How to get on top – the effect of rationality and incivility of user comments on their visibility in political online discussions on Facebook

ABSTRACT

Research on user comments has found that incivility in online discussions affect readers’ attitudes, feelings, and their willingness to participate in discussions. Yet the extent to which users encounter these comments in their daily routine is largely unknown. On social network sites, the number of interactions with comments, particularly the Likes and replies they receive, determines their visibility and, therefore, their potential impact on users. The study argues that the presence of rationality, personal incivility, and anti-democratic incivility in comments is related to the number of interactions that comments receive. The results of a content analysis of 2,241 comments below 499 news posts on Facebook largely support this assumption, revealing a positive association between comment rationality and the number of interactions, but also between personal incivility and interactions. Anti-democratic incivility is positively associated only with the number of replies to a comment but not with the number of Likes.

KEYWORDS:

• User comments
• incivility
• deliberation
• social media
• content analysis

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Top-level comments (TLC, also: initial comments) are comments posted on the first “level” of a discussion. That is, they, formally, respond to the related news post. Users can reply to TLC with sub-level comments (SLC, also: replies). These SLC appear in a threaded structure below the TLC.

2. Due to lacking variance of this variable in the intercoder reliability test, Krippendorff’s α_k could not be computed.

3. We instructed coders to code sarcasm rather cautiously and only in clear cases thereby preventing speculative coding, which might result in a rather conservative estimation.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Pablo Jost

Pablo Jost is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Communication at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. His research focus is on the communication of political representatives and citizens under the conditions of digital media change.

Marc Ziegele

Marc Ziegele is an Assistant Professor for Political Online Communication at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Duesseldorf, Germany. In his research, he studies online incivility, deliberation, journalistic moderation, and media trust in the digital age.