 The next talk has the wonderful title, The Cogwheel of Flesh. And please have a warm welcome for the two expedition leaders, Frau Fili and Argonai. Great. Thank you. So we can move to the next slide. Brilliant. So what is this all about? Journalists get a lot of letters from their readers. Also moderators, people who moderate professionally like Fili. And one of them contained this wording, you know, sense a cogwheel of flesh. You are nothing. You're just a number, just like all of us. But you don't realize it because otherwise you wouldn't be doing your censoring bullshit. None of us has the courage to change their life and to put their life against these people. So like the courageous men's and women's in other countries who lives and you live from our lowly waiters and you stupid Jews. So journalists get a lot of unwelcome mail. That's always been that way. That was the same in the times before the internet. But recently in the recent years everybody seemed to get the impression that everyone was complaining about the stuff that was happening on the internet at the time. So like, you know, you could create the slogan, where the internet is, there is also hate. It doesn't work really well in English. Like Katrin Göring Eckert, a politician of the German Green Party who has apparently had common sense because of her name, Göring. And she sat down and read out some emails she received, some hate mail. Or for instance, what happened to me yesterday at the ticket sales in the German, the Berlin train station, or even worse, the nomination for the German TV prize where Anja Resche was nominated for her comment against the right-wing movements that have been surfacing in Germany recently. Where the emotions have sort of been boiling up. And journalists are starting to write letters to their readers and letters to their public. And this isn't just happening to journalists, but also to bloggers who complain about the state of their comment sections. And I was at a conference in Berlin recently. Alexander Kluge was there too. He was a German intellectual, a bit older than average. And according to him, the internet is great and it confirmed Brecht's radio theory where he formulated his ideas about broadcasting. Broadcasting should be a medium of interaction where there's a back channel from the receivers to the senders. And for many, many years when there was a debate about the role of media, there was this debate about the back channel. So that the people who consume the media should have the opportunity to address themselves to the author. And Alexander Kluge said that this has now happened, but it's sort of left a stale taste that you can see from all the reactions because many of them aren't very pleasant to read and very nasty, in fact. And you could say that the comments below newspaper articles have turned into a corner of filth and that's Philly's main task. She has to clean up these corners of filth. And there's a certain unhappiness about this. This is not just about the refugee situation. It's happened earlier than that. The newspapers had started to close the comment sections might be due to economical reasons, but it might also be due to the fact that they didn't really know how to moderate comments. And then there are media like Facebook, which we won't be talking about a lot today, where everything is essentially a comment. And many people are unhappy with this. Many media have these Facebook channels into which they pump their content. And the stuff that goes back is often slightly unpleasant. On the other hand, many media professionals are convinced that initially you mirrored the media you had in print online, and now publishers understood that Ancillio copyright is not going to save them. You need to invest in digital. That's going to be the future. And you can be unhappy with the general state of affairs. Nothing is less dignified to people of culture than to be governed by... This is always a case. And you can pull a long rant about the state of comments on the internet and the state of politics. And TV is always crap. There's nothing good on... Oh, God, radio! It's an outrage, really. No, but seriously, in a free and liberal society, you need to have an open culture of debate where you must be allowed to be against the current state of affairs. That's just good style in a democracy and even more so in a liberal society. But if we think about the situation in dictatorship, then these rides are in danger, like the right to free speech, and that's why it's important to fight for them. Because under the conditions of a dictatorship, there are always hard sanctions against the opposition. And the example I just told you about, that was from the first leaflet of the white rose who opposed the Nazis. And they typed this on a typewriter, and of course the Nazis weren't exactly happy about this. And as you all know, the white rose movement was sentenced to death due to their four leaflets that they published. And yes, the situation today is entirely different. Nobody's killed, but there are still sanctions in place. And we have to consider how much free speech we want to have, what's the balance. And there are always going to be opinions that we aren't happy with. For instance, when people don't show good style in there, in the way they express themselves, or people who deny the Holocaust, nasty things like that. You might have noticed I fulfilled Godwin's law at the very beginning of my talk. I started with a Nazi comparison. That's been established quite early on the internet. The longer discussion lasts on the internet, for instance in news groups, I don't know how many of you remember news groups, it was a bit like mailing lists of the early internet. And Godwin's law states that the longer discussion lasts on