-name’ environment. We find a significant increase in the cognitive complexity of comments (a proxy for one aspect of deliberative quality) during the middle phase, followed by a decrease following the shift to real-name commenting through Facebook. Our findings challenge the terms of the apparently simple trade-off between the goods and bads of anonymous and real-name environments and point to the potential value of durable pseudonymity in the context of online discussion.

Anonymity and Inhibition in Newspaper Comments

“…Another interesting finding is the fact that non-anonymous comments were less toxic than expected, while anonymous comments were not significantly more toxic than expected. This is congruent with the observed effect of durable pseudonymity [47], where the quality of comments improved over time for durable pseudonyms. Many anonymous commentors may choose anonymity, not to troll others but to avoid personal attacks in real life.…”

“…In a large-scale study of comments from before and after the first change of policy-before and after they implemented a requirement of identification through Facebook in 2013-Fredheim, Moore and Naughton [46] found that comment quality improved after users had to authenticate their accounts. However, a similar study on the comment sections of Huffington Post [47] complicates the issue, as they found that the quality of commenting, measured by the cognitive complexity of comments, improved after the first change of policy, where users had to authenticate their accounts but could still use pseudonyms. However, the second change, when users had to use their real names when commenting, caused a decrease in the quality of discussions.…”

The Integrative Complexity of Online User Comments Across Different Types of Democracy and Discussion Arenas

“…It captures the sophistication of verbal or written statements by their degree of differentiation and integration (Suedfeld et al 1992). While differentiation indicates whether a user comment considers different viewpoints related to an issue or different aspects within the same perspective, integration reflects to what extent it draws conceptual connections between these (Moore et al 2020). Thereby, differentiation is a prerequisite for integration (Suedfeld et al 1992).…”

“…Significant positive correlations have been found between the integrative complexity of debate contributions in political group discussions and the level of justification in these utterances (Beste and Wyss 2014). The construct can thus be used as a proxy for the argumentative quality of online user comments (Moore et al 2020).…”

“…To date, integrative complexity has rarely been studied in digital contexts (Brundidge et al 2014). Alongside an investigation by Moore et al (2020), this project is one of the first to examine the phenomenon in online debate contributions. Thereby, it advances an expansion of the field that scholars have long called for (Suedfeld 2010).…”