Comment conundrum

Posted at 11:31PM on Dec 16, 2009 by William M. Burton

Perusing the Globe and Mail's website today, I stumbled upon this story about Scott Brison, a Liberal MP from Nova Scotia. Brison sent out a Christmas card this year featuring him and his husband, as well as their dog. Now, I didn't really think this merited a story: even if Brison was the first federal politician to marry someone of the same sex, an MP sending out a Christmas card of him and his husband pretty much does not deserve any ink on it, right?

But then I saw the comment section; a notice had been posted:

Comments have been disabled Editor's Note: Comments have been closed due to an overwhelming number of hateful and homophobic remarks. We appreciate that readers want to discuss this issue, but we can't allow our site to become a platform for intolerance.

The interest here isn't so much the homophobia - we can only expect that, I suppose, on an Internet forum - but the fact that the only comments - or at least a vast majority - are so homophobic as to warrant the disabling of all commenting on the article (or blog post, whatever) is quite interesting.

Comments on news web sites can be a thorny issue. For some reason or other (many have postulated that it's the web's supposed anonymity), people feel free to say all sorts of things they would never utter or put to paper in the physical world - so comment pages and sections often devolve into lowest-common-denominator slurring, slander, and libel. What's an editor to do?

Short of having a logged-in comments only, where users must have verified email accounts, it's tricky to figure out a way to keep commenters on web sites accountable. Perhaps this isn't such a bad system - Boston.com uses it and has a very lively (and very, very hateful) comment culture. I wonder if The Daily should opt for such a system - and whether it would stifle our already not too vibrant comment sections.