Civil Interactivity: How News Organizations' Commenting Policies Explain Civility and Hostility in User Comments

Ksiazek, Thomas B.

doi:10.1080/08838151.2015.1093487

Cited by 72 publications

(58 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…We focus on two gatekeeping roles that journalists perform in news comment sections: rejecting comments and highlighting strong comments. Some sites have premoderation policies that require journalists to determine whether submitted comments should be posted or rejected (Ksiazek, ). Work to date has not examined these decisions.…”

Section: Professional Norms and Journalists' Reactions To Uncivil Commentioning

confidence: 99%

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News Values, Cognitive Biases, and Partisan Incivility in Comment Sections

2017

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Partisan incivility is prevalent in news comments, but we have limited insight into how journalists and news users engage with it. Gatekeeping, cognitive bias, and social identity theories suggest that journalists may tolerate incivility while users actively promote partisan incivility. Using 9.6 million comments from The New York Times, we analyze whether the presence of uncivil and partisan terms affects how journalists and news users engage with comments. Results show that partisanship and incivility increase recommendations and the likelihood of receiving an abuse flag. Swearing increases the likelihood of a comment being rejected and reduces the chances of being highlighted as a NYT Pick. These findings suggest that journalists and news users interact with partisan incivility differently, and that some forms of incivility may be promoted or tacitly accepted in comments.

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Section: Professional Norms and Journalists' Reactions To Uncivil Commentioning

confidence: 99%

“…strong comments. Some sites have premoderation policies that require journalists to determine whether submitted comments should be posted or rejected (Ksiazek, 2015). Work to date has not examined these decisions.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

News Values, Cognitive Biases, and Partisan Incivility in Comment Sections

2017

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“…16 Specifically, a prior bag of words that indicate hostility was employed. 10 The bag of words was translated into Korean, and words that imply uniquely Korean name calling, stereotypes, aspersions, and other pejorative slangs were included in the bag of words. To extract uncivil words from the collected Tweets, Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis software was used.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…2 Incivility is a type of linguistic expression that individuals create in various ways, entailing complex emotions with various hostile, hateful, aggressive, and aspersive terms. 9,10 To be more specific, forms of incivility include negative name calling (disparaging terms directed at certain groups), aspersion (unsympathetic terms directed at certain issues), vulgarity (offensive terms in a discussion), and pejorative speech (words that include negative emotions). 5,11,12 These forms of incivility are particularly prevalent in social media comments, 4,13,14 and social media incivility targets various contentious issues and relevant groups, such as those related to race, religion, nationality, gender, disability, and political issues.…”

Section: Incivilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Social Grooming on Incivility in COVID-19

Kim

2020

Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking

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This study implements a computer-assisted content analysis to identify which social grooming factors reduce social media users' incivility when commenting or posting about the COVID-19 situation in South Korea. In addition, this study conducts semantic network analysis to interpret qualitatively how people express their thoughts. The findings suggest that social network size is a negative predictor of incivility. Moreover, Twitter users who have built larger networks and gained positive responses from others are less likely to use uncivil language. Lastly, linguistic choice among users is different depending on the size of their social network.

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“…The accessibility of these documents and the way they are written (e.g., are they in technical language or easy to understand and instructive) matter for users to be able to exercise their part of the shared responsibility. Ksiazek (2015) showed that specific policies like those regarding moderation of comments are effective facilitators of civil discussion. Thus, to analyze how organizations help users fulfill their responsibility, we examine the quality of OCPs’ policy documents.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Online Content Providers Moderate User‐Generated Content to Prevent Harmful Online Communication: An Analysis of Policies and Their Implementation

Einwiller¹

2020

Policy & Internet

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This article reports two studies conducted in the United States, Germany, South Korea, and China to examine how online content providers (OCPs) exercise their responsibility in dealing with harmful online communication (HOC) by moderating user‐generated content. The first study employed content analysis of 547 HOC policy documents. In the second study, 41 representatives of OCPs were interviewed regarding the implementation of these policies. We show that HOC policies are most often communicated through user‐unfriendly terms of service. Only Korean OCPs present their policies very vividly. Few organizations, mainly United States and German, encourage counter‐speech. The most common organizational actions against HOC mentioned in the policies are deleting posts or blocking accounts. The interviews reveal, however, that organizations—apart from those from China—are cautious in implementing such reactive actions. They fear accusations of censorship and acknowledge the tension between free speech and their content moderation practice. What emerged as the “gold standard” for identifying HOC was manual inspection. However, organizations operating large platforms widely apply machine‐learning technology or artificial intelligence. In sum, our research suggests that OCPs are not proactive enough in their communication for HOC prevention and often focus more on avoiding legal ramifications than on educating users when handling HOC.

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Civil Interactivity: How News Organizations' Commenting Policies Explain Civility and Hostility in User Comments

Cited by 72 publications

References 37 publications

News Values, Cognitive Biases, and Partisan Incivility in Comment Sections

News Values, Cognitive Biases, and Partisan Incivility in Comment Sections

Effects of Social Grooming on Incivility in COVID-19

How Online Content Providers Moderate User‐Generated Content to Prevent Harmful Online Communication: An Analysis of Policies and Their Implementation

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