the internet, the more likely it becomes that there's going to be a Nazi comparison. This is often used sarcastically. And there's a rumor that the argument is always immediately won by the opposition as soon as somebody makes a Nazi comparison, but unfortunately that doesn't work in practice. But these sarcastic rules, well, when discussion goes off the rails, then you have these auto-regulation measures that you have laws like these as measures of auto-regulation. And of course you might say the harmless Hitler comparisons, for instance, looking at the documentation program of the German youth channel N24. But in general you can say when there's the internet, there are going to be trolls, they're inseparable. And in the age of using it, there were hard rules. For instance, tofu, the tofu way of citing, you're not supposed to quote everything the people above you said. But that's been violated today. I mean, that's no longer in place today. Even if you just write one line in an email, people are going to be annoyed if you don't quote everything below it. So the people of the use of it of course had a technical background because it was very early days of the internet and today's conditions are entirely different. And laws that you're trying to establish, they're not going to be eternal. Everything changes, the good practices. And yes, with regard to all these Nazi comparisons, even the big ones are doing it. Hillary, for instance, Hillary Clinton compared the annexation of Crimea with Hitler and Schäupler, the German military finance did the same thing. And of course, in return, people compare Schäupler to Hitler because of his stance in the euro debate. I think you can't really say that Godwin doesn't happen outside the internet. What's interesting in that context, just because I already mentioned her in a positive context, in this commentary from August, she made another commentary which was very popular about the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp and what was shocking to me personally. I was attentive, I was listening to this presentation and she will manage to draw the line or get it together with a situation in Dresden, with the right-wing demonstrations, which I found a bit extreme. So that's a kind of Hitler comparison ultra, where I just tread carefully. Well, my job here is to really water down the wine a bit, so obviously the journalists are critical about the backlash from the net and I'm trying to give the other side just to say, well, what journalism is doing isn't that really perfect either. And so what this topic was, a summary of Süddeutsche Zeitung German daily, Thomas Middelhoff, media house manager who was arrested, who was in prison, and he is for many the incarnation of a greedy, arrogant, why hasn't this guy understood this himself? This is a demagogue strategy. Well, if you're just trying to imagine the comments under this newspaper's tweet, there were even people demanding that, oh, well, this person be publicly executed, that that doesn't take long. But these reactions are interesting and this was a Facebook entry of Süddeutsche and this is just an article by a very, very distinguished commentator, Liondecker, and I in fact personally complained about this and the reply of Süddeutsche was that, well, that's the summary, that's the headline of the article, so you should be complaining about the article basically. But so the question shouldn't be what are the reactions that just appear out of nowhere. Obviously this is in the context and obviously this is a reaction to something that you put out there and if this is polarizing, well, obviously this is an echo chamber effect. Well, and if we just want to talk about, well, demagogues, what does it mean? There's a nice definition by someone called Martin Moorlach. Well, you can work towards your political goal if you cater to the masses, if you are psychophantic, if you try and approach their feelings and intents and prejudices and just the way how you want to proceed to pursue your goals, this would be, a demagogue would present that their methods as the only true methods and this is, well, alternative laws without alternative, a way of showing who are the good guys in this game. Well, we know the situation. The truth, a trademark, is the first to die in war. Why? Why is that? Because we have this effect of polarization. We have, well, that's us, the good guys, and we have them who are obviously the enemies and that makes it quite obvious how to evaluate these sides and you can follow these traces or these dynamics very easily in a random newspaper article and I'd just like to pinpoint your attention to that just to ask these questions. Who are the people who are being excluded and what are the sides that are maybe being drawn? So this is Iu Komasa. Gunther Ettinger. He's a bit of a hate figure for a lot of people even in reporting, even in current reporting so he's like the EU internet expert who knows nothing of the internet and we have all that, like the West against Putin, the good guys against Assad, the Greeks versus Merkel and obviously the axis of the, well, good guys against the rest of the world. Well, these are the narratives you find in varied forms in public discourse or in the press and it's essential to understand that we're being made into a part of this us sphere and that still means that we can have the need to distance ourselves from this artificial grouping and this can be a kind of bias, this can be in a sort of sense of imbalance and we would in that case maybe try and distance ourselves from that or even exclude ourselves from certain us and them constructions and that was what I might, what I found out about this Anya Reske commentary about Auschwitz. If I were one of these demonstrators, one of these right-wing