Transferring control from the backend to the frontend: A comparison of the discourse architectures of comment sections on news websites across the post-Soviet world

Abstract

This study compares how comment sections (CSs) were implemented, as of summer 2016, on the 179 leading national news websites across the 15 post-Soviet countries. In order to pursue this aim, a novel coding scheme is developed that facilitates assessment of the degree to which the discourse architectures of CSs transfer control over the content published from the backend to the frontend of a website. Accordingly, each CS is assigned a value on a ‘control transfer index’ (CTI). The study identifies the level of press freedom/democracy of a country as the only significant predictor for whether, and how openly, CSs were implemented. The popularity of CSs and their CTIs decreased with decreasing levels of press freedom/democracy. However, even in the most closed regimes, CSs were still a relatively commonly observed phenomenon. We interpret this latter finding by drawing on theories of citizen participation under authoritarian rule.

Explanations of news personalisation across countries and media types

“…This assumption is based on comparative studies using concepts such as "journalism cultures" (Hanitzsch, 2011) or "media systems" (Hallin & Mancini, 2004) to trace the differences between journalistic organisations and routines at the local level. These differences are also known to influence the process of adopting media innovations as shown by multiple studies on media innovation and its adoption (see, for instance, Hanusch et al, 2019;Humprecht & Esser, 2018;Lehtisaari et al, 2018;Nozal Cantarero et al, 2020;Toepfl & Litvinenko, 2018) that suggest that these processes develop differently for specific media systems and media markets.…”

Public Deliberation in Russia: Deliberative Quality, Rationality and Interactivity of the Online Media Discussions

“…While most authoritarian deliberation research is concentrated on state-created (invited) public spaces, less attention is given to non-institutionalized, invented or semi-invented spaces, like the social media (Jiang, 2010;Medaglia & Zhu, 2017), or news websites comment sections (Toepfl & Litvinenko, 2018), which are central to our research. What can be expected from such spaces in terms of deliberation?…”

“…The first one is that comment sections are a mere reverberation of the governmental discourse to legitimize propaganda by 'public opinion', through various astroturfing techniques (Han, 2015) and messages moderation by the media outlets (Toepfl & Litvinenko, 2018). The citizens with opposite views may refrain from engaging into such discussions due to self-censorship, fear and similar reasons.…”

‘Friends call me racist’: Experiences of repercussions from writing comments on newspaper websites

“…Research on online comments in newspapers has often focused on the quality of debate in such forums. Several studies have explored the challenge of incivility and harassments (Coe et al, 2014; Hmielowski et al, 2014; Muddiman and Stroud, 2017; Rowe, 2015; Santana, 2014; Sobieraj and Berry, 2011; Ziegele et al, 2017) and how design features and editorial policies can impact the deliberative quality of comments (Canter, 2013; Ihlebæk and Krumsvik, 2015; Jensen, 2003; Kies, 2010; Løvlie, 2017; 2018; Stroud et al, 2015; Toepfl and Litvinenko, 2017; Trénel, 2009; Wright and Street, 2007). Others have questioned the concept of ‘deliberative quality’ in such novel forms of debate and instead applied counter-public theory to understand the dynamics of user behavior (Toepfl and Piwoni, 2015).…”