Freedom of Internet Speech Demands Vigilance Against Obnoxious Comments

Some AC authors believe that only fellow Content Producers should be allowed to comment on our articles. Presumably the idea is that if everyone who comments is also writing for AC, nobody will want to make enemies.

I disagree. People who want to make obnoxious comments can easily set up bogus AC identities. We already have some alleged Content Providers who have never actually provided any content.

Blocking anonymous comments on individual articles may help some people, like Abigail Beal, who wrote a very nice article about family fun on a rainy day. Although the title and first paragraph clearly indicated that the twenty suggestions were intended to include young children, some troubled soul or souls (e-slang: trolls) typed in at least 60 deliberately obnoxious comments, mostly about sex. AC's computer system is supposed to generate automatic e-mail notification when someone comments on an article, but heretofore the system has not notified us of "outsider" comments...and recently it's been failing to notify us of comments from logged-in Content Producers. When a comment from a fellow AC writer did reach Abigail Beal, she purged the nasty comments and blocked further anonymous comments from that page.

Nobody likes to find that our writing has generated a flood of verbal sewage, but consider: Because the system ranks articles based on page views and comments they attract, and even provides Performance Payments, like royalties, based on the degree to which an article is read, the nasty little trolls were actually generating money for Abigail Beal. They also pushed her article to the top of the "Most Commented On" list, where it was seen and read by more of the kind of readers for whom the article was intended. The troll(s) may dislike Abigail Beal personally, but they have helped her become a more successful writer.