@inproceedings{80791ded9ced4f6aa4c269ec7509f84f,
title = "Changing names in online news comments at the New York Times",
abstract = "Online news comments are often confronted with issues of civility and inclusivity, which are sometimes pegged to the anonymity afforded to contributors in those spaces. In this work we study one form of anonymity in online comments that manifests as users changing their display name when they write a given comment. We undertake a predominantly quantitative analysis of how display names are changed across over 4 million comments on the New York Times site. We characterize the extent and nature of name changes on the site, explore the relationship of name changes to topicality and sentiment, and examine how name changes might be used to inform the moderation of online comments.",
keywords = "Anonymity, Journalism, News, Online commenting",
author = "Sachar, {Simranjit Singh} and Nicholas Diakopoulos",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} Copyright 2016, Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (www.aaai.org). All rights reserved.; 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016 ; Conference date: 17-05-2016 Through 20-05-2016",
year = "2016",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016",
publisher = "AAAI Press",
pages = "339--347",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Web and Social Media, ICWSM 2016",
}