This article takes up the popular argument that much online discussion is toxic and hence harmful to democracy, and argues that the pervasiveness of incivility is not incompatible with democratically relevant political talk. Instead of focusing on the tone of political talk, scholars interested in understanding the extent to which digital platforms threaten democratic values should focus on expressions of intolerance. I demonstrate the validity of this conceptual model by investigating the discursive and contextual features associated with incivility and intolerance online in the context of public comments in two different platforms—news websites and Facebook. Results show that incivility and intolerance occur in meaningfully different discussion settings. Whereas incivility is associated with features that reveal meaningful discursive engagement, such as justified opinion expression and engagement with disagreement, intolerance is likely to occur in homogeneous discussions about minorities and civil society—exactly when it can hurt democracy the most.

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In this study, we investigate dysfunctional information sharing on WhatsApp and Facebook, focusing on two explanatory variables—frequency of political talk and cross-cutting exposure—and potential remedies, such as witnessing, experiencing, and performing social corrections. Results suggest that dysfunctional sharing is pervasive, with nearly a quarter reporting sharing misinformation on Facebook and WhatsApp, but social corrections also occur relatively frequently. Platform matters, with corrections being more likely to be experienced or expressed on WhatsApp than Facebook. Taken together, our results suggest that the intimate nature of WhatsApp communication has important consequences for the dynamics of misinformation sharing, particularly with regard to facilitating social corrections.

Online abuse can inflict harm on users and communities, making online spaces unsafe and toxic. Progress in automatically detecting and classifying abusive content is often held back by the lack of high quality and detailed datasets. We introduce a new dataset of primarily English Reddit entries which addresses several limitations of prior work. It (1) contains six conceptually distinct primary categories as well as secondary categories, (2) has labels annotated in the context of the conversation thread, (3) contains rationales and (4) uses an expert-driven group-adjudication process for high quality annotations. We report several baseline models to benchmark the work of future researchers. The annotated dataset, annotation guidelines, models and code are freely available.

Political campaigns' use of digital technologies has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades, but most studies have been focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polls. Opinion polls are an important information source for citizens and candidates and provide the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this article, we explore the relationship between the use of social media in the 2016 US presidential elections and candidates' standing in public opinion polls, focusing on the surfacing and primary stages of the campaign. We use automated content analysis to categorize social media posts from all 21 Republican and Democratic candidates. Results indicate that a candidate's performance in the polls drives certain communicative strategies, such as the use of messages of attacks and advocacy, as well as the focus on personal image.

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Este é um artigo de acesso aberto, licenciado por Creative Commons Atribuição 4.0 Internacional (CC-BY 4.0), sendo permitidas reprodução, adaptação e distribuição desde que o autor e a fonte originais sejam creditados. RESUMOAs eleições presidenciais de 2014 foram as mais acirradas desde a redemocratização do Brasil, exibindo reviravoltas em termos de intenções de voto e estratégias de campanha. O objetivo deste artigo é analisar o possível impacto das pesquisas de intenção de voto nas estratégias de campanha on-line no Facebook oficial dos três principais candidatos das eleições presidenciais de 2014. Fazemos uso de Análise de Conteúdo (AC) para avaliar como cada equipe utilizou diferentes estratégias comunicacionais na página do Facebook durante o primeiro turno das eleições e realizamos testes estatísticos para observar se as variações estratégicas são condizentes com as mudanças no cenário eleitoral apontadas pelas pesquisas de intenção de voto. Estamos especificamente interessados em observar em que medida as oscilações dos candidatos nas pesquisas afetam o tipo de comunicação estratégica no Facebook. Os resultados demonstram que há variação nas estratégias dos três candidatos ao longo da campanha do primeiro turno. Contudo, a posição do candidato nos levantamentos eleitorais não parece influenciar o uso de determinadas estratégias. Não obstante, defendemos que os nossos achados contribuem para a literatura corrente ao observar as campanhas digitais no contexto mais amplo da corrida eleitoral. O artigo aponta, ainda, para uma reconfiguração do papel de candidatos e eleitores no cenário das campanhas em redes sociais. Patrícia G. da Conceição Rossini, Érica A. Baptista, Vanessa V. de Oliveira, Rafael C. Sampaio 146 Vol. 18 Nº 2 -maio/agosto 2016 revista Fronteiras -estudos midiáticos ABSTRACT Brazil's 2014 presidential election was the toughest race since the country's redemocratization process. The competitive scenario captured by polls prompted candidates' to rethink their campaigning strategies. This paper aims to analyze the role of digital media in Brazil's 2014 presidential campaign by focusing on the influence of polling numbers on the candidates' communication strategies on Facebook. By comparing the candidates' messaging strategies during the race, this study analyzes how the competitive nature of the race affected the way the candidates used their Facebook accounts for campaigning. We are specifically interested in observing whether the candidates' oscillation in the polls -and their positions in the race -had an effect on the use of attack messages and advocacy messages. Our results demonstrate that the candidates' strategies changed during the race. However, their positions in the polls do not seem to influence their use of particular strategies. Our findings contribute to the field by bringing the broader context of the election to illuminate the analysis of the digital campaign. We also point to a reconfiguration of the roles of candidates and citizens in the ever changing context of digita...