“…Online comments systems have given ordinary people simple ways to share and discuss their opinions in public forums. However, there has been disagreement in the scholarly community about the democratic value of online comments (Dahlgren, 2005;Janssen and Kies, 2005;Kies 2010;Wright and Street, 2007), and several claim to see a deterioration of public discourse, pointing to issues like "echo chambers" and increased polarization (Sunstein, 2017), "flaming" (Lee, 2005(Lee, , 2012Santana, 2014), "trolling" Hardaker, 2010;Phillips, 2015), harassment of women (Biber et al, 2002) and hate speech (Erjavec and Kovacic, 2012;Gelber and McNamara, 2016;Glaser et al, 2002).…”