Google to YouTube Users: Don’t Be Evil

Google is trying to clean up the Web, one comment at a time. Earlier this week it introduced a new feature designed to drain the online cesspool better known as YouTube comments.

YouTube has long been the repository of anonymous, illiterate, hateful, and just plain brain-dead comments since its inception. Now Google is trying to gently urge people to post videos and comments using their real names — more specifically, their Google+ identities — in the quaint notion that if people are held accountable by name, they might possibly act a little less like jerks. Maybe.