Online Newspapers’ Readers’ Comments - Democratic Conversation Platforms or Virtual Soapboxes?

Abstract

Online discussions between citizens have been subject to scholarly debate and several empirical studies for a substantial period of time. Scholars have envisioned these as potential venues for citizens' deliberation. Often, however, empirical findings do not support these notions. The quality of discussion is often not up to the standards of truly deliberative discussions. Nonetheless, there are strains of evidence suggesting that online discussion venues applying facilitators, fixed topics and actively enforcing discussion rules, may avoid many of the problems with discussion quality. This article therefore examines whether readers' comments on a Finnish newspaper's website resemble democratic conversations. During the course of three weeks in spring 2010, we content analyze 300 reader comments. Our findings indicate that although there are strains of democratic conversations to be found in online reader comments, there are also many instances in which the opposite holds true.

Design Matters! An Empirical Analysis of Online Deliberation on Different News Platforms

“…Altogether, the results largely coincide with previous research on online deliberation related to news (Graham & Wright, 2015;Rowe, 2015;Ruiz et al, 2011;Singer, 2009;Strandberg & Berg, 2013); the comment sections under study comply with many of the characteristics of deliberative discussions (see Table 4). With regard to rationality, comments are mostly on-topic (topic relevance, 82 percent), with almost half providing justified statements (reasoning, 46 percent).…”

“…Although there is a remarkable range of empirical studies on online deliberation, their findings remain contradictory. Some studies show that online discussions, while not fully complying with the ideal of deliberation, still meet many characteristics of deliberation (e.g., Rowe, 2015;Ruiz et al, 2011;Singer, 2009;Strandberg & Berg, 2013). 2 Other studies that are often guided by a more skeptical view of Internet technology report communication that is characterized by incivility and flaming instead of reasoning and respect (Coe et al, 2014) or homophily and polarization rather than rational consensus (Anderson, Brossard, Scheufele, Xenos, & Ladwig, 2014;Sunstein, 2002;Wilhelm, 2000).…”

“…News platforms are frequently discussed as a space for public deliberation, with users commenting on journalistic content, either on news websites themselves or on social networking sites such as Facebook (Strandberg & Berg, ; Stroud et al, ). While journalistic content provides opportunities and starting points for user deliberation, comments posted on news do not always live up to the ideal of deliberation (Coe, Kenski, & Rains, ).…”

The Portuguese news industry’s perspectives and roles on the making of active citizens: readers’ skills to comment on the news

“…Audiences consider their connection to professional journalism to be more fruitful if they have opportunities to get close to journalism and journalists and to go further than simple sources of news (Brites, 2015a). This connection can happen regardless of audiences' democratic ability and potential to comment online (Strandberg & Berg, 2013).…”

Impact of Temporality and Identifiability in Online Deliberations on Discussion Quality: An Experimental Study

“…In our final coding scheme, we operationalised these criteria through the use of several different indicators adapted from the literature (cf. Graham 2009;Steenberger et al 2003;Strandberg and Berg 2013). Each of the main criteria of discussion quality as well as their operationalisations are summarised in Table 1, in which the inter-coder reliability (Krippendorf's alpha) is also provided for each variable.…”