Your social ties, your personal public sphere, your responsibility: How users construe a sense of personal responsibility for intervention against uncivil comments on Facebook (original) (raw)

Shaping (non)-discursive social media spaces: Cross- national typologies of news organizations' heavy commenters

New Media & Society, 2020

This study examines the role of heavy commenters on social media. We propose typologies of heavy commenters on Facebook pages of six news organizations in two systems that historically embraced different discourse cultures-the United States and Germany. We find that discourse cultures are impacted by news outlet and country: the US discourse is more participatory in terms of comment frequency, but further characterized by a strong non-discursive culture compared to a participatory liberal discourse culture in Germany. Frequency of commenting as normative ideal of social media sites (e.g. web traffic) does not lead to higher amounts of deliberation. On the contrary, it may contribute to what we conceptualize as the non-discursive model. As an expression of this, heavy commenters in the United States more often perform hate watching that manifests in hostile commenting on stories that are incongruent with their political ideologies. Implications for the democratic function of media organizations on social media are discussed.

Lonely together? Identifying the determinants of collective corrective action against uncivil comments

New Media & Society

Journalists, scholars, and citizens have raised concerns regarding the high share of incivility in comment sections of news outlets. The current study surveyed members of the social movement #ichbinhier, which aims at collectively countering uncivil comments to cultivate a civil discussion atmosphere in comment sections. We root the activities of #ichbinhier as corrective action and identify the determinants of the members’ engagement by integrating research on bystander behavior and collective action. The findings of our survey show that factors pertaining to individual skills, perceived responsibility, and expected benefits relate to the members’ likelihood to engage against uncivil online comments. Regarding factors derived from collective action research, group efficacy and knowledge of the rules and structures of the movement account for higher levels of engagement. These results shed light on the factors that motivate and inhibit #ichbinhier members—and, potentially, Facebook ...

Shaping (non)-discursive social media spaces: Cross- national typologies of news organizations' heavy commenters by Lea Hellmueller, Juliane Lischka & Edda Humprecht

New Media & Society, 2020

This study examines the role of heavy commenters on social media. We propose typologies of heavy commenters on Facebook pages of six news organizations in two systems that historically embraced different discourse cultures-the United States and Germany. We find that discourse cultures are impacted by news outlet and country: the US discourse is more participatory in terms of comment frequency, but further characterized by a strong non-discursive culture compared to a participatory liberal discourse culture in Germany. Frequency of commenting as normative ideal of social media sites (e.g. web traffic) does not lead to higher amounts of deliberation. On the contrary, it may contribute to what we conceptualize as the non-discursive model. As an expression of this, heavy commenters in the United States more often perform hate watching that manifests in hostile commenting on stories that are incongruent with their political ideologies. Implications for the democratic function of media organizations on social media are discussed.

Digital Social Norm Enforcement: Online Firestorms in Social Media

PLOS ONE, 2016

Actors of public interest today have to fear the adverse impact that stems from social media platforms. Any controversial behavior may promptly trigger temporal, but potentially devastating storms of emotional and aggressive outrage, so called online firestorms. Popular targets of online firestorms are companies, politicians, celebrities, media, academics and many more. This article introduces social norm theory to understand online aggression in a social-political online setting, challenging the popular assumption that online anonymity is one of the principle factors that promotes aggression. We underpin this social norm view by analyzing a major social media platform concerned with public affairs over a period of three years entailing 532,197 comments on 1,612 online petitions. Results show that in the context of online firestorms, non-anonymous individuals are more aggressive compared to anonymous individuals. This effect is reinforced if selective incentives are present and if aggressors are intrinsically motivated.

Spiral of Silence 2.0: Political Self-Censorship among Young Facebook Users

This study applies the spiral of silence theory to political discourse among digital natives on Facebook. Using structural equation modeling on a survey of 967 Facebook users in Germany under the age of 30, we find that network heterogeneity increases the perception of the opinion climate as adverse, which, in turn leads to self-censorship. Moreover, political interest and active Facebook use foster users' willingness to speak out, while fear of isolation and communication apprehension lower it. We discuss the findings, embed them into discourses about impression management and context collapse, and show the usefulness of the spiral of silence theory in social media research.

