CBC to outsource comment moderation? Not so, says CBC
One of the great things about running this blog is moderating the comments. I love seeing how people respond to stories, and ones that were posted long ago that are still on people’s minds. They are alternately funny, thought-provoking, irritating and occasionally downright rude, but they are your views and that’s what this thing should be about.
This blog, like CBC.ca, has a fairly straightforward comments policy. It’s usually okay as long as it’s polite, on topic and legal. On both sites, comments are generally not edited – they are either approved or denied based on the policy.
Still, it takes time – comments to this blog come in at all hours, and since they are pre-moderated (they don’t appear online until we approve them) I feel badly when they sit waiting in moderation for long stretches.
CBC.ca, obviously, gets many, many more comments than this site does. And that’s about to explode exponentially.
In the near future, CBC.ca is going to implement software from a company called Pluck that will potentially allow comments on every story on the site. That’s a lot of comments – how to moderate?
According to Karen Wirsig at the Canadian Media Guild, CBC.ca has entered into a contract with ICUC Moderation of Winnipeg for web moderation services. The idea is to outsource the moderation of comments based on CBC’s policies, to ensure that turnaround times are reasonable, and the site can keep up with radically increased workloads.
CMG is concerned, however: for a decade now, this work has been done by journalists at CBC. Marc Philippe Laurin, CMG president of the CBC branch says he has asked for more information.
“We want to find out what’s the nature of the work, and exactly what these people will be doing, and what they define as moderation,” he said. “Whenever it has to do with content, it’s Guild territory. I understand that it’s not quite the same thing on the internet, with viewer feedback.” But he pointed out that shows like As It Happens, which use talkback lines for listener feedback, are handled by CMG staff. “We want to know why our folks couldn’t do it ourselves,” Laurin said.
Should comment moderation be done by trained journalists, or is this a waste of resources?
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Moderation of comments at the CBC should be performed by CBC staff. If the CBC is going to outsource this process then it must feel that the ability to comment on stories is a valuable resource. Valuable enough to spend some of it’s money to have it outsourced. However, by outsourcing it you are entrusting this valuable resource to a third party which may not have the same training and dedication that CBC staff have. My suggestion would be a dedicated group within the CBC that would provide this service internally keeping the core values, professionalism, and mission close to the task at hand.
The issues with outsourcing is the individual moderators could also be responsible for various other sites and may not have the skills necessary to judge comments beyond the string black and white policy objectives.
Should comment moderation be done by trained journalists, or is this a waste of resources?
That’s sort of a leading question, isn’t it? Either comment moderation should be done by “trained journalists”, i.e. by journalists at CBC, and comment moderators should not be hired; or else this is a “waste of resources”, in which case comment moderators should not be hired.
Another way of framing it is: should comment moderation be done by trained journalists, or by trained comment moderators, or by noone (i.e. unmoderated)?
(Whether or not those comment moderators are employed by the CBC or by another firm is surely a secondary question to the matter of the competency required to do the job.)
This new moderation policy was no doubt inspired by the behaviour of the previous Radio2 blogger. He would spout on incessantly in support of new CBC2 programming, subtly ridiculing posters who didn’t agree. To further make his point, he would often post supportive comments from his personal friend! Great “comment moderation” in this public forum you’ve provided us with, pal! Even the current blog/promo person seems to think it is her place to do PR work in response to critical comments. Hello! We are the customers, you are the paid shill….if you don’t want to know what we think, don’t ask.
I don’t know. I honestly don’t know. At the very least, I think it ought to be done by someone working directly with CBC on a daily basis, if not on the regular payroll. Outsourcing it might put up a wall between us and the Corporation that shouldn’t exist.
I think it might be preferable to have a mix of moderators: journalists, comment-mods, and others on staff as appropriate.
I tend to lean on the side of not outsourcing for two reasons:
1. It’s an editorial function, not a technical one. These people aren’t cattle to herd, they’re people with thoughts and opinions. The CBC should respect that. Either have the journalist who wrote the story moderate the comments (in which case they’ll have to read the comments and can learn quite a bit from them) or create a team of people to do so. The suggestion that comment moderation is a waste of time for journalists gives a bad first impression: that it’s annoying dealing with the stupid people who comment online. If that’s the belief, then there’s no point having comments attached to stories.
