When communities and their conversations live digitally, what’s the value of a comments section? For the Washington Post, quite a lot; as they have discovered that a comments section can showcases their most loyal readers.

Greg Barber, Director of Digital News Products, and Sam Han, Director of Data Science & AI from the Washington Post led a talk called Can AI Soothe the Savage Comments Section? which featured their AI-based comment moderation software, ModBot.

With journalism today living online, and not print, community weighs much more than the historical “Letters to the Editor” section. So what then, are the goals of every newsroom? According to Barber, “trust, loyalty, diversity, and efficiency… and a tool that can help the publication reach those goals is online comments.”

The Washington Post has found a few unique motivators that encourage readers to post comments from author and expert clarification and participation, for news organizations to highlight high-quality comments, and finally for the commenters voice to be heard. The  problem with allowing comments on your site, Barber informed, “is that we’re not using them correctly.”

The comments section exsist as if we’re throwing a party, but not showing up. —Greg Barber

There’s real value found in commenters, because it increases trust, loyalty, and provides opportunity for diversity. “More than fifty percent of commenters are subscribers,” Barber said.

To bridge the gap and bring efficiency to the comments section, The Washington Post created an AI-based automatic comment moderation system, called ModBot. Since 2016, The Washington Post has been perfecting this system to achieve a near-perfect regression analysis in production.

In terms of ethical concerns, and how ModBot can continue to work best for the newsroom, Barber and Han are still working out the kinks. “It’s a hard sell,” Han said, “so we gave individual power to the newsroom so that they could determine ModBot’s operating threshold.”

What’s next for ModBot? Ultimately, The Washington Post hopes ModBot will be able to not only delete savage comments, but surface those that should be featured. Greg Barber discussed the current challenges for development.