After reading and taking notes on some of the articles about The War Against Online Trolls on Room for Debate, I noticed that looking at the comments really did help. I usually don't read comments, but some of the people who take time to comment bring up really good points. For example, in Don't Identify by Names Online but by Knowledge, author Annemarie Dooling believes that we should not stop anonymity, but that we should use it to communicate more effectively. She believes that users who want to participate on certain websites should have to send personal information to moderators who should then decide whether they have enough "knowledge and background" to be able to have their comments posted. She thinks it is best for users to "be independently verified behind-the-scenes by administrators", but never actually identified for others to see. At first, I thought this was a great idea because it would filter all of the irrelevant comments, but then I came across a comment that made me think differently.
The comment read "There are many logical people without a resume of accomplishments, so this would limit many people." I agree with this comment because there are many people who would not be able to verify their knowledge and this would then silence way more people than I think the plan intended to do so. Young high school or college students have many opinions about controversial topics, but would they have the right to post since technically they have not graduated yet? Young people like us are still working on our accomplishments; we do not have a "business I.D. or... research documents" to back ourselves up.
The idea of keeping anonymity is great when we want to express ourselves but are worried about our image as a person. Without anonymity, people would not be able to express themselves freely. Anonymity comes with a price though, and that is online trolling. Trolling has been our central topic and finding ways to stop them is something we should think about. However, instead of restricting people based on their past knowledge , there should only be restrictions on what they offer to the conversation. Of course moderators should delete and restrict hateful and irrelevant comments, but they shouldn't restrict comments just because a person is not successful offline.
Hey Jocelyne, I would like to say that I agree with you on how websites online shouldn't need additional information on us like our education. Having websites judge us for having the lack of credibility is demeaning and can cause more problems than necessary. Finding solutions on how to stop trolls should be our main goal instead of trying to find restrictions, because if we end up doing that, we would still end up having rude and obscene comments on all types of internet based media.
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