Virtuous or Vitriolic

Abstract

In an effort to encourage community dialogue while also building reader loyalty, online newspapers have offered a way for readers to become engaged in the news process, most popularly with online reader comment boards. It is here that readers post their opinion following an online news story, and however much community interaction taking place therein, one thing appears evident: sometimes the comments are civil; sometimes they are not. Indeed, one of the chief defining characteristics of these boards has become the rampant incivility—a dilemma many newspapers have struggled with as they seek to strengthen the value of the online dialogue. Many journalists and industry observers have pointed to a seemingly straightforward reason for the offensive comments: anonymity. Despite the claim, however, there is a striking dearth of empirical evidence in the academic literature of the effect that anonymity has on commenters' behavior. This research offers an examination of user comments of newspapers that allow anonymity (N=450) and the user comments of newspapers that do not (N=450) and compares the level of civility in both. In each group, comments follow news stories on immigration, a topic prevalent in the news in recent years and which is especially controversial and prone to debate. Results of this quantitative content analysis, useful for journalism practitioners and scholars, provide empirical evidence of the effect that anonymity has on the civility of user comments.

KEYWORDS:

• anonymity
• civility
• online newspapers
• reader comments
• user-generated content (UGC)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I wish to thank Dr. John Russial, University of Oregon, for his contributions to this project. This research was supported in part by grants from the Newspaper and Online News Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication and the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication.