Civil Interactivity: How News Organizations' Commenting Policies Explain Civility and Hostility in User Comments

Abstract

The digital transformation of journalism enables new modes of interactivity with the news. While user comments are nearly ubiquitous across news Web sites, there is little understanding about how to improve the quality of discussion spaces that many characterize as hostile and vitriolic. This study uses a keyword content analysis of user comments across 20 news Web sites to understand the organizational policies that encourage more productive dialogue. The findings show that specific policies regarding user registration, moderation of comments, and reputation management systems are effective facilitators of civil discussion.

Acknowledgement

The author is deeply grateful to Sri Varsha Devineni for developing the crawler program.

Funding

This research was made possible by the generous support of a Summer Research Fellowship and Research Support Grant from Villanova University.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher's Web site.

NOTES

Notes

¹ The original set of hypotheses also included the widely used policies of netiquette guidelines (i.e., easily accessible rules for commenting) and protocols for reporting abusive comments (i.e., buttons to flag or report comments as abusive). However, these policies were implemented by all Web sites in the sample, and thus had insufficient variance to include in the analysis.

² The list of top sites comes from research conducted by the Pew Research Center in their annual State of the News Media reports (Pew, 2011, 2012). In the 2010 and 2011 reports, Pew provided lists of the top 25 online news sites as reported by three different measurement firms: Nielsen Online, ComScore, and HitWise. These three lists were triangulated across both years, offering a comprehensive list. Sites that did not allow comments were removed, along with news aggregators and those listed as brands (e.g., Tribune Newspapers), which would include many different online news outlets. The final sample is available in Appendix A.

³ The custom program was developed by the researcher, in collaboration with a graduate assistant in computer science. The program crawled the political news page of all sites on all sampled days, creating an archival database of the stories and all comments posted to those stories.

⁴ Full word dictionaries are available at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/08838151.2015.1093487.

⁵ There were no significant correlations between the number of comments posted to a story and either the civility or hostility indices. Thus, the number of comments alone does not explain the degree of civil discussion.

⁶ This study was unable to account for the possibility that some automated pre-moderation filters would remove profanity or replace it with “grawlix” (e.g., “@#$%&!”), thus decreasing the hostility score for a given comment thread. Future research should aim to better understand how these policies impact hostility scores.

Additional information

Funding

This research was made possible by the generous support of a Summer Research Fellowship and Research Support Grant from Villanova University.

Notes on contributors

Thomas B. Ksiazek

Thomas B. Ksiazek (Ph.D., Northwestern University), is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Villanova University. His research interests include digital media use, audience behavior, journalism studies, and network analysis.