Pegida guys in Dresden, I would feel, well, excluded or ostracized by this press lady or by people telling me well, you're not part of us, this establishment of distance and that runs counter to the old, well, there's this old BBC ideal basically of convincing the enemy trying to make someone else believe my own reporting more than counter propaganda but well, you can of course say well, journalists would say we're so objective and we don't we don't partake in this us and them but I think it's well, there's a famous journalist's quote a German news maker who says don't, well, collude, don't not even if it's a good cause but don't attach yourself to this cause. This is, um, macht dich nicht mit einer Sache gemein, you say in German journalism training. But of course it's also easy to to lie with facts by selectively picking facts and excluding others. I think that, you know, proof is a beautiful thing but that's not enough. And then there's the question of neutrality, what is neutral? Who decides what is neutral? And very often it depends on the people you are talking to who are the people who approve of neutrality and I'd assume that the people who are best suited to judging neutrality are those who aren't on your side already. And naturally in journalism whenever there are technically difficult subjects like net neutrality there's a temptation to condense these things into simplified narratives to be able to sell it to your readers and one famous example of this in debates on internet politics is this recursion to general narratives like freedom versus security and this is Charles play because the people who, you know, the people who report and people who decide don't even need to understand the technical background because they've heard lots and lots of talks and they know on which side they're supposed to be. So these narratives are often misleading and it just depends on who dominates the plain text and then of course this can always be turned around and you might ask what about German security when foreign states are now now surveilling us whereas what happens to our freedoms? So to condense this whenever there are comments and we mean comments in the comments section below an article there are two options you can either ignore them and be solidary and say oh great this is a brilliant article and you spoke right from my heart and interestingly loads of people were shared but it's apart from that it's very rare for journalists to receive positive feedback so the more popular option in the comments section is to oppose the journalist's point of view and to voice opinions that are excluded from general discourse like pro-Putin and this can turn out quite interesting but I would say that there's going to be the biggest uproar when journalists polarise and there's been a lot more polarisation recently but there's going to be a tendency for readers comments to turn against the opinion of the journalists and I think it's not possible to completely separate these comments from the article itself because there's again this tendency to create more emotions to generate more clicks I need technical help please I actually got the text on this I can use this break to defragmentate the seats again can everyone who's got a free seat next to him raise his hand please go get a seat get your hand partner okay I think you can put down your hands again thank you oh god we're about to start where are we now with the commentary debate first of all I'd like to show you a slide which shows the tweet of mine actually I actually wanted to comment that the authors actually don't read the commentaries and the commentators don't read the text basically the whole speech in one sentence but I will explain myself now properly ever since humanity the birth of humanity there have been debates where if you think about artefacts in the museum where there are debates online who actually end up in virtual debates managers for example they try to dissolve those fights in the internet and to enable conversation on facts so the group dynamics can actually dissolve themselves so they don't need a mediator but yeah it's not the case usually so I usually like to work that way that I like people to communicate and I want a lot of people the biggest amount of people with the biggest amount of points of views to communicate with each other so yeah before I forget I'd like to mention one thing which Andri mentioned before it's not only that one group says that the commentaries are bad and they have to be kicked there's always different positions and every position claims that their commentaries claim stays or that the other commentaries have to be kicked so they are redundant so actually we we're not actually fighting against an agenda which is always like most a lot of the news portals have a volume of several thousand commentaries so we don't even have the time to consider any political parties you might have in private and therefore within seconds or possibly a minute of time we have for each comment that's the time we have to decide whether it stays or whether it goes and we don't even have the time to worry about whether people think like us as a person and then in the refugee crisis during the refugee crisis some news sites just partly or fully closed their comment sections for instance the Züldorges Zeitung but they seem to have relaxed their practice a bit and in the meantime most of the larger news sites have closed their comment sections and only closed it for certain subjects but if news sites were to give up entirely and close their comment sections entirely like the Züldorges does which only allows a very narrow set of debates then they should ask themselves a question of what they themselves did wrong in a multi-faceted debate Comments in general