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While the social, political, and journalistic relevance of user comments on online news items has been discussed intensively, no study has tried to examine why some online news discussions are more interactive than others. Based on the rationale of news value theory, this study argues that so-called discussion factors in user comments indicate general relevance to later users to respond to them. Qualitative interviews with users who comment on news stories online and a quantitative content analysis of 1,580 user comments showed that the discussion factors uncertainty, controversy, comprehensibility, negativity, and personalization can explain interactivity in news discussions. Further, different technological implementations of the comment function seem to have a limited influence on the effects of these discussion factors.

The “privacy calculus” approach to studying online privacy implies that willingness to engage in disclosures on social network sites (SNSs) depends on evaluation of the resulting risks and benefits. In this article, we propose that cultural factors influence the perception of privacy risks and social gratifications. Based on survey data collected from participants from five countries (Germany [ n = 740], the Netherlands [ n = 89], the United Kingdom [ n = 67], the United States [ n = 489], and China [ n = 165]), we successfully replicated the privacy calculus. Furthermore, we found that culture plays an important role: As expected, people from cultures ranking high in individualism found it less important to generate social gratifications on SNSs as compared to people from collectivist-oriented countries. However, the latter placed greater emphasis on privacy risks—presumably to safeguard the collective. Furthermore, we identified uncertainty avoidance to be a cultural dimension crucially influencing the perception of SNS risks and benefits. As expected, people from cultures ranking high in uncertainty avoidance found privacy risks to be more important when making privacy-related disclosure decisions. At the same time, these participants ascribed lower importance to social gratifications—possibly because social encounters are perceived to be less controllable in the social media environment.

Cyberbullying victims' success in coping with bullying largely depends on schoolmates and other bystanders' social support. However, factors influencing the degree of social support have as yet not been investigated. In this article, the concept of victim blaming is applied to cyberbullying incidents. It is assumed that a cyberbullying victim receives less social support when the victim's behavior is perceived as very overt. It is further assumed that this effect's underlying process is the partial attribution of responsibility for the incident to the victim and not to the bully. The hypotheses are tested with a 2×2 online experiment. In this experiment, varying online self-presentations of a fictitious female cyberbullying victim were presented to 586 Germans aged 16-22. The victim's public Facebook profile was manipulated in terms of the victim's extraversion and the amount of personal information disclosed. The results support the hypotheses. Participants attributed more responsibility for the bullying incident to the victim when the victim was presented as extraverted and very open in revealing personal information. This diminished social support for the victim. The effect was partially mediated by the victim's perceived attractiveness. The study implies that concepts from victimization research can enhance our understanding of cyberbullying incidents. Among other factors, the victim's specific personal characteristics deserve more consideration--not only with regard to the incident itself but also regarding subsequent social dynamics and coping mechanisms.

Previous research suggests that distinct characteristics of news articles, such as their news factors, account for the different participation rates in comment sections as well as the degree of interactivity among the discussants. In this study, this assumption is tested in the Facebook environment and extended to the analysis of how news factors (i.e., event characteristics) and illustration factors (i.e., characteristics resulting from a specific journalistic editing) of news articles predict the inclusiveness of discussions, as well as the occurrence of civility, rationality, and deliberative interactivity in user comments. A content analysis of 619 news articles and 11,218 related user comments on nine nation-wide Facebook news pages reveals that the news factors controversy, latent conflict, contravention, obtrusiveness, and impact particularly account for specific discussion qualities. The results also show that the illustration factors emotional language/ visualizations, slant, and conversational prompts affect the deliberative quality of the discussions.

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