Infested by trolls

"Iñaki, son of a bitch." "Iñaki stinks." "I'm going to jerk off, be back in a minute," are some of the comments to be read posted on Iñaki Gabilondo's video in elpais.com. Can we allow a respected journalist to be treated this way on our pages? I think not.

"I piss on your gender equality. Right now I'm going to get a massage from a hot slut, and then give her a poke up the dirt road. And if today somebody kills a bitch who was trying to take her ex-husband's house away from him, I'll crack open a beer to celebrate." This comment, which a friend told me about, was posted on the EL PAÍS gender blog Mujeres.

Sorry, dear reader, for beginning in this way. But I wanted you to know just what we are talking about. Is this the sort of thing we want to read in EL PAÍS? I share the view that the publication must be as open as possible to reader participation. But one thing is a discussion, and another is a slagging match.

Some years ago Timothy Campbell wrote an illuminating article titled What is an internet troll?, in which he addresses the problem of how to deal with trolls. Some people fight them by merely ignoring them. Others try to attract them to their own ground. But I think that the degradation of discussion forums has become a serious problem of quality control. If the newspaper allows rancorous cranks to usurp this space offered for reader participation, then the space is going to decline rapidly in quality, because readers who are interested in serious debate are disgusted by trolls.

The clearest example is the blog Mujeres. Its promoter, the deputy editor Berna González-Harbour, explains that it was created to propitiate debate on gender equality problems. But it has become infested by a small group of recalcitrant male chauvinists who are degrading the level of debate. If other newspapers have managed to prevent this happening, what must EL PAÍS do to combat it? "My experience is that dirt attracts dirt. Dirt is not normally dumped on what is clean," says Iñaki Gabilondo, and I believe that this is the key to the question.

The first step, then, is that of cleaning. We have to see to it that, throughout the digital newspaper, the conversations are similar in quality to those in Hay un exodo a Estados Unidos?, the space on the Spanish brain drain to the US, which shows that clean debate is possible. But more effort is needed. The reader will have appreciated the improvement due to the Eskup control system, which demands prior registration for participation and which, after a warning, expels those who do not respect the norms. The tool that allows readers to label a comment as insulting is very useful, as it eases the editor's job. But control is still lacking, especially in sections that cannot handle the workload involved in supervising all the comments.

Until now, in the Eskup-controlled system, 74 participants have been vetoed. Some of them have written to the Reader's Ombudsman to complain that the newspaper "is exercising an intolerable censorship, and preventing freedom of expression." But the Ombudsman considers that this is not censorship. It is just an application of the norms of courtesy and quality outlined in our style book.

I propose that clearer criteria be set, and more resources devoted to the work of quality control. Blogs may be open to reader participation or not. The open ones can be subject to control before or after publication. When permanent vigilance cannot be assured, I suggest that the control be previous. And in the case of Iñaki Gabilondo's video-blog, in view of the existing degradation, if the paper cannot ensure a degree of supervision that would keep the discussion polite and intelligent, as the author deserves, then I think it would be better to close it to readers' comments.