This Site Makes Sure You Read The Story Before Commenting

A Norwegian company has come up with a new way to protect the rights of individuals online. NRKbeta, the tech-based arm of the Norwegian broadcaster NRK, issued a proposal for a law that would help in controlling the hate comments people usually write on posts or pictures posted on social media sites.

Digital security has been an issue for some time, ever since the rise of the use of the Internet and social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. However, the Internet has become synonymous with ideals like “freedom of speech” for people who think they have the right to express whatever opinion they might have, no matter however hateful they can be. To this effect, NRKbeta has come up with a unique way to combat hateful and angry commenters online – by having them take a quiz before they can comment.

Surprisingly though, the proposed law and the issue published by NRKbeta was met with an enthusiastic response and commenters actually went so far as to post links to books and researches, asked more questions, and gave good feedback on how to improve the process of commenting for everyone.

Here’s how NRKBeta forces readers to be better informed about a topic via a quiz

The credit to this response goes to a feature that the company introduced the previous month because of which commenters have to answer a quiz (three questions, mostly) to be able to access the comments section.

Through this, the company is able to certify that the readers have actually read the articles and are not blindly commenting on it. When readers have actually read the article they can understand what is going on, hopefully, and be able to come up with a properly formed response.

The quiz, even if it is just three questions, actually also helps in delaying some pent up emotions like anger. This also keeps in check the need to rant on part of some readers after reading some things that they might not agree with. Even if the potential commenter spends fifteen seconds on the quiz, they calm down enough to rethink what they are doing and that helps a lot.

NRK has only rolled out this feature on a few stories and they are hoping to test it more. Even though it is Norwegian language only for now, the idea of having people read up on a topic before they go on an uniformed rant is a good one and can be applied universally. They do say that ignorance is bliss, unless you are commenting over the internet that is.

via Niemen Lab