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

Abstract

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.

Don’t read the comments: the effects of abusive comments on perceptions of women authors’ credibility

“…Beyond assessments of credibility, an abusive comment may also affect behaviors such as news-seeking by making women authors' violations of gendered social expectations (and the outlet for employing her) more salient. Previous work focuses on behaviors in the comment section: Work by Muddiman and Stroud (2017) finds that when incivility was partisan, depending on the congeniality of views expressed, users responded by recommending or flagging the comment. Similarly, other studies find that users are more likely to engage with a comment when it contains profanity (Kwon & Cho, 2017).…”

How Web Comments Affect Perceptions of Political Interviews and Journalistic Control

“…People can add to a comment section "echo chamber" with comments that further reinforce one-sided messaging (Suhay, Blackwell, Roche, & Bruggeman, 2015). Polarized content in comment sections may also amplify further polarized comments (Muddiman & Stroud, 2017). What is more, online political dialogue has a tendency to increase political polarization and extreme viewpoints (Hwang, Kim, & Huh, 2014).…”

Detecting Incivility and Impoliteness in Online Discussions. Classification Approaches for German User Comments.

“…Incivility is difficult to define because the decision of what is civil and uncivil is subjectively shaped (Coe et al, 2014;Herbst, 2010). Therefore, achieving consensus about where to draw the line between civil and uncivil discourse is a complex problem (Muddiman, 2017;Stryker, Conway, & Danielson, 2016). Scholars have defined incivility as the communication of disagreement combined with a dismissive, disrespectful, aggressive, or hostile tone (Coe et al, 2014;Hwang, Kim, & Kim, 2016).…”

“…Researchers in social sciences have argued that using such language can be considered a violation of democratic and social norms (Muddiman & Stroud, 2017). They have, therefore, used the term 'incivility' to describe different forms of disrespectful and harmful language (e.g., Coe, Kenski, & Rains, 2014;Muddiman & Stroud, 2017). Previous studies have reported various negative effects of uncivil comments on the readers of online discussions.…”

“…Still, from a psychological viewpoint, these forms could affect the attitudes of readers even stronger than obvious forms of offensive language (Kalch & Naab, 2016;Papacharissi, 2004). Based on previous theoretical work on incivility (Muddiman & Stroud, 2017;Papacharissi, 2004), we therefore train classifiers on both impolite comments-postings that are offensive but not necessarily harmful to other users-and 'truly' uncivil comments, which often include subtle forms of racism, extremism, and undemocratic appeals (e.g., Kalch & Naab, 2017).…”