BotW: WPP versus the Internet; [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]

[View web version]( BEST OF THE WEEK [Cooperate]( And another thing... Welcome to Best of the Week, on the morning after the morning after the Mumbrella Awards. And indeed, on the day before the day before the new financial year. This week’s writing soundtrack: Burce Springsteen’s new album, Western Stars. Same as last week. Probably the same as next week. Before you start reading, a big disclaimer. This week’s note is long - more than 4,000 words. It’s not been through the usual final subbing check, because I’ve gone to the wire on getting it out of the door for 10.10am, so I apologise for all grammatical and spelling faux pas. And worst of all, it’s a self-indulgent reflection about the trade press. Please feel free to spend your weekend doing something more fun. But if you’re still here, thank you. Evicting the trolls Just over a year ago, I was in our Singapore office, chatting to Dean Carroll, the GM of our Asian operation. We were discussing an issue that was hurting some of our industry relationships, and our reputation too. The Mumbrella Asia comment thread was lively, but at times verging on the nasty. Without noticing it as it was happening, over the previous couple of years, the comments had drifted away from our own moderation policy. We’d been letting through comments we just shouldn’t have. While many commenters were still constructive and insightful, others were using it as a means of attacking the work of rivals. And the more we allowed them to, the more they did it. For a journalist moderator, removing comments or deleting some of a post, can feel like censorship, and we’d been allowing too much to go through. It was bothering Dean and I, because of the ambience it was giving to the site. And we were increasingly hearing from contacts that some were nervous about sending in new campaigns if their work was going to be thoughtlessly bashed. With the previous editor having left the building, it was time for a rethink about comments, but Dean and I disagreed about the strategy we should take. It was time for a big change, I argued. It was time to give up on full anonymity. We should oblige anybody who wanted to post a comment with us, to link it to an email address. We wouldn’t insist they publish their real name, but at least we’d be able to say that we knew who they were. Dean was of a different view. He was concerned that, first, such an approach is misleading - burner email addresses are easy to create, so we wouldn’t really know who the commenter was, we’d just be able to pretend we did. And second, it would create friction for ordinary readers who just wanted to talk about that day’s topic. Was it unfair to make it harder for them? Dean proposed an alternative approach. Get back to the basics of good, and much stricter, comment moderation according to our own policies - talk about the issue, not the individual; kick the ball, not the player. And do it much more obviously. So rather than simply choosing not to publish an offending comment, we would redact the offending part of the comment using the phrase “[Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]”. One point of this would be to make the steps we were taking more visible, rather than simply opting not to publish the comment. It would show we were actively moderating. I wasn’t convinced it would be enough, but was willing to give it a try before we went for the nuclear option. Indeed, I was so doubtful, that I insisted we brief our web development team on the changes I wanted to make so we could act immediately if the experiment failed. In readiness for that failure, Dean wrote a draft of a detailed post explaining why we’d felt forced to take the step. It was headlined “Time’s up for trolls”. A year on, the post remains unpublished. To my surprise (and relief) Dean’s plan worked. As we began to enforce our own guidelines more rigorously and visibly, our readers began to notice. The trolls moved away, and the quality of the comments began to improve. Indeed, the phrase “[Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]” became such a running joke that it was referenced in an ad for a local brewery. The copy for the ad, designed to look like it was on Mumbrella, read “For when your client sets a 6pm meeting and you want to tell them [Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]”. It’s still not perfect of course. How can you tell whether a well constructed, albeit critical, comment comes from a sincere place, compared to somebody who has a vested interest in attacking a rival organisation behind the work? That makes the job of comment moderation an art rather than science, and of course means we can still get it wrong. A year on, while we haven’t won over all those who dislike the existence of comments on Mumbrella Asia, it does feel as if we are enjoying the types of conversation we’d prefer