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This study is the first to simultaneously investigate country-level and platform-related context factors of toxic outrage, that is, destructive incivility, in online discussions. It compares user comments on the public role of religion and secularism from 2015/16 in four democracies (Australia, United States, Germany, Switzerland) and four discussion arenas on three platforms (News websites, Facebook, Twitter). A novel automated content analysis ( N = 1,236,551) combines LIWC dictionaries with machine learning. The level of toxic outrage is higher in majoritarian than in consensus-oriented democracies and in arenas that afford plural, issue-driven rather than like-minded, preference-driven debates. Yet, toxic outrage is lower in forums that tend to separate public and private conversations than in those that collapse varying contexts. This suggests that user-generated discussions flourish in environments that incentivize actors to strive for compromise, put relevant issues center stage and make room for public debate at a relative distance from purely social conversation.

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In this study, we offer a novel approach to research on migration reporting by focusing on the argumentative substance prevalent in different online outlets. Taking German refugee policy as our case in point we map the role that moral, ethical–cultural, legal, and pragmatic argumentations play within journalistic, partisan, and activist outlets; and how these coincide with incivility and impoliteness. Using dictionary-based content analysis on a data set of 34,819 articles from thirty online news outlets published between April 10, 2017, and April 10, 2018, we find that legacy mainstream media, partisan media, and activist media perform vastly different functions for the larger public sphere. We observe that human rights activist media perform an advocatory function by making the moral case for refugees, whereas corrosive partisan media at the fringe—particularly within the contra-refugee camp—often present opponents as inherently illegitimate enemies. Implications for public sphere theory and directions for future research on emerging and legacy media are discussed.

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