Users’ Encounter With Normative Discourses on Facebook: A Three- Pronged Analysis of User Agency as Power Structure, Nexus, and Reception

This study asks whether users’ encounter with normative discourses of lifestyle, consumption, and health on social media such as Facebook gives rise to agency. The theoretical framework draws on reception analysis, for its implied, but central interest in agency that lies at the intersection of texts and audiences. Based on a critique of the “participatory paradigm,” a paradigm that situates the locus of agency in the structural opposition between senders and users, in the norms of rational deliberation or in the figure of the activist, gaps are identified which can be filled by adopting an explicit focus on the socio-cultural practices of ordinary audiences in their encounters with media discourses. The study investigates user agency on seven Facebook groups and pages with the help of a three-pronged perspective based on the notion of the media–audience relationship as (1) power structure, (2) nexus, and (3) reception. The analysis reveals that the structure at play on these Facebook groups and pages does not encourage user agency. However, user agency manifests itself through user interactions and expressive sense-making processes associated with reception. The benefits of such audience agency are a public, collective, and communicative sense-making process and an expansion of the professionally controlled text.

Hiding hate speech: political moderation on Facebook

Media, Culture & Society

Facebook facilitates more extensive dialogue between citizens and politicians. However, communicating via Facebook has also put pressure on political actors to administrate and moderate online debates in order to deal with uncivil comments. Based on a platform analysis of Facebook’s comment moderation functions and interviews with eight political parties’ communication advisors, this study explored how political actors conduct comment moderation. The findings indicate that these actors acknowledge being responsible for moderating debates. Since turning off the comment section is impossible in Facebook, moderators can choose to delete or hide comments, and these arbiters tend to use the latter in order to avoid an escalation of conflicts. The hide function makes comments invisible to participants in the comment section, but the hidden texts remain visible to those who made the comment and their network. Thus, the users are unaware of being moderated. In this paper, we argue that hidi...

Perceiving threat and feeling responsible. How severity of hate speech, number of bystanders, and prior reactions of others affect bystanders’ intention to counterargue against hate speech on Facebook

Studies in Communication | Media, 2018

Since platform operators are severely challenged to cope with hate speech on social networking sites, countering by individual users is all the more important. Still, it remains unclear to what extent users' intention to actually interfere against hate speech is determined by the context and content of hate speech. Drawing from research on bystander intervention online, we conducted an online experiment (n = 304) to explore the effects of severity of hate speech, number of bystanders, and prior reactions of others on Facebook users' intention to counterargue. Results show that users are less willing to react if the number of bystanders is high, hence providing support for a bystander effect. Also, prior reactions of others lower users' feeling of responsibility to intervene countering hate speech. However, we demonstrate that the severity of hate speech increases users' intention to counterargue if they consider it threatening and concurrently feel responsible to act.

Follow the Rules and No One Will Get Hurt: Performing Boundary Work to Avoid Negative Interactions When Using Social Network Sites.”

Social network sites (SNSs), like Facebook, have widespread appeal among emerging adults, yet they also present the potential for negative interactions. Interviews (N = 227) with emerging adults from Wave 3 of the National Study of Youth and Religion reveal the boundary work emerging adults undergo to limit negative SNS interactions and how they navigate the dynamic and permeable boundaries between positive and negative interactions. This work includes following three informal rules meant to limit negative interactions: do not share excessive personal information, do not spy on or stalk other users, and make online friendships with people one already knows. Several important implications result from this boundary work: crossing boundaries can have negative offline and online consequences, following the informal rules helps stabilize SNS communities by limiting the potential and severity of harmful interactions, and SNS may be popular among emerging adults but some disenchantment is not uncommon and some emerging adults may not use SNS as a result.