https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4909-2116
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ABSTRACT
The study put forth a new concept, which we call engagement moderation, that is defined as community managers or journalists interacting with commenters to improve the comment threads, rather than deleting comments. We then tested this concept using an experiment (N = 798) on a mock Facebook page of a news site. Results showed that if journalists employed engagement moderation and used what are called high-person-centered responses to incivility—messages that acknowledge the emotional pain or upset people may feel—it produced more positive attitudes toward the news outlet’s Facebook page, online community, and handling of incivility. Our findings provide guidance to news outlets regarding what type of messages are most beneficial if community managers or journalists enact engagement moderation by responding to uncivil commenters.
Acknowledgement
Funding for this study was obtained by the first author from the Vice President for Research at The University of Texas at Austin. The authors thank the students in the first author’s Com 370 Online Incivility course for help with generating ideas for the comments that became stimuli for this experiment. Additionally, we thank Alanis N. King for her work designing the comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Mass Communication Division of the National Communication Association for its annual conference, Salt Lake City, Utah, in November 2018.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Participants were additionally randomly assigned to view a message that either confronted the uncivil person or consoled the person being attacked. However, this factor produced no significant main effects, so these conditions were collapsed.
2 Realistic-looking Facebook posts were created using PrankMeNot, an online Facebook status generator: http://www.prankmenot.com/.
3 Participants in pre-test 1 (N = 25) are 39.5 years old on average (SD = 9.52), and 48% are male and 80% are white. Pre-test 2 participants (N = 207) are 34.09 years old on average (SD = 11.11), and 57.5% are male, and 81.6% are white. For the third pre-test (N = 72), participants are 36.42 years old on average (SD = 11.61), and 62.5% are male, and 70.8% are white. Pre-test 4 participants are 34.28 years old on average (SD = 11.49), and 60.3% are male, and 69.1% are white.
4 In all cases, models were tested both with and without political beliefs and pre-existing attitudes toward immigration and climate change as covariates. For all dependent variables, main effects were significant either with or without these covariates. As a result, models without the covariates are reported in the interest of parsimony.