Don’t read the comments: the effects of abusive comments on perceptions of women authors’ credibility

Abstract

Recent work suggests women authors experience more abuse in online comments than men, but we do not know whether these abusive comments affect people's perceptions. Given renewed interest in the experience of women online, we ask: does exposure to abusive comments affect perceptions of women authors' credibility? And does this penalty extend to the outlet? To answer these questions, we employed a survey experiment which manipulated exposure to an abusive comment, and author gender. We found a significant effect for the abusive comment on author credibility and intention to seek news from the author and outlet in the future, but gender of the author did not moderate these effects. To ensure the null effects for gender were not an artifact of comment or topic, we fielded two additional survey experiments. Across topics, whether the abuse was gendered or gender-specific, we found abusive comments exert significant negative effects on evaluations, regardless of author gender. Our results have implications for news organizations considering comments.

More Than Just Shouting? Distinguishing Interpersonal-Directed and Elite-Directed Incivility in Online Political Talk

“…Second, this study has focused on identifying uncivil expressions and its different functions in discourse based on targets and other contextual characteristics, and the discussion of whether or not incivility is inherently problematic is based on these characteristics, not actual effects. Future research needs to investigate how different targets of incivility may yield different effects on participants and bystanders of online discussions (Searles et al, 2020). Finally, this study only analyzed textual elements, not considering other frequently used media sources on social media, such as images, graphics interchange formats (GIFs), or emoticons.…”

“…Scholars have found potentially detrimental effects of online incivility, such as increasing polarization (Anderson et al, 2014), triggering uncivil responses (Gervais, 2015), affecting perceptions of persuasiveness (Chen & Ng, 2016), or perceptions of credibility of news outlets (Meltzer, 2015) and journalists (Searles et al, 2020). There is also some evidence of positive effects: uncivil blog posts may incentivize participation in the comments (Borah, 2014), and some people find uncivil social media messages "entertaining" (Sydnor, 2018).…”

Does online incivility cancel out the spiral of silence? A moderated mediation model of willingness to speak out

“…Third, while impolite forms of incivility may be more benign than other types, they have been found to incite negative emotional responses (Chen, 2017;Chen and Lu, 2017;Gervais, 2015;Rösner et al, 2016;Sydnor, 2019;Wang and Silva, 2018), meeting the assumption of our study for testing the emotional responses to incivility. Specifically, in the context of news, uncivil comments may polarize people's attitudes toward public issues (Anderson et al, 2014) and diminish their perceptions of news stories (Anderson et al, 2018;Naab et al, 2020;Prochazka et al, 2018) or of journalists (Searles et al, 2018). Thus, incivility is important to consider because it is a potent motivator that influences discussions about the news.…”

Effects of online commenter sex cues and news receiver sex on commenter credibility

“…4). Incivility and abusive comments can have an additional negative impact on the perceived credibility of the author (Searles et al, 2020).…”