The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion—Our Social Skin. By Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Pp. xi + 184. $20.00.)

Journalists are increasingly concerned that offensive and banal user comments on news websites might alienate readers and damage quality perceptions. To explore such presumed effects, we investigated the impact of civility and reasoning (and lack thereof) in user comments on perceptions of journalistic quality. An experiment revealed that unreasoned comments decrease an article’s perceived informational quality, but only in unknown news brands. Incivility in comments had an unconditionally negative effect on the perceived formal quality of an article. Neither civility nor reasoning improved the assessments of journalistic quality, as compared to a comment-free version. On the contrary, we observed a trend showing that the mere presence of comments deteriorates the perceived quality of an article.

Effects of civility and reasoning in user comments on perceived journalistic quality

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.

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

In this article, we present a cross-national comparative analysis of which online news users in practice engage with the participatory potential for sharing and commenting on news afforded by inter...

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/2056305117735754

Who Shares and Comments on News?: A Cross-National Comparative Analysis of Online and Social Media Participation

Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear

User comments allow ‘annotative reporting’ by embedding users’ viewpoints within an article's context, providing readers with additional information to form opinions, which can potentially enhance deliberative processes. But are these the only reasons why people comment on online news and read these comments? This study examines factors that motivate, or demotivate and constrict, such participation by surveying nearly 650 commenters, lurkers, and non-users in Germany. From a normative perspective, the results are ambivalent. The results show that commenters are driven by social-interactive motives to participate in journalism, and to discuss with other users. However, the data suggest that commenters do not obtain cognitive gratifications to the desired extent. Presumably, their exchange is socially and not deliberatively motivated. Reading comments is fuelled by both cognitive and entertainment motives, but regression analyses show that the entertainment dimension − a dimension that is not usually consid...

Christian Pfaffinger

Papers

User comments: motives and inhibitors to write and read