With the ever-growing popularity of social media, major media sites have come to understand the importance of audience participation. MediaShift’s Mark Glaser writes about the problem traditional media sites have had with the issue of filtering and moderating. Their conundrum has moved beyond using comments in the first place to how to moderate them. Moderators have taken to requiring users to register to post, while others have taken a less cumbersome approach for users by recognizing those who use their real names or highlighting the most substantial or engaging comments. Amazon.com (NSDQ: AMZN) gives badges to users who use their real names, while NYTimes.com enables readers to rate and recommend each others’ comments. BusinessWeek.com has taken this personalization a step further by choosing a commenter of the day to feature on its home page, complete with his or her photo and link to the comment.

The Hartford Courant’s Karen Hunter wrote about the process of going through user comments—such as foul language, racist remarks, sexual and homophobic slurs, overly personal information, and imposters—to censor offensive threads and advocated for the end of anonymous comments. Topix CEO Chris Tolles, on the other hand, defended the use of anonymous comments, citing from his site’s research that while unregistered comments do have about a 50 percent higher kill rate than their registered counterparts, they account for three times the volume. Besides, he argued, identifying someone by their IP address is about as simple as identifying them through registration.

The deputy ME for digital journalism at NYT Jonathan Landman says there is a need for a “balance of reinforcement and negative reinforcement.” Requiring commenters to reveal their names is an instance of negative reinforcement, while having editors select and highlight comments or enabling users to recommend what they deem are the best comments are examples of positive reinforcement. Currently, all comments on The Times have been approved by at least one of a 4-person team of moderators.

One of the biggest arguments in the debate over moderating comments is that editing inappropriate comments may lead to the site’s liability in defamation cases. The Communications Decency Act of 1996, however, has protected sites from becoming liable for user comments; it is only when an editor changes the meaning of a post to make it libelous that a site becomes responsible.