2. This company in question seems to have been chosen at least in part because they claim to be bilingual. (I’m assuming this deal is for cbc.ca only and not radio-canada.ca). But a quick look at their “French” homepage shows mostly English navigation text and a welcome text that sounds like it was written by someone in Winnipeg who just finished their 8th grade French class. The use of the French flag to denote the French language also shows an unintentional cultural insensitivity that the company wouldn’t have if it had more experience with French content.
As someone who currently does moderate as part of my job, I’d find it hard to imagine outsourcing this especially for some particularily sensitive stories.
Sometimes ‘polite, on topic and legal’ aren’t the only considerations – it can be much more subtle than that. I’m not sure that someone who isn’t a journalist and most importantly, may not be familar with the story, would have the right touch.
But I agree that the moderating can cause a very heavy workload at times.
“same training and dedication that CBC staff have” One can imagine what the secret indoctrination would be to ensure dedication to the CBC objective.
I think this decision makes sense. If comments aren’t edited, surely non-journalists can be trained to recognize all the red flags and approve the comments that are OK. The tricky ones can always be deferred to CBC. Hiring CBC journalists 24-7 doesn’t make sense – especially since outside companies are probably scalable – if they have multiple clients, they can probably devote more resources when the workload is highest and not have them twiddling their thumbs when nothing is coming in.
It’s also possible that the outside people are in fact “trained journalists” – or at least, qualified to make certain decisions (hiring a real live daily news type reporter would be a waste, internal or external. Who’d want that job anyhow?)
But I am curious to know if there is an equivalent CMG function. There probably is, and I wonder if anyone did the cost analysis to see exactly how much CBC.ca thinks it will save. My guess is that, like all outsourcing decisions, we’ll never know. I only hope that if there are savings, it goes into having more input on the site, allowing something new instead of just penny pinching.
What do other big websites do?
Journalists are just that. They write stories.
It’s not their job to moderate user submissions.
However.. there is nothing stopping the CBC from hiring people IN HOUSE to do the moderating.
And as the old saw has it: “Who will watch the watchers?”
“Journalists are just that. They write stories.” Really – ask Krista. Or was it Peter, Linden, or Keith? The CBC journalists will find the truth!
I have to say, I didn’t see that one coming. Why is it that everything CMG has to say about things like this comes across like it was decided about halfway through the previous century? Moderation of user submissions isn’t journalism, it isn’t even an editorial function, it’s a stopgap until AI gets to the point where it can reliably detect the tricks people will do to get genitalia references onto a public forum.
“Trained journalists”? As someone who has toiled in the trenches of the Toronto Broadcasting Centre’s 4th floor, I’m not convinced that the “training” journalists receive, such as it is, can help make anyone a good moderator. Being a good moderator requires good judgment, decent social and written skills, and a sense of humour. These are not qualities that are taught in journalism school, and they are in short supply in the often poisonous atmosphere of the CBC.
BUT… these skills are even less likely to be found among the 20-somethings who would be paid peanuts by ICUC Moderation to scan comments on CBC.ca for bad words and references to Wendy Mesley’s Undergarments (oh, sorry, that show was cancelled). Just wait til a virtual bunfight breaks out about the Middle East.
And another thing. Here’s a quote from the ICUC Moderation website:
“We currently moderates 8 out of the 10 most widely used languages in the world from its moderation control centers. These languages include English, French, Spanish, German, Portuguese, Russian, Hindu, and Arabic. Management of multiple languages is handled through the effective use of technology and consistent quality controls and processes.”
They knows so many languages, they don’t even knows its names!
Sign me up for “Hindu” lessons.
Thanks for great comments. It’s clearly not an easy arena for any of us to figure out.
To be clear I have met with CMG to discuss our first steps here and we’ve agreed to meet again soon when we get a better idea of what the use of User Generated Content in general means to the CBC going forward. This is far more than just “blog” comments, ranging from sign on profiles to video submissions, text to pictures etc. In addition this is not solely a CBC News issue for journalists, as all areas of the CBC including Kids, entertainment and Sports use and intend to use User Generated Content.
ICUC is helping us in developing, with our technology vendors (Pluck, ThinData, Maven and others), both technological processes and workflow (i.e. – people!) processes to flag potentially questionable user generated content. Those items are all based on editorial guidelines from a cross department workgroup led by NCAN.
Material that requires editorial or journalistic decision making will continue to be made by journalists and/or program teams going forward, depending on context, and ultimately escalate to the Editor in Chief. We recognize that, and made that clear in our discussion. Part of this initial process is to help determine the process, the job descriptions and the number of people required.
