"Sometimes vile anonymous comments" -- ya think?

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Red-light camera exec suspended for online comments

An executive at an Arizona traffic-camera company has been suspended after a newspaper in Washington discovered he misrepresented himself as a local resident on its website and made comments to promote business in the area, a company spokesman said Friday.

[snipped]

[Herald editor Neal] Pattison said newspapers have been dealing with sometimes vile anonymous comments for years.

The paper’s comments policy bans commercial use and misrepresentation by posters, but Pattison said he doubts they catch everyone who breaks the policy, even though his staff monitors the comments. Posts breaking the rules are especially common during political campaigns.

“Every paper is dealing with this,” Pattison said. “What you want to do is foster a broader discussion about things that really matter. It’s getting harder and harder to do so.”

[snipped]

Pattison said the newspaper recently removed a comment on a story about a police officer’s death because the post called for more police deaths. He said that when the person was told why his comment was removed, he “went nuts.”

The poster went on to email everyone associated with the company and posted an anonymous diatribe blasting the paper on Craigslist.

Jones said the broader problem was that the social discourse on the Internet — on newspaper comments pages, across social media outlets — has become so polarized and mean that people are becoming cynical about everything they see online.

“It’s hard to engage in debate and argument when your first interpretation is, ‘I need to be suspicious,’” Jones said.

[snipped]
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