Improving the Debate: Interface Elements that Enhance Civility and Relevance in Online News Comments

Emilie, Bossens,; Storms, Elias; Geerts, David

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85610-6_25

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 58 publications

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“…As one of the ideas from the ideation workshop included taking a clear position, we wanted to test if this could indeed increase the civility of comments, among other things. The results of the controlled online experiment we set up for this revealed that the civility and relevance of participants' comments in the three novel interfaces (a discussion statement, a discussion statement with an 'agree' and 'disagree' button and a discussion statement with an opinion scale) are significantly higher compared to a traditional interface (we describe the results in more detail in [1]). This suggests that when readers have a specific statement to comment on, in particular in the context of controversial news, they are more likely to behave civil and stay on-topic than when the focus of the comment section is more open.…”

Section: Experimental Results: Higher Civility and Relevancementioning

confidence: 96%

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RHETORiC: an Audience Conversation Tool that Restores Civility in News Comment Sections

Emilie

Geerts

Storms

et al. 2022

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

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We present a case study where we developed RHETORiC: an audience conversation tool that promotes civil participation in online news comments. By following a human-centered design process, we created and evaluated a novel tool with an interface that supports people in carefully formulating their opinions and arguments, so they can constructively contribute to online discussions about news. Results of a large-scale field study show that our tool succeeds in increasing the level of civility, argumentation and proficiency of comments in comparison with those on social media. On top, both users and journalists report high satisfaction with the RHETORiC tool. In our paper we reflect upon lessons learned about the design process as well as about the tool itself, which contributes to the fields of both Human-Computer Interaction and Digital Journalism. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing.

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Section: Experimental Results: Higher Civility and Relevancementioning

confidence: 96%

“…To measure the quality of participants' comments and study variations between the conditions, we coded all comments on five dimensions: argumentation, civility, relevance, orthography and length. For more details about this experiment, see [1].…”

Section: Design and Testingmentioning

confidence: 99%

RHETORiC: an Audience Conversation Tool that Restores Civility in News Comment Sections

Emilie

Geerts

Storms

et al. 2022

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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PosterTalk: Expanding Participatory Agency in Public Survey Platforms via Middle-Out Gatekeeping

Biedermann

Coenen

Roeck³

et al. 2023

Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference

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“Fridays Are Racist”

Medina

2024

International Journal of Technoethics

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Social media platforms have become a threat to democracy and human flourishing. Critics have previously expressed alarm that our ever-increasing technological habits are negatively influencing human values and virtues. This research explores how the engagement design of social media sites is a morally questionable metric for social media ‘success'. Using a virtue ethics framework in relation to technology ethics research, as well as drawing from the work of Ellul (1962) and technology philosophers, this paper emphasizes the need for perspective and civility in engagement and argues for solutions that withdraw from an engagement design built on efficiency and financial gain. Proposed solutions include global change in the form of 1) altered weights for algorithmic prioritization (e.g., promoting diverse topics and reducing tribalist engagement), 2) returning autonomy to users (compared to corporate control), and 3) global legislation (i.e., the European Union's DSA).

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Improving the Debate: Interface Elements that Enhance Civility and Relevance in Online News Comments

Cited by 3 publications

References 58 publications

RHETORiC: an Audience Conversation Tool that Restores Civility in News Comment Sections

RHETORiC: an Audience Conversation Tool that Restores Civility in News Comment Sections

PosterTalk: Expanding Participatory Agency in Public Survey Platforms via Middle-Out Gatekeeping

“Fridays Are Racist”

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