We have had a lot of feedback on reader comments in the past few months.
A tiny minority of individuals have engaged in consistent trolling, and, despite being given numerous chances to engage in constructive dialogue, always revert to form, and have therefore been permanently banned.
The number of persons permanently banned is 3, out of a total of nearly 5 million readers since DTNZ’s inception.
Since December we have been trialing an AI-powered scan to find and eliminate these individuals from commenting on DTNZ, as they go by different user names and we have a ‘no-login’ policy for comments. The AI has been effective in identifying and connecting comments made by the same anonymous source, and auto-deleting them.
Spam comments
DTNZ also attracts a considerable amount of spam comments, which are also automatically binned by AI. In very rare cases non-spam comments may be mis-identified.
What is trolling?
Trolling is ‘when someone posts or comments online to ‘bait’ people, which means deliberately provoking an argument or emotional reaction.’ (eSafety.gov.au).
The troll hides behind anonymity (a privilege given to them by DTNZ), to leave inflammatory, irrelevant, or offensive comments. Their only goal is ‘to elicit a strong emotional reaction, disrupt normal discussion, or simply to get attention.’
Hate Speech
Hate speech is language used to promote violence towards a group of people based on their religion, race, sexual preferences, or nationality.
AI-generated comments
We have been alerted to one user who has been accused of making AI-generated comments. We have been asked to ban this person for misleading conduct, which in itself could be seen as a form of trolling.
On reviewing the comments we are of the view that they probably are AI-generated. Most of this user’s comments appear to be long-winded printouts from an AI platform.
Other concerns with AI-generation of comments include:
- the sizeable word count unnecessarily clogs up server space and resources, and reduces the user experience, being TL;DR
- there is the likelihood over time (if not banned) for AI-generated comments to proliferate, and in time dominate, and even automate, rendering the comments section a pointless depository of ChatGPT responses.
We will continue to review the issue of AI-generation of comments at this point in time.
To clarify our comments policy:
- Trolling is not acceptable and persistent trolls will be banned permanently
- AI is used to automatically identify and eliminate repeat trolls and spam
- Do not write anything defamatory
- Criticism of social issues is welcomed, but do not cross the line into hate speech (as defined above)
- Refrain from using profanities
If your comments are not appearing on DTNZ and consider you have been unfairly or mistakenly banned, contact the Editor via email on editor@dailytelegraph.co.nz.
Fair enough.
DTNZ is the ONLY publication that publishes free speech.
We commentators ought to protect this OUTSTANDING feature by not engaging into troll argumentation and call out undue comments as explained above.
THANK YOU DTNZ for the service you provide, and the millions of oversea views attest to this.
There will be a time when DTNZ will receive the accolades it deserves.
But trustfully, DTNZ will never accept gufftmean bribes like TVNZ or the herald, ay?…and that’s not hate speech. It’s a fact.