Uncivil dialogue: Commenting and stories about indigenous people

Today we made the difficult decision to temporarily close comments onstories about indigenous people. We hope to reopen them in mid-January afterwe've had some time to review how these comments are moderated and to providemore detailed guidance to our moderators.

I want to explain our rationale for taking this unusual step.

But let me begin by explaining why we have comments on our news site.

If you follow industry trends, you'll know that the value of commentingon media websites has been debated for years.

Many publishers, including some newspaper sites in Canada, have shutcomments down. Others have turned the commenting function on their websitesover to third-party social media platforms such as Facebook.

As Fortune's Mathew Ingram recently wrote, there are common complaintscited whenever a publisher makes this move: comment sections breed trolls and"garbage"; the proportion of readers that leaves comments is small comparedwith the general audience; it costs a lot of money and time to manage andmoderate this community; and there are social media platforms better suited forthis type of conversation.

Much of that is true.

But at CBC News, we also see many positives. We believe our commentsection helps answer our mandate as a public broadcaster to reflect the countryand its regions to itself. We believe it's important to provide the public witha democratic space where they can freely engage and debate the issues of theday.

Research shows that our audience not only expects comments on a newssite like ours, but values them -- even if readers don't participate directly inthe comment threads. Those who do leave comments consume far more of ourcontent than average users, so they're a highly engaged segment of ouraudience.

We also have one of the most active comment spaces of any mediaorganization in the country. In the last few months, we set records for thenumber of comments left on our pages, topping one million comments in Septemberand October.

We've seen thoughtful, insightful and moving comments on our pages.We've seen ignorant, ill-informed and objectionable comments as well. All of itis acceptable, in our view, in a marketplace of ideas where the issues of theday are freely debated and tested. For that to work, the debate must berespectful, even if it's vigorous and pointed.

But as our guidelines make clear, we draw the line on hatespeech and personal attacks.

While there are a number of subjects and groups of people who seem tobring out higher-than-average numbers of worrisome comments, we find ourselveswith a unique situation when it comes to indigenous-related stories.

We've noticed over many months that these stories draw a disproportionatenumber of comments that cross the line and violate our guidelines. Some of theviolations are obvious, some not so obvious; some comments are clearly hatefuland vitriolic, some are simply ignorant. And some appear to be hate disguisedas ignorance (i.e., racist sentiments expressed in benign language).

This comes at the same time CBC News has made a concerted effort toconnect with indigenous communities in order to improve our journalism andbetter reflect these communities to a national audience. The success of ourAboriginal unit and our investigativejournalism around missing and murdered indigenous women are just two examples of that commitment.

We don't want violations of our guidelines by a small minority of ourcommenters to derail our good work or alienate our audience. So we're taking apause to see if we can put some structure around this. We will reopen commentsas soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience in the meantime.

Brodie Fenlon

Acting director of digital news

CBC News and Centres