Uncivil and personal? Comparing patterns of incivility in comments on the Facebook pages of news outlets

Abstract

Social media and its embedded user commentary are playing increasingly influential roles in the news process. However, researchers' understanding of the social media commenting environment remains limited, despite rising concerns over uncivil comments. Accordingly, this study used a supervised machine learning-based method of content analysis to examine the extent and patterns of incivility in the comment sections of 42 US news outlets' Facebook pages over an 18-month period in 2015-2016. These outlets were selected as being broadly representative of national, local, conservative, and liberalnews media. The findings provide the first empirical evidence that both the level and the targets of incivility in the comments posted on news outlets' Facebook pages vary greatly according to such entities' general type and ideological stance.

Detecting Incivility and Impoliteness in Online Discussions. Classification Approaches for German User Comments.

“…Following this line of research, it seems useful to differentiate between impoliteness, which is considered inappropriate but not necessarily harmful, and true incivility, which has more detrimental and lasting consequences. This view is supported by recent empirical work on incivility that has drawn similar differentiations (e.g., Rowe, 2015;Su et al, 2018). These studies typically reveal that impoliteness occurs relatively often in online discussions, whereas incivility occurs less frequently (Papacharissi, 2004;Rowe, 2015a;Su et al, 2018).…”

“…In sum, automatically classifying documents into abstract concepts based on text patterns requires an appropriate training sample (Grimmer & Stewart, 2017). Creating such training sets is costly and some studies therefore rely on small sample sizes (Su et al, 2018). Further, Ross et al (2017) haveshown that the manual coding of hate speech requires clear definitions and guidelines to produce reliable annotations.…”

Effects of Social Grooming on Incivility in COVID-19

“…11 Given that larger networks are positively related to rationality, tolerance, and knowledge, 30 users with a smaller network size could react aggressively in response to contextual news topics and divergent opinions. 6 In this sense, emotional, emphatic, and uncivil remarks were identified in the smaller network size map.…”

“…Many researchers have detected social media incivility. [3][4][5][6][7] According to the literature, most incivility is significantly associated with contentious issues and relevant groups (e.g., race, religion, sexual identity, nationality, immigration, etc.). However, the literature has not yet clearly explained what factors boost or reduce the degree of incivility on a social media platform.…”

Societal problem solver or deficient discipline? The debate about social science in the online public sphere

“…The decision was made based on empirical findings suggesting that uncivil user comments on scientific topics not only polarised readers, but they also changed how individuals interpreted the news story itself [Anderson et al, 2014]. Research shows that around 20% to 40% of user comments on news stories consist of uncivil comments [Coe, Kenski and Rains, 2014;Rowe, 2015;Santana, 2013;Su et al, 2018]. Hence, the user comments in our case study might also entail a certain degree of incivility -targeting for example other users and social scientists.…”