have a bad image, a bad reputation there's a study by Echo Newsroom that says that in 2011 68.2% of readers 68.2% of journalists said that their discussion was mostly sticking to facts and this is now down to 49% so they lost quite a bit and in my experience most journalists don't really take part in the discussions that happen below their articles in my study it's 40.3% of journalists and as I know from my work it's always the same journalists who engage in this debate with their readers but most of them ignore it or say the comments, that's terrible it's just horrible and this is one of the reasons why comments have a bad reputation they're always below the article which already sets a sort of hierarchy because the article is on top and the comments are below the users often don't feel like they're being taken seriously and the rules on deletion or of use aren't very obvious but then again the community doesn't always bother reading them we will see a lot of emails who wonder why something was deleted and they get terribly upset and we reply that we deleted your comment because it was a reply to a comment that was against the terms of use the comment itself was fine but the original comment wasn't and many people don't realize that there are very simple reasons another problem is user interfaces they're often bad most news sites are still designed to look like newspapers and the comment sections are like letters to the editor we could do a lot more if you were to reduce this analogy to printed paper and if you were to embed the readers more into your workflow for instance allowing them to publish your own articles or holding events with actual readers or having chats where authors chat with their readers which is often hard to do technically and there's an optical thing as well many news sites force you to have comments collapsed by default and then you can expand them but you're you're redirected to another page so you don't see them immediately they happen in another place and this makes this gap worse so editors need to regain the trust of their readers so they're able to keep the pace with the current developments this censorship taking place this summer we had the impression that due to the refugee crisis there was a lot of attention to the comment sections but I'm not entirely sure if the comments actually did get worse or if there was a group of people who hadn't commented a lot previously now started to go online and comment our articles so I think there's been a bit of a shift in the 90s newspapers started putting news online without thinking about revenue and now finally these things are what's holding them back and it's obvious today that we need new online formats find new ways of publishing news and the future is going to be somewhere online but we don't know where new sites live from the clicks to their articles which in turn generate profit and from that follows clickbait and optimizing for clicks and yes making people more likely to click on your articles or did it break down ah it's too bad that's a classic of comment I'm just here because of the commentaries that's what it says yeah it's about the people who don't read the article and just put the comment that's a tactic of polarization of media and this is also a tactic that the trolls use so the question is does the net like the internet actually turn us into trolls well it depends this is what we have to discuss about what we do against it and what is a troll actually a troll for me is a person who's not interested in the exchange of opinions and is just trying to provoke and just targeting at the author of the article or other people and they just use other people to talk about themselves so they just try to attract attention and eliminate the discussion but the trolls are not the only problem the problem is that we have lost the ability to discuss like we don't know how to discuss things of course I got some commentaries for you okay shall I read them out okay this user is called the Jewish pig the old whore at Wikipedia we eliminated the sentence that the pig's mom is a Jewish Polish person and luckily we copied it to her home pages why do you hide that you sons of a bitch okay we got another comment okay I'll pass on every one of you where's Patrick who's actually against Merkel and actually eliminates all those betrayerish politicians with a shot in the head actually people you have to laugh about it but I actually read an article about it lately it was about Frauke Petri and her invitation to Plasberg and the article was about six rhetorical tricks of Heike Petri which was interesting because the tricks, the rhetorical tricks come to the tricks that trolls use so what Heike Petri did was she didn't let her opponent speak and she said yeah that's what others do as well so that's relativization and yeah she well she used wrong terms apparently and deviated from the topic like to a completely different topic and the fifth point was it's just fun yeah so she and yeah at last she just shouted like when nothing else helped so one of my thesis is that trolls consider themselves artists and they are actually competing with journalists about the status so this is also a reason why trolls are actually so difficult to handle because you can't really disencourage them everyone who tries actually to disencourage the trolls actually in support to the trolls so don't feed the troll yeah just brings it straight to the point because ignorance is actually what disencourages the trolls okay the perception of art says that the communication works from the artist to the perspective so the artist actually doesn't really get the erection of the perspective okay this is the classical perception and it's um yeah in the press it's very similar today that a lot of authors