to see. We’re back in control. Which brings me to Australia, where if there’s been a single overarching theme of the last month, it’s been around freedom of expression. And that includes on trade press comment threads. I’ll come back to Mumbrella and the rest of the trade press shortly. As our editor Vivienne Kelly pointed out in [this week’s Mumbrellacast](, it feels rather self indulgent to be prioritising the debate about the role of the trade press over the bigger public interest issues currently at stake. Last weekend, I grabbed a long weekend away. I picked up The Economist to read on the plane. It contained one of the best summaries I’ve seen of Australia’s current challenges when it comes to free speech. The publication’s anonymously authored Banyan column reflected on the surprise that some Australians are feeling as they realise that the freedom-loving, authority-tweaking country might not be quite what they thought it was. For non-Economist readers, by the way, the publication has a policy of anonymity for all of its authors. As the Economist puts it: “The main reason for anonymity… is a belief that what is written is more important than who writes it”. Talking about [Australia’s surprising disregard for free speech]( (it’s worth going through the registration wall just for this one article), Banyan laid it out. “It is like stumbling out of bed and not recognising, let alone liking, the face you see in the bathroom mirror.” The article went on to spell out the issues behind the AFP’s raid on the ABC which followed Four Corners’ reporting on misdeeds by Special Forces in Afghanistan, six years ago. Banyan went on: “The eye-rubbing is not just over press freedom, but about Australia’s direction as a liberal democracy. The whistleblower over the Afghanistan allegations was formerly a lawyer with the defence department. David McBride had followed public-interest disclosure rules by raising his concerns with his department. Only when he concluded that they were being ignored did he take his material to journalists. Far from being protected as a whistleblower, he is charged with the disclosure of unauthorised documents and faces a life sentence.” Then of course, there was the raid on the Canberra home of a News Corp journalist “in connection with a story about secret plans to expand the state’s surveillance powers to include snooping on people’s e-mails, text messages and bank accounts”. And the former spy and his lawyer, Witness K and Bernard Collaery, who exposed Australia’s bugging of the government of Timor-Leste to get information about offshore oil rights negotiations. And there’s former ATO staffer Richard Boyle, facing serious jail time for exposing aggressive tax collection techniques which certainly aren’t in the public interest, or in the interests of small business. He only made it public after internal whistleblowing failed. Earlier this year, [Australia fell out of the top 20 countries in the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index](. Another factor in that fall on the Press Freedom Index was the existence of some of the harshest defamation laws among developed democracies. (Ironically) I can’t talk specifically for legal reasons, but I know at first-hand that powerful people are able to use the law to clean up their reputation, and that truth is not always enough to hold them at bay. And this week, defamation risk for publishers got even worse, with [a landmark ruling from Justice Stephen Rothman that if a media outlet posts a news article to Facebook, and a reader makes a defamatory comment on that Facebook post, the media outlet is responsible for publication](. Let me stress that: not a comment on the publisher’s own site, but on the Facebook page. While I’m sure it will be tested in higher courts, the ruling is one more dilemma for media brands. Do the traffic benefits of Facebook distribution still outweigh the risk when there’s no simple pre-moderation system. And should the ruling stand, the same principle will apply to any brand on Facebook, not just for media companies. If a random consumer says something libellous on your page, your brand will be instantly liable. The problem is the cumulative effect of all this. It’s the behaviour of the authorities and the overreach of the libel laws. As Nine boss Hugh Marks - who is now of course the custodian of the great former Fairfax newspapers including The Age, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Australian Financial Review - put it in [his speech to The Australian Press Club]( this week, the boiling frog analogy is apt. Australia’s growing disregard for free speech has happened gradually and the media themselves took a while to become alarmed. The Australian media did not fight hard enough for their freedoms as they were being eroded. But now they’ve woken up. The bosses who put their lobbying firepower so effectively into changing the media ownership laws and into