With the generalization of internet services, internet articles flood into every portal site. This has made people easily notice everyday issues and share their thoughts through comments. Comments – have you ever written one? At least you would have seen comments at the bottom of a news page. The Comments space is for that use. It is used for expressing your thoughts, sympathizing about the article, and so on. However, that doesn’t mean that you can express just anything. Some articles praise or criticize a particular person or group of people. There have been problems ever since the internet became a new place for people to communicate. The problems are quite various, but users writing comments behind anonymous nicknames have reached its peak: the point of ruining or ending the lives of our beloved ones.

The biggest problems and concerns are in the entertainment field. In this area, there are a lot of articles that have been inflating facts as though even a small thing were a considerable thing. Last year, it was quite a ‘blue’ year in the entertainment field. Sulli, who was a beautiful and cheerful girl, and Gu Hara, who was a cute and active girl, both committed suicide. I’m not suggesting that these two miserable incidents occurred only because of comments. I could not stand with people who kept blaming the celebrities’ deaths as their fault. Not only that, the press kept writing about when and why and how they left this world. Stimulating headlines written by journalists popped up everywhere. The writers were not feeling any guilt or grief for what they were writing about. People, who were grieved to watch the tragic news, started thinking that they could no longer be bystanders of this sorrow. So, people pulled together to make a change.

Readers demanded the abolition of comments in entertainment articles. Portal sites took steps: Naver implemented a policy on March 5, 2019 to abolish comments in entertainment articles and Daum in October, 2019 also implemented a policy to prevent comments that sometimes spread false information.

Many people know that abolishing entertainment comments alone can't solve everything. In fact, that also removed the good effects of comments, various opinions, and criticisms. Are all comments bad? No. We do have a right to express our thoughts and one way of doing it is writing comments. Everyone has different opinions and there can be meaningful communications through untact methods. For example, some people praise or cheer for the celebrities on the news. That means the abolition of comments in entertainment articles cannot be a permanent solution. Besides, there are fields that need public opinions, such as politics.

In political fields, reporters write articles that include quite a bit of subjective opinions and readers also have their own subjective opinions. This is a kind of freedom of expression, but some of them act out of line. To prevent some incidents, before the April 15, 2020 general elections, portal sites showed good steps to rule out ways that could be the center of public opinion, such as real-time search terms, or possibly the manipulation of public opinion. In addition, Naver's policy of posting comments and releasing a collection of comments through self-verification, which was implemented a few months ago, is still receiving praise.

A comment should be posted with proper responsibility. Not long after the policy on comments was executed, I saw a comment that interested me, so I looked up the collection of that comment writer. The comment wasn't a bad one. It was a comment expressing sympathy for the article. But the moment I saw the collection of comments, I found out that the person was really working on the internet as a person with countless egos. Literally, in some articles, he or she was a job seeker, a teacher, a nurse, and so on. It was hard to understand why he or she was interested in gaining sympathy through comments and was active with many different egos.

As I saw a part of ‘what was going on’ in the internet, I became more positive about the exposing the collection of comments. It is a great way to prevent false stories, and by this, the comments could find their right use, such as sympathizing or criticizing an article rightly. I think this was a necessary change that should have happened much earlier. After such a long time and so much grief, we have started to change. Though the internet is not the real world, it can now be our second real world.

Our first step was the abolishment of comments in entertainment articles and exposing the comments collection. These can be a part of the key for stopping the threat to anyone. We still have a lot of work to do to construct a better shield for those people. You should remember that there are same manners needed online as in your everyday life. However, did only the comments give them a hard time? Isn't it also necessary to take action against wrong internet manners? Well, this little change could be the start.

“Online” doesn’t mean that you are an outlaw. Always keep in mind: yes comments, yes responsibilities.

Choi Seoyoung  think0412@naver.com

<저작권자 © 홍익대영자신문사, 무단 전재 및 재배포 금지>