and journalists don't realize what the users think of their articles so there's also journalists who can only maintain their independence if they don't care about the opinions of other people the users and the readers don't let themselves be influenced through the people and this is what I've heard of journalists and I think okay when our age of clicks where clicks gain importance they're actually yeah forced to orientate at the public like the viewers okay I tried to just keep it short the question is how to moderate and do you moderate beforehand or afterwards do you or do you do it before or do you do it the other way around so these mechanisms are usually not obvious to the readers well in that case the worst of them so that's actually the tactic that most news outlets are using today with the notable exception of Facebook and that's the classic example where just some problematic things might in fact remain and so the select oh well gardening in advance is the world the most obvious tactic in a way well actually the time is already almost over I did have a lot of nice nice little quotes here for you now just just flick through just random abuse but of course someone someone writing just to describe our work and also address us as commentators and this actually claimed well I'm contributing to keeping your place as a commenter commentary moderator in place so you can censor it right now and that's XKCD you can see it yourself well my last question would have been sort of more hypothetical I'll have to leave it out this time but just to as maybe to think on what would the ideal comment section actually look like another user commentary the refugees arrived in Germany in 2015 exceeds the number of US military sort of think about well quality what do you mean quality thanks a lot so there's no time for questions the time is over well there is a little bit left but sorry about the abrupt end so we can start right away you can still ask questions even if it doesn't look like it a question from the floor what I would have liked to heard well my question is what do we have these comment sections at all for at all because obviously the readers are the user and the journalists should kind of address and well you said no they're perfectly content well then everyone else with opposing opinions well they'll obviously flood the commentary with their toxic remarks that's just even if you're like on site online weekly German newspaper you can't stand being in that why not just close it all down I mean you can still discuss it on all the rest of the open web aren't just these comment sections just still basically an artifact just to keep garnering clicks and don't really have that debate function anymore yes I understand what you say in principle if comments work it can be very dynamic be very good for both parties because users have the opportunity to feed information back to news sites that they wouldn't otherwise get for instance on Twitter there are people who life-tweet photos from war sites which would be very very hard to get otherwise so it can be a very very good thing but you have to maintain it you have to make an effort to maintain it you have to invest a lot of time and websites have to have to change they have to be built differently they simply don't work on the model they use today Do please keep quiet if you're coming and going because we're still in the Q&A session and another question from the floor well about all these trolls like if you're excluding them from mainstream news sites I'm not actually sure that that's the best situation and they're not actually there where you can still approach them maybe with counter-speech but isn't that even a more complicated question if they like retreat into closed sections so what is well for you what's the goal with the trolls do you just want them to disappear or if so where do they go I'm glad for each comment that I'm allowed to moderate and to allow especially comments that don't fit into my view of the world because this allows me to prove that you know hey we're fair I think you need to reach a debate where the people who are now trolls you know the reaches of people we consider trolls and allows them to start reasonable debate and we need an opportunity for people from various political camps to be able to voice their opinions and that's something we don't have today well we're going to talk about the technical design of this comment section if you look at something like gamification of the user interface we do have a big variety of possibilities and the technical details might determine the kind of forum you provide so you can maybe prevent with technical means that a community kind of tips or goes sour but the return question or the corollary would be what's the benefit for the trolls there incentive to do that and how can you maybe address that so for instance in heiser german media very well known forum well you have a kind of editing system so some successful and maybe more moderate and informative comments are pushed up to the top in way that reddit is doing it maybe similarly well other outlets are experimenting with just blanking out unwanted content just so you see white space and I think you can actually design better comment sections so clearly people who want to troll somewhere and if you will send them out they'll do it somewhere else but well you have something like a troll subculture like if you look into 4chan which isn't a little better troll board but that's a culture maybe pop culture and impulse in itself so if I can just sort of throw that question back is well what's in it for the troll really trolling by trolling and that's all we have time for so we know further questions I'm afraid but thank you again very much for this very interesting talk