User comments across platforms and journalistic genres

This study introduces a comparative approach to study user comments on the same news content across online platforms while distinguishing between soft and hard news genres. Empirical analysis focuses on Israel’s popular news website Ynet. Using automated tools, we scraped 17,347 comments to analyze differences in the quantity, length, and topics of comments that were posted through Ynet’s comments section, Facebook Comment Plugin, and Facebook page. Our findings reveal that commenting patterns vary greatly across platforms and news genres. Specifically, the number of comments posted on Ynet’s Facebook page is significantly higher than the two other commenting platforms (for both hard and soft news), but these comments are shorter and more emotional. We discuss these findings in relation to the notion of ‘context collapse’ in social media, and argue that one of the outcomes of the convergence between news content and social media is the augmentation of consensual national sentiment.

Social Media + Society, 2018

A number of news organizations have begun shifting commenting from their websites to Facebook, based on the implicit assumption that commenting on Facebook is an equivalent (or preferred) substitute. Using survey data from 317 online news commenters, and drawing on the concept of imagined audience, this article examines this assumption by comparing news commenters’ perceptions of imagined audiences for comments on news organizations’ websites and on Facebook. While news commenters had mostly different imagined audiences between the two platforms, they had similar evaluations of the personal dimensions of their audiences and the quality of news comments. News commenters on Facebook, for example, did not perceive their audiences to be any more reasonable, intelligent, or responsive—or any less aggressive—than did commenters on news organizations’ websites. Facebook commenters also did not perceive comments to be of any greater quality than did commenters on news organizations’ website...

The Information Society, 2018

The research on online news comments has been dominated by a normative approach and has centered on media engagement. Normativity and media dominance have also featured big in the theoretical discussions on the public sphere. This article presents a case study of online news comments, combining a novel methodological testing of social network hypotheses to examine user-user interactions in online comments with a conceptual discussion of the potential connections between social network research and theories of the public. The social network analysis in this study indicated that users (online commentators) do not constitute highly dense networks, although their relations can be studied as social networks. However, this analysis can only explore limited features of this online phenomenon and requires complementary methods. From a conceptual perspective, this article confirms the role of shared issue for a potential public and also emphasizes the importance of context, actors, and meanings for understanding the public.

Commenting on online news articles must be considered an online staple – an established practice among news consumers that is currently being funneled from the web pages of news organizations to third-party platforms such as Facebook. The paper at hand adopts an exploratory approach and provides insights into the fervency and popularity of commentators and comments on the Facebook Pages of two Swedish and two Norwegian newspapers. The results indicate that while immigration issues are a common topic in both countries, the Swedish context stands out by also featuring high degrees of commenting activity in relation to issues of gender equality. Identifying a series of differences in how these opportunities to comment on news are used in each country, the Swedish context appears to offer a wider range of opinions among the most fervent commentators in comparison with Norway. A similar tendency is found among the most 'liked' comments

Interactive Film & Media Journal

Discussions through interactions between contending parties have been known to have minimised, if not completely resolved, many conflicts, and have nipped numerous others in the bud because people were able to express themselves for others to know their stands on issues. Likewise, new media technologies, ably hinged on the Internet, have further created avenues for more interactions among people in different media ecosystems. Given the variegated attributes of the Internet, most newspapers now have online versions which have provisions for readers to make comments at the end of each story or report. The comment feature of online newspapers and social media gives room for interaction among readers and users, hence, commenters are not only using it to comment on what they consume from the media, but they also use it to react and comment on the comments made by other commenters. This brings about a robust social interaction among the commenters, outside the medium that serves as the so...

New Media & Society, 2020

This study examines the role of heavy commenters on social media. We propose typologies of heavy commenters on Facebook pages of six news organizations in two systems that historically embraced different discourse cultures-the United States and Germany. We find that discourse cultures are impacted by news outlet and country: the US discourse is more participatory in terms of comment frequency, but further characterized by a strong non-discursive culture compared to a participatory liberal discourse culture in Germany. Frequency of commenting as normative ideal of social media sites (e.g. web traffic) does not lead to higher amounts of deliberation. On the contrary, it may contribute to what we conceptualize as the non-discursive model. As an expression of this, heavy commenters in the United States more often perform hate watching that manifests in hostile commenting on stories that are incongruent with their political ideologies. Implications for the democratic function of media organizations on social media are discussed.

Social Media + Society by Edda Humprecht, Lea Hellmueller, & Juliane Lischka, 2020

Recent work demonstrates that hostile emotions can contribute to a strong polarization of political discussion on social media. However, little is known regarding the extent to which media organizations and media systems trigger hostile emotions. We content-analyzed comments on Facebook pages from six news organizations (N=1,800) based in the United States and Germany. Our results indicate that German news organizations’ Facebook comments are more balanced, containing lower levels of hostile emotions. Such emotions are particularly prevalent in the polarized information environment of the United States—in both news posts and comments. Moreover, alternative right-wing media outlets in both countries provoke significantly higher levels of hostile emotions, thus limiting deliberative discussions. Our results demonstrate that the application of technology—such as the use of comment sections—has different implications depending on cultural and social contexts.

New Media & Society, 2020

This study examines the role of heavy commenters on social media. We propose typologies of heavy commenters on Facebook pages of six news organizations in two systems that historically embraced different discourse cultures-the United States and Germany. We find that discourse cultures are impacted by news outlet and country: the US discourse is more participatory in terms of comment frequency, but further characterized by a strong non-discursive culture compared to a participatory liberal discourse culture in Germany. Frequency of commenting as normative ideal of social media sites (e.g. web traffic) does not lead to higher amounts of deliberation. On the contrary, it may contribute to what we conceptualize as the non-discursive model. As an expression of this, heavy commenters in the United States more often perform hate watching that manifests in hostile commenting on stories that are incongruent with their political ideologies. Implications for the democratic function of media organizations on social media are discussed.

Studies in Communication | Media, 2017

Newsrooms are still searching for ways to manage user comments because of both a desire for professional distance from their audiences and a lack of analytical tools. This paper presents findings from our exploratory, interdisciplinary study in journalism research and computer science that focuses on the algorithmic classification and clustering of user comments. In contrast to endeavours that aim at filtering out hate speech or spam, we take a more constructive approach and focus on detecting particularly useful or highquality user contributions that can be leveraged for journalistic purposes. On the basis of a literature review and our own preliminary research on audience participation and user review analytics, we developed a mock-up of a software framework to help journalists systematically analyze user comments to this end. We then surveyed its effectiveness through two group discussions-one with comment moderators and another with editors from different editorial departments of a large German online newsroom. Features that journalists and comment moderators considered useful include the categorization of user comments in pro-and contra-arguments towards a certain topic, the automated assessment of comments' quality as well as the identification of surprising