Review: Comments and ethics

As my coursemates have covered many interesting themes, I decided to choose the subject that intersests me most. This is actually 'Social Media, Viral Marketing and Crowdsourcing' (our team's subject) but it combines good with 'Social data for fun: ethic and privacy concerns on Facebook apps', 'Legal and Ethical problems with clips on YouTube' and 'Comments and ethics'. As the last is also connected with my every day job, I'll focus on that.

As there were only two people in the group, the amount of text is a bit smaller. But this way there was nothing supefluos and all I found was relevant and interesting. I'm definately coming back to the reference list/article collection.

Commenting in internet has lately become a big topic. Though the most known court-case about commenting - Delfi vs Leedo - started already in 2006, it had a progress during this year. The problem is: who is responsible for content of (anonymous) comments. Is it the commentator or the site that allows the comments? From this year Delfi has hired few moderators whose job is everything else but easy. Though it might seem like a easy one. The line between acceptable comment and not acceptable comment is thin. Besides that, people can be really agressive towards them when they have removed some (unwanted) comment.

This autumn 4 Estonian media companies (Eesti Ekspress, Delfi, Maaleht, EPL) came up with a campaigne "Ära sigatse" with slogan: 'Don't throw thoughtless comments - there is a person on the other side of screen'. Time will show, if this project justifies itself. Let's hope it does, because even now it can be said that the amount of "bad" comments is decreased. One interesting fact, though: comparing the comments to daily news articles and entertainment news articles, there's a concrete difference, as daynews get more sensible comments than the tabloids where the amount of thoughtless comments is bigger.

Both themes - the campaigne and courte case - are (slightly) covered in the groupwork. But what could have been done different/better? I didn't see any conclusion and disbutation on subject 'what could be done to improve the situation?' For example, I would have expected some discussion about anonymous and non-anonymous comments and a little bit more reasoned structure.

Nevertheless, the theme is interesting and the work got me again thinking of the ethical part of the comments.