Anonymous, ’til we decide to out you

Lindsay Brown doesn’t like anonymous posting:

The good news here is that Halifax media are inadvertently leading the charge against the silly practice of anonymous online commentary.

First, in April, The Coast demonstrated that the mere possibility of court action was enough for it to de-cloak its posters.

Now, The Chronicle-Herald has shown us that its promise of anonymity depends on who you are. Apparently, the promise is worthless if the Herald thinks it can get a story out of identifying you. They’ll even go to the trouble of hunting you down. So, anonymous poster, beware.

The Herald has also exposed in a dramatic way the contradiction tolerated by media who encourage online “anonymity”. We know that the Herald is an ethical news organization, so it follows that the paper regards anonymous commentary as ethical. But the story on the premier’s chief of staff is predicated on the idea that it was UNethical for him to post anonymously. So, either posting anonymously was unethical, or the newspaper acted unethically when it identified the poster. The Herald can’t have it both ways. Media outrage across the country at the anonymous postings from Helena Guergis’s staff in March shows our local paper has plenty of company — they are all wallowing together in a frothy hot-tub of contradiction.

They can defend themselves by arguing that anonymous commentary is the special domain the elusive “ordinary citizen”, and that the public has a right to know when someone with a vested interest or bias has trespassed. That leaves online media with two options: they can check every anonymous post to ensure that its author is in fact ordinary; or they can require posters to sign their work and allow readers to determine for themselves how much credibility the writer deserves. The latter continues to work well on letters-to-the-editor pages.

A commenter on the Herald website called LilacLover also sees the contradiction:

So let me get this straight. The Chronicle Herald facilitates a public web forum, where readers can post comments with relative anonymity. However, if those comments call into question the Chronicle Herald’s objectivity on a particular story, then that reader can expect to be tracked down, repeatedly contacted, and exposed on the front page? If so, then I think Dan O’Connor’s comparison to Frank magazine may in fact be legitimate. I just registered today, to make this comment, and nowhere did I see a location to even enter my real name or did I see a Terms of Use* clause, informing me of this seemingly witch-hunt practice.

*The Herald does have a Terms of Use clause.