Shaping (non)-discursive social media spaces: Cross- national typologies of news organizations' heavy commenters (original) (raw)
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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.
Extant research scrutinizing political talk online has been developed largely against the backdrop of deliberative discursive norms and has considered political talk without a systematic analysis of surrounding mass-mediated discourses. By contrast, this study operationalizes counterpublic theory as an alternative theoretical perspective and analyses comments on news websites as a reaction to hegemonic “publics at large”. Specifically, it juxtaposes a discourse analysis of all articles about a new anti-Euro party in devotedly pro-European Germany published on nine news websites in the week following the 2013 elections (n=22) with a content analysis of all comments posted below these articles (n=3154). It finds counterpublics differently shaped on tabloid versus non-tabloid and right- versus left-wing outlets. Consequences for democracy are discussed.
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AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research, 2021
Online news comments are intended to cultivate an interdependent relationship between news organizations and their audiences. However, uncivil online comments have become a persistent problem that requires constant intervention through moderation. In this paper, to better understand these interventions, we analyze interviews of eleven managers of online comments of large Finnish news organizations. By exploring the views of journalistic managers of moderation, this study contributes new insights to the discussion about online content moderation, as previous research has focused more on social media platforms and moderators. Our results suggest that the managers have a complex relationship with comments. They would like to see more engaging comments but were also frustrated with the continuous need to moderate the comments. The managers also expressed concern that uncivil comments keep more constructive commenters from participating, thus harming the audience relationship. Organizati...
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Recent work demonstrates that hostile emotions can contribute to a strong polarization of political discussion on social media. However, little is known regarding the extent to which media organizations and media systems trigger hostile emotions. We content-analyzed comments on Facebook pages from six news organizations (N=1,800) based in the United States and Germany. Our results indicate that German news organizations’ Facebook comments are more balanced, containing lower levels of hostile emotions. Such emotions are particularly prevalent in the polarized information environment of the United States—in both news posts and comments. Moreover, alternative right-wing media outlets in both countries provoke significantly higher levels of hostile emotions, thus limiting deliberative discussions. Our results demonstrate that the application of technology—such as the use of comment sections—has different implications depending on cultural and social contexts.
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The high deliberative quality of political conversation among citizens is a valuable component when taking political decisions. However, online discussions often do not correspond to deliberative standards which can be found in the theory of deliberative democracy. In this paper, argumentation (reasoning) and communicative culture (civility and incivility) as the most relevant parameters of deliberation are analyzed in order to assess the quality of Russian and American social networks' deliberation. The research is based on a methodology of discourse analysis which allows to identify the deliberative quality of political discourse. The article presents the results of online discussions' analysis on significant issues in the Russian and American socio-political discourses-the court verdict of Alexei Navalny and the second impeachment of Donald Trump. As an empirical basis of study, online discussions on the pages of Vkontakte social network of four Russian media and discussions of four American media on Facebook are used. The authors conclude that social media deliberation as a form of public dialogue in Russia is poorly developed in terms of argumentation and culture of speech while American online deliberation is more developed, reasoned, polite and respectful.
Information, Communication & Society User comments across platforms and journalistic genres
This study introduces a comparative approach to study user comments on the same news content across online platforms while distinguishing between soft and hard news genres. Empirical analysis focuses on Israel’s popular news website Ynet. Using automated tools, we scraped 17,347 comments to analyze differences in the quantity, length, and topics of comments that were posted through Ynet’s comments section, Facebook Comment Plugin, and Facebook page. Our findings reveal that commenting patterns vary greatly across platforms and news genres. Specifically, the number of comments posted on Ynet’s Facebook page is significantly higher than the two other commenting platforms (for both hard and soft news), but these comments are shorter and more emotional. We discuss these findings in relation to the notion of ‘context collapse’ in social media, and argue that one of the outcomes of the convergence between news content and social media is the augmentation of consensual national sentiment.
2017
Our contribution deals with an Austrian case study on racist discourse strategies in the forums of the Austrian online newspaper derStandard.at. First, we will consider forums as a communicative form characterised by specific linguistic features as well as its technical and functional design. Furthermore, we will present an analysis of the reader’s postings from a critical-discursive perspective following the discourse-historical approach, where the readers’ comments on articles on migration and language are investigated against the background of online-specific communication. Another subject of discussion will be areas of conflict between freedom of expression, deliberation and the ‘censorship’ of the forums by the editorial staff with the help of semi-automated tools for filtering out explicit racist postings. Finally, we discuss chances and risks of the investigated forums regarding discursive and social practices within democratically constituted societies and address the questi...