In March, the CBC announced it
would phase out the use of pseudonyms in comments on our various websites
across English and French services. As we noted at the time, we have been
actively reviewing our commenting policies and audience engagement strategies
for many months.
While the vast majority of
comments submitted to our site fall within our guidelines, we want to do more
to elevate and promote civil conversation.
Since then, we have made some
significant changes: we brought back the 'down-vote' to give our online
community more say on the comments they read, and have added email verification
to all new accounts.
There's another important change
coming June 13th: we will reset our online communities across CBC.ca, including
the CBC News site. Moving forward, all community members will be
asked to use real names when commenting on our pages.
What's more, all members who use
an email address to sign into our platform will be asked to re-register and
create a new account. Community members who sign into our site using Facebook
or Google+ will not be required to create a new account, but we will no longer
publish comments from anyone using an obvious pseudonym, regardless of how
people sign in.
We have a comprehensive Q & A
on the real names policy posted here.
As the public broadcaster, CBC has
a distinct role to play in surfacing and nurturing Canada's conversations. Much
of the conversation has shifted in recent years to the digital space, including
social media and CBCNews.ca, where we see several thousand visitors a day
logging in to comment.
At a time when others are shutting
down comments or struggling to maintain civility in their digital forums, we
still believe it's possible to promote a respectful exchange of ideas.
We are not stopping here, either.
We will soon introduce new functionality that allows people to 'mute' trolls.
We will continue to invest in
evolving our community, our relationship with our online audiences, and their
connection with each other.
We have heard from many of you
already about the new policy: some of you see the benefits, others have dwelled
on the potential drawbacks. We're aware of them all, and we welcome
constructive thoughts, ideas and feedback in the comments section below
Jennifer McGuire