We chose ICUC because they have expertise in News and in Children’s in particular, they provide strategic consulting services in the implementation of social network services and features, and they’re Canadian. The only Canadian company providing those services.
As we get a handle on what the use of this kind of content means and as we fully deploy the technology to do so, we fully intend to consult with CMG on type and number of positions going forward and we made that clear.
Notwithstanding the use of a “?” at the end of your headline the clear inference is that we are out-sourcing and we are not. I wonder whether if journalists had moderated this blog they would have called for a fair and balanced report and sought a comment from me? See? Journalism is journalism and user generated content is something else – but what is it?
As always you can reach me at 416 205-7182 to discuss and I’ll be happy to try and explain.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the comment! It’s always great to see executives participating in this — even if it contains a well-deserved lashing of me.
Can you clarify then: As I understand your comment, ICUC will not be moderating any comments on CBC web sites — is that accurate? From what I read of your text, they are only developing a process/methodology for moderation? Can you confirm, then, that only CBC employees will be doing all the site moderation?
It’d also be great to know if any CBC bloggers (of which there are a-plenty) will be involved in the development of these guidelines? I think I can speak for a lot of CBC bloggers (people who are employed by the CBC but have popular personal blogs) that they felt pretty disappointed that none seemed to have been consulted around the much talked-about blogging policy recently…
Not a lashing – just trying to show it’s a tricky subject and I recognise it as such.
I’d gladly receive any and all comments from bloggers on how best to handle these issues. Email me at work. From my reading of these comments I can see everyone struggles with what is honest opinion albeit “salty” and what could be perceived as “libel, promotion of hatred” and so on.
Frankly I’m more concerned about how one considers video and pictures that are contributed. Exposure, for example from A&E, had great short films submitted that flagged instantly the age old “but is it art” question. The answer is never strictly a “journalistic” discussion or decision. Who made journalists the arbiter of all content whether it’s news or not? Someone, within the context of of an Exposure like show, submits a film dealing with teen self-mutilation that includes personal footage of this activity. Who makes the call? How do we escalate? Is it art or documentary? There’s a process here to be figured out…..
I frankly don’t know what the outcome of this initial phase will be with ICUC but I repeat, I anticipate we will develop new job descriptions and new positions going forward, and will continue to use both technology and people (CBC employee type people!) to monitor and moderate user generated content.
I look forward to working with the Union and others to figure out how we can achieve this soon and sensibly in a way that can scale and is sustainable. Any and all comments and ideas gratefully received. Even the smartarse ones sure to come…
cheers Todd!
I say leave it unmoderated. Comments are made by the public, like it or not. The moment you moderate anything, you accept responsibility for the content.
It’s been proven many times that the public is quite good at moderating, either through argument or voting comments down.
And it’s free, which would let journalists do what they should be doing.
A slashdotesque moderation system would be way too breakable. Also the user base is very different and less likely to have the amount of community focus required to make it work. It would very quickly become the stomping ground of a small cadre of more-or-less crazy people willing to put in N hours a day nuking comments they didn’t like, thereby rendering it useless for the general population. And moderated or not, the CBC will still be held responsible for anything dodgy that gets posted – if not legally then morally.
This is not to say that I think that any even vaguely valid comment should be censored, far from it. Basically so long as it’s not spam or hate speech, and it’s within a country mile of the topic at hand, it should go up in my opinion, and I don’t think the public reaction to anything more restrictive than that would be pretty.
(For example, we use Movable Type for blogs at the moment. Now, MT includes an IP banning feature that we can’t turn off, but that can’t actually be used – as, to MT, all comments appear come from Akamai IPs. Every now and then someone will accidentally hit the Ban This IP button when clearing out junk, knocking out comments for the people behind that Akamai server, and they invariably contact us and are furious that, to all appearances, the CBC is blocking them personally. Even though this isn’t actually the case, they do have a point. That definitely shouldn’t be the policy, “going forward”.)
there’s a red herring here:
the issue isn’t whether content moderation should be done by journalists or not, the issue is whether the ceeb should do its own moderation, rather than handing over control to an outside source.
I’m guessing a lot of the current moderation isn’t done by “journalists” anyhow.. it’s done more by researchers, APs. or new media types.
(and the whole “trained journalist” moniker is pretty funny… many of our journalists have little formal training at all, excellent journalists though they might be)
As anonymous alluded to — ‘voting down’, *and* voting up, Digg-style, would be the perfect way to set up moderation. Let’s find out if the software supports it!