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A Norwegian Website Is Making Readers Pass a Quiz Before Commenting (niemanlab.org)
Joseph Lichterman, writing for Nieman Lab: Two weeks ago, NRKbeta, the tech vertical of the Norwegian public broadcaster NRK, published an explainer about a proposed new digital surveillance law in the country. Digital security is a controversial topic, and the conversation around security issues can become heated. But the conversation in the comments of the article was respectful and productive: Commenters shared links to books and other research, asked clarifying questions, and offered constructive feedback. The team at NRKbeta attributes the civil tenor of its comments to a feature it introduced last month. On some stories, potential commenters are now required to answer three basic multiple-choice questions about the article before they're allowed to post a comment. The goal is to ensure that the commenters have actually read the story before they discuss it.
..requiring a literacy test to vote?
Why would you want to post on such a site to begin with though? Conceivably some antisemitic website would require you to indicate that you believe Jews are the source of all evil or something like that. You can't have a reasonable debate in such a place to begin with and I expect that only people who would want to post there are already true believers.
As with any tool, it can be used responsibly and have good outcomes or be used for terrible purposes by immoral people. You also forget that for the website to ask a question and assign it a correct answer is a tactic endorsement that they believe it is the truth. A news site could run a story about political candidate X talking about the wage gap, but that's just reporting on something that happened, having a question where the correct answer is "the wage gap is real" on the other hand goes beyond just reporting. Any news site that used questions so irresponsibly would just hang itself.