getting licence fee reductions are finally demanding something far more in the wider public interest. And press freedom is indeed in the wider public interest. That, united, firepower from the media owners is now on display. Michael Miller, boss of News Corp, whose mastheads include The Australian along with metro titles in just about every major Australian city, and ABC boss David Anderson, also spoke at that Press Club event. As I say, the media has already demonstrated that it can achieve law change in its own self interest, so I do feel reasonably optimistic that if they stay focused they can achieve it here. And there are also plenty of times where media achieves government policy change in the public interest too. At [Thursday night’s Mumbrella Awards]( I was delighted that our jury gave News Corp and The Heart Foundation the Media Campaign of the Year award for the successful campaign to create a specific Medicare item number around heart health checks. You may remember I wrote about the campaign in Best of the Week a month or so back. And now I’m back on Mumbrella, let’s come back to this week’s debate around comment threads. Sorry, this week’s email really is self-indulgent. Are you sure you don’t have better things to be doing with your Saturday morning? This week saw WPP’s interim boss in Australia John Steedman publish [an open letter to the publishers of Australia’s trade media](. He wants to see an end to allowing anybody to comment anonymously. As open letters often are, it was strong on rhetoric, although I would not agree with all of the conclusions. His definition of a troll appeared to be anybody who comments anonymously. I’m not sure that’s a definition that most people would agree with. For me, a troll is somebody who comes into the conversation with poor intentions. But if he’d prefer to stick with the definition, then it’s important to note that WPP itself employs a lot of trolls. He went on: “During the past couple of years, I’ve seen a concerning decline in the quality of online comment sections in our industry media. People are being attacked for their sexuality or appearance, for their perceived ability or public statements.” Yet I can’t actually think of an example in the trade press of somebody being pilloried for their sexuality or appearance. There is of course a risk that somebody will immediately point out an example we let through; human error does happen in comment moderation, but I just can’t think of one. As I said earlier, we discussed the issue in this week’s Mumbrellacast and our editor Vivienne - who leads our day-to-day moderation - made the point that we often get jokey comments on profile shots or somebody’s appearance, and we don’t publish them even if they seem harmless. But I might find myself in most disagreement with Steady would be around the issue of people challenging “public statements”. If somebody issues a press release, writes an op-ed or gives an interview about an industry topic, I’m not certain that comment on that is a bad thing. Then of course, it comes down to the quality of comment. On a good day, I find myself jealous of the level of engagement from identified commenters that occurs on LinkedIn.The quality of debate on a good post from Mark Ritson, for instance, can be really impressive. I ask myself: Why can’t our commenters be like LinkedIn and give their names? And more often I cringe at the self-promotion and naked flattery of powerful people that occurs on your average LinkedIn post. But of course Steady has a point. It’s easier to make a snide comment when you’re anonymous. The question though - and it’s one I’ve wrestled with for more than a decade - is what is the real issue? I’m not certain it’s anonymity. I think it’s nastiness. A line I’ve heard myself use more than once when discussing the comment thread is “You should see what we don’t publish.”. And there’s an awful lot we don’t - more than half of everything we get. Particularly when SEO magic delivers us into the hands of the religious or political extremists,we get some hateful stuff. And of course it remains unpublished. Often, those comments come with full names and details attached. We moderate it because it’s unpleasant and against our own community guidelines. The fact they’ve put their name to it doesn’t make us want to publish it. The issue isn’t one of anonymity. I do prefer it though when our regular commenters give themselves a consistent persona. It’s always interesting when I get chatting to somebody senior and they conspiratorially tell me who they are. Sometimes I’d already worked it out, and of course never would tell. They make intelligent, informed comments that they wouldn’t be allowed to if they had to go through corporate channels to put their name to it. Sometimes, they offer simple factual points or correct misunderstandings, where company rules wouldn’t let them jump in. There is something to be said though for consistent