From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation

Paßmann, Johannes; Helmond, Anne; Jansma, Robert

doi:10.1080/24701475.2022.2105123

Cited by 3 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 31 publications

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“…Early definitions of spammy social media comments were largely concerned with bots deployed for automated traffic manipulation, often with promotional intent (Reagle, 2015). As malicious utilization of comments intensified over the past decade through trolling and targeted disinformation, platforms adjusted their guidelines and introduced stricter regulations (Paßmann et al, 2022). We nevertheless consider the ‘spamminess’ evident in the Armenian curses as a driving force in tactical memetic commenting.…”

Section: ‘Congratulations On Taking the Time To Translate This’: Spam...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump's deselection

Pilipets,

Paasonen

2024

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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On 7 November 2020, strange things were happening in the comments to @realDonaldTrump's tweet erroneously arguing that he had won the US presidential election, ‘BY A LOT’. Posting quote tweets and replies in Armenian in tandem with ‘cursed images’, memes, and creepypasta, users engaged in a spam-like trollish intervention, even as Twitter kept removing the said content in real time. Exploring this online incident through various analytical techniques, this article first attends to absurdity and ephemerality within the polarized social media event. Second, it makes an argument for the productivity of digital methods in cultural studies inquiry aiming to understand the temporal, contextual, and infrastructural aspects of memetic commenting. Third, by focusing on the social (media) theatre of Armenian curses, we make a case for the analytical importance of studying materials deemed niche and anomalous in networked exchanges.

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Section: ‘Congratulations On Taking the Time To Translate This’: Spam...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump's deselection

Pilipets,

Paasonen

2024

International Journal of Cultural Studies

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Modulating moderation: a history of objectionability in Twitter moderation practices

Keulenaar¹,

Magalhães²,

Ganesh³

2023

Journal of Communication

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With their power to shape public discourse under unprecedented scrutiny, social media platforms have revamped their speech control practices in recent years by building complex systems of content moderation. The contours of this tectonic shift are relatively clear. Yet, little work has systematically documented, examined, and theorized this process. This article uses digital methods and web history to trace the evolution of objectionable content on Twitter content moderation policies and practices between 2006 and 2022. Its conclusions suggest that, more than abandoning an Americanized view of freedom of speech, Twitter has aimed at building a crisis-resistant speech architecture that can withstand external shocks, criticisms, and shifting speech norms. This kind of modulated moderation, as we term it, hinges on a form of normative plasticity, whose goal is not necessarily adjudicating content as more or less acceptable, but moderating it on the basis of evolving and ever contingent public conceptions of objectionability.

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Do user comments belong to journalistic articles? A brief visual history of user interaction on selected German and American news websites 1996–2024

Paßmann,

Schories,

Heinicker

2024

Proceedings E Report

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The chapter reconstructs a brief history of online commenting, based on the position comments have to journalistic articles on news websites. Its key assumption is derived from paratext theory: Changes in spatial and temporal proximity of texts in the periphery of a main text––such as comments on the same web page as a journalistic article as compared to posts in a separate forum––indicate controversies over relevance of participants in a public discourse. Studying transformations of online comments is thus considered an access point to studying histories of public spheres. With help of a software the authors and colleagues developed, changes in commenting sections are traced and visualized. These changes are detected in a data sample of archived web pages provided by the Internet Archive.

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From healthy communities to toxic debates: Disqus’ changing ideas about comment moderation

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump's deselection

Memetic commenting: Armenian curses and the Twitter theatre of Trump's deselection

Modulating moderation: a history of objectionability in Twitter moderation practices

Do user comments belong to journalistic articles? A brief visual history of user interaction on selected German and American news websites 1996–2024

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