One of the most important aspects of the web is how it has increased the possibility for people to participate in public debate. It’s hard to find anyone today who will deny that the web has made it so much easier to contribute your opinion on almost any topic. Almost everyone who consider themselves democrats will think this is a good thing. When you participate in the public sphere, you are learning how to act democratically. Participation strengthens democracy, many liberal thinkers have concluded.

So the web should be one of the best things that have happened to democracy for a very long time, right? Maybe it is; I think so, at least. But increasing participation also produces some new and so far unsolved problems. Debates on the web can be ugly, anonymous participants hurling abuse at each other and frequently proving Mike Godwin right. Is this really the future of democracy? Sometimes it looks more like ochlocracy.

News organisations are traditionally the most important institutions of the public sphere. How do they tackle the question of civility in debates on their websites? Even today many prefer the easy solution: They keep the readers out. But even the most conservative of newspaper editors must have realized by now that this is a dead end. It also runs contrary to the idea of newspapers – who should be for increased participation, if not journalists and editors?

The other extreme is to allow and encourage participation with no constraints. I believe Norwegian news websites have been among the most liberal. For a few years allowing readers to comment on articles has been the norm (some also offer forums and let readers create their own blogs). Hence it might be useful to look at the experiences they have gathered so far. I think it’s fair to say that they are mixed. An article on a popular news website quickly generates many comments, depending on the topic – several hundred is not unusual. The quantity is a challenge in itself. On small websites such as blogs, users tend to know each other after a while. A community forms where users take turns “policing” the debate. On big websites, aggressive and “irresponsible” users can drown out the constructive ones. That’s why debates on blogs often are more rewarding to follow and take part in.

So the news websites need tools to filter out the destructive users and promote the good reader-commentators. There are several possible: let users vote on commentaries, give an advantage to logged-in users, have editors sift through comments and give special attention to the best of them (Dagbladet.no have been testing all these techniques — have a look at their fairly new debate section). If the website succeeds, the interesting comments will “float” to the top of the list and the others won’t be read. Hopefully the “destructors” will get bored and disappear.

Whether to allow anonymity in debates is another hot topic. The opponents say that anonymous participation goes against the principles of public debate: you should be mature enough to stand for what you mean in public. This is a strong argument. But nonetheless, most Norwegian news websites allow anonymous comments or pseudonyms. A strict policy seems to scare many people away. Maybe people who do not know the traditional academic or intellectual codes for public debate take part when they don’t have to give up their full name. It can be argued that this way, arguments and views are represented which wouldn’t otherwise appear. Many liberal thinkers would applaud that, as well.

I think Norwegian news websites have been right in taking a liberal approach to reader participation. But they have a special responsibility to try and make the debate as civil as possible. Here they should be careful not to define civil in a very narrow way. Sometimes what seems uncivil is just a matter of a different style than the usual academic-influenced style of newspaper op-ed pages. Web debates are more direct, sometimes more personal, faster. Websites should have clear rules that are adapted continously.

Using the web’s own tools to increase the quality of debate is the right way. In fact, I think news organisations will discover this on their own: they need to maintain high quality, anything else would hurt the brand in the long run. And they need to appeal to users who expect to participate, anything else would be a very risky strategy indeed.

(Originally published on the Why democracy website).