pseudonyms. AdGrunt’s been commenting with us for more than a decade. As he put it way back in 2011 in a previous debate about our comment thread: “The desire to remove all anonymous commentary is unwise. I can scarcely conceive what practical benefit it will bring. In fact its undertones are rather more sinister – unless we know who you are and what you’re saying, you can’t say it. That’s 1984, my friends. Fuck that. “One should differentiate between the familiar claque of hit-and-run commenters, especially around emotive topics and then the more regular, if pseudonymous long term contributors. “I use a consistent alter-ego in an effort to neutralise puerile ad hominem discussion, but still maintain a continuity of thought and style. For all you know I could be a household name, or simply the bloke who empties the bins.” But the point I’m most looking forward to discussing with Steady - and we already have a coffee in the diary for later in July - is around the question of what the end of anonymity would mean for those without power. In his piece, he makes the very important point that he’s always up for feedback and open debate. But I wonder what that means in practice. I’ve looked carefully on the various trade press sites that published the open letter. Quite a few of his 5,500 employees have publicly backed his stance. But I can’t find a single example of one of his employees being brave enough to publicly disagree with him. Either WPP is a uniquely aligned organisation, or those who disagree feel their careers might suffer for going public on it, so don’t dare. In reality, that means no debate or feedback. I don’t doubt the sincerity of the many people from media companies who have gone public on their support for the stance - who doesn’t want better discourse on the internet? But it’s also impossible to get past the fact that John Steedman is also their biggest customer, with WPP spending a couple of billion dollars across Australian media. The challenges of moderation and anonymous comments aren’t just peculiar to Mumbrella and Campaign Brief by the way. (AdNews and B&T do allow comments, but in practice they don’t really get any.) Last year News Corp’s [The Australian apologised after letting through reader comments advocating an arson attack on the ABC’s Ultimo headquarters](. But it was an error of moderation, and it didn’t lead to anonymous comments being turned off. Slightly ironically (there’s a lot of irony this week), News Corp’s Michael Miller’s posted a public Facebook post in support of John Steedman’s stance. I say ironically, because as I write, the text of his speech to the Press Club, published on The Australian’s media section, has attracted a healthy 106 comments. They’re perfectly legitimate, but mostly anonymous. What of our readers’ view? Many of the responses to Steady’s proposal were anonymous (particularly those who disagreed with him), but nonetheless, it’s been an intelligent and passionate debate. One argued: “Comments must be anonymous or there would be no comments at all. Who goes to B&T or AdNews, ever? Every time I visit, which is rarely, I can almost hear the tumbleweeds. “I could do without Campaign Brief’s comment section honestly, but you can consistently find gold in Mumbrella’s comments and it’s because you never know what you’ll find. Thoughtful albeit long-winded critiques, outraged conservatives (where do they come from?), different takes, support and stories. It’s fun in here. “Please don’t turn trade rags into soulless press release factories.” Some would argue that it’s the job of the trade press to be cheerleaders for the industry. And I agree that you shouldn’t be doing this job unless you care about the industry. However, the danger of self-interest from trade press is to play up to the agency bosses who spend trade marketing dollars, and allow issues to go unchallenged. That also had the helpful side effect of not risking any of those trade marketing dollars. Our view is perhaps slightly different. Whenever a new person joins the Mumbrella team, I explain that our job is to try to be the voice of the entire industry, and not just the bosses; we want their respect but we need to remember that we don’t serve them. We are in favour of a better industry for everyone. And the trade press in Australia has been viciously competitive for at least the last couple of decades. When I joined B&T in 2006, the wounds were still fresh over an April Fool press release sent them by the team at AdNews announcing the sale of Mitchells to Telstra. They fell for it and made fools of themselves by putting out a breaking news email. A cascade of overreactions followed, including complaining to the police about misleading and deceptive conduct, glasses of wine being thrown at industry events and a pub fight which made it into the newspapers. The grudges are different, but the bad blood within the trade press continues even today. So it was perhaps not a surprise that the sites that get least comments (and the most commercial support from WPP) were most enthusiastic in getting behind his call this week. But, nonetheless, I am also a little nervous. I’m not comfortable with the tactics used by campaign group Sleeping Giants to use economic warfare to attack media outlets they do not like by targeting the advertisers. (And yes, they do that anonymously on Twitter.) Those who use economic power to dictate an editorial policy are no friends of a free press. There’s a concderning line in Steedman’s piece that could be taken in a similar way, although I hope I’m misunderstanding it. “As readers and advertisers, we must hold the publishers to account and stop visiting or supporting sites that allow anonymous, clickbait commentary.” Who’s that aimed at? Does it include his major trading partner News Corp? Or how about AdNews? As a test yesterday, it took me four-and-a-half minutes to create a fake profile to access their Disqus discussion platform. And most of that was taken up by Googling how to create a throwaway email account, which I hadn’t done before. With a little effort, people can comment anonymously on AdNews, it’s just that they don’t comment there at all. Is it really about anoinynous commentary, or anonymous, negative commentary? But yes, agency bosses do have some economic power to hurt us if they want to. When the media agencies boycotted all industry awards (mainly in protest at AdNews’ failure to tackle Atomic 212’s awards cheating) last year, we took a hit. These agency bosses, by the way, are for the most part sincere in wanting to do the right thing by their industry, even if I’d argue that the approach needs to be thought through with more rigour. Many of those who have anonymously shared their #MeToo experiences in the comment thread on our site work for those very bosses. And for all that, I suspect I agree with Steady more than I disagree. But we are thinking differently about what the problem is, and how we fix it. My mind can be changed, and I hope Steady’s can too. When you’re in a powerful position it’s possible to forget what it’s like for those who are not. I believe he’s sincere in wanting something something that protects his staff from feeling under attack. And I’d like to believe that the motivation is not about preventing pubic critique of the (admittedly challenged) WPP. Mumbrella is also against personalised comments, homophobic comments and bullying. My instinct is that the answer lies in moderation policy. Is there more we should do? Should we provide a report button for people who think they see a comment that we should not have let through? Should we be more overt with the “[Edited under Mumbrella’s community guidelines]” tag? And the answer may also lie in a conversation across the whole trade press about what community standards are acceptable. The potential rogue trader in all this is Campaign Brief, where just about anything goes. The attacks can be hateful, while the astroturfing is cringeworthy. We did try to get the trade press publishers together a few years ago, in a conversation brokered by The Communications Council. But at the last minute one of the other publishers pulled out, and the meeting was postponed, never to be reorganised. We should try again. There is a problem, and we can all contribute to the solution. Extra time Which brings me to this week’s housekeep[ing. First, if you’re interested in the comment moderation debate, we talked about it in [this week’s edition of The Mumbrellacast](. The rest of the team put it far more eloquently than me. As you’ll hear, we all have our own perspectives on the anonymous comment issue. Inward-looking as the topic was, I think it’s one of the best editions we’ve done. Second, a final reminder that it’s the [Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit](on Thursday. It’s a relief. I’ve been helping out with copywriting for our marketing messages over the last few weeks and I’m completely out of sporting puns. But it’s a great program. If I had to pick just one highlight, I can’t wait to watch Viv go a second round (so I did have one more sport pun in me...) with Skins founder Jaime Fuller. Last year’s encounter was highly entertaining, and a lot’s happened since then. And third, don’t forget to get your [Publish Awards]( entry in. Our columnist of the year category is still quite new and we’re hoping for some great entries. The final deadline is Friday. As ever, I welcome your thoughts to tim@mumbrella.com.au . The weekend newsdesk is in the hands of Zoe Wilkinson - zoew@mumbrella.com.au. Have a great weekend. Toodlepip... Tim Burrowes Content Director - Mumbrella [Cooperate]( Mumbrella | 46-48 Balfour Street Chippendale NSW 2008 Australia This email was sent to {EMAIL}. If you would rather not receive Mumbrella's Best of the Week email you can [unsubscribe]( or [manage subscriptions](. [Facebook]( [LinkedIn]( [Twitter](