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Naver headquarters

As of Mar. 19, the comment history of everyone who comments on Naver news articles will be made public. “The goal is to cut down on trolls and attempts to abuse the commenting service and to restore its original beneficial purpose,” South Korea’s leading portal site said on Mar. 18.

The basic points of Naver’s new comment policy are to disclose commenters’ nickname, profile picture, and comment history and to make new users wait seven days before they can start commenting. While commenters had previously been able to choose not to make their comment history public, they’ll no longer have that option.

Opening the list of commenters for a given user will display all the comments that are currently posted, but not comments that the user has delayed or that have been deleted after being reported for abuse. However, the percentage of comments recently deleted by the user will be displayed along with their comment history. Naver provided the following explanation for why it’s disclosing the deletion percentage: “Trolls have a tendency to delete their comments shortly after posting them. We’ve created a way to identify such users.” The comment history will also display how many comments a user has posted and how many times they’ve clicked “like.”

The user’s nickname and profile picture will be displayed in the comment section underneath news articles. Because only the first four letters in nicknames are displayed on the page, users with similar nicknames have been hard to tell apart, but the profile pictures will make that easier to do.

The reason for requiring new users to wait seven days before commenting is to prevent people from signing up to post comments for a brief time and then cancelling or deactivating their account. But this restriction won’t apply to users who verify their actual identity after signing up.

These aren’t the only steps that Naver will be rolling out to improve its commenting policy. It will also be adding an option to hide comments and using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to spot trolls. If someone finds another user’s comments repeatedly offensive, they can prevent that user’s comments from being displayed on their screen, Naver explained. Naver will also be upgrading its “clean bot” AI tool that filters out malicious comments so that it can consider the context of sentences rather than merely searching for profanity.

By Choi Min-young, staff reporter

Please direct comments or questions to [english@hani.co.kr]