“What a nasty girl!” incivility and gendered symbolic violence in news discussions

ABSTRACT

This study examines conversations developed in the virtual public sphere to identify if a user’s gender affects the presence of incivility in news comment sections. By relying on a mixed-method analysis of 1,961 news comments published on a Chilean news website, we observed the extent to which uncivil speech and gendered symbolic violence traits are used to reinforce stereotypes against women. Our results show men are more likely to post uncivil comments, while women use fewer profanities, insulting language, and stereotypes. One of our most intriguing findings is that men tend to receive more uncivil replies that women, mostly because they are more likely to initiate uncivil conversations, which in turn triggers uncivil replies and increases the odds of uncivil comment threads. As such, news outlets looking for enhancing healthy discussions should encourage greater participation of female users in their comment sections. We also identified the presence of hegemonic masculinity discourses referring to women and their gender roles in society. These findings reveal that comment sections mirror a social hierarchy in which men have a position of power that allows them to be more uncivil. Consequently, the virtual public sphere replicates the dominant-subordinate relationships described by previous research.

KEYWORDS:

• Incivility
• deliberation
• hegemonic masculinity
• symbolic violence
• news comments

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank Ariel González, Ángela Parra, and Frederik Zilcher, for their valuable help with the coding process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. “Ni una menos” is Spanish for “Not one [woman] less..”

2. The Krippendorff’s alpha of .65 is slightly lower than the .667 threshold established by Lacy et al. (2015) for variables not used for drawing main conclusions. However, the topics variable was comprised by 40 categories, which makes it really challenging for coders to achieve high agreement (Andrew Hayes and Klaus Krippendorff 2007) and high reliability (Marianna Bolognesi, Pilgram, and van den Heerik 2017). As such, the alpha=.65 achieved for the topics variable is remarkably high given the number of categories in this variable.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: The authors received funding from Chile’s National Agency for Research and Development (ANID) through the grant Fondecyt de Iniciación 11181254, and the Millennium Science Initiative Program - NCS2021_063 and ICN17_002.

Notes on contributors

Valentina Proust

Valentina Proust (M.A., Universidad de Chile) is a Ph.D. student in the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests interconnect communication and language studies to observe the role of storytelling in journalism, particularly those related to social issues, such as gender, Latin American social movements, and inequalities.

Magdalena Saldaña

Magdalena Saldaña (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is assistant professor in the School of Communications at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, associate researcher at the Millennium Institute for Foundational Research on Data (IMFD), and associate director of the Center for the Study of Media, Public Opinion and Politics in Chile (MEPOP). Her research interests include digital journalism, social media, political communication, and Latin American Studies.