A Norwegian tech website has come up with the idea of making readers take and pass a quiz before they can comment on articles, to ensure that they know something about the article they are commenting on.
A fortnight ago, NRKbeta, the tech site of the public broadcaster NRK, ran an article about the new digital surveillance laws that have been proposed for Norway.
While digital security is a hot topic in the country, all the comments for this story were respectful and contributed to the understanding of the topic, according to NiemanLab.
The NRKbeta editors attribute this to a feature introduced in January and implemented on select stories. Readers who want to comment have to answer a multiple choice quiz of three questions about the article before they can comment.
{loadposition sam08}NRKbeta journalist Ståle Grut was quoted as saying: "We thought we should do our part to try and make sure that people are on the same page before they comment. If everyone can agree that this is what the article says, then they have a much better basis for commenting on it."
The quiz that comes up when one attempts to comment on some articles on NRKbeta.
However, NiemanLab said, when stories were posted on the main NRK site, they tended to have the same kind of comments that one sees on other sites: uninformed, crude and rude.
The move by NRK is not unusual. Google's parent company Alphabet announced last week that it would be working The New York Times, The Guardian, The Economist and Wikipedia that it would be testing a tool called Perspective that uses artificial intelligence to detect "toxic" comments.
NRK has not yet decided whether it will use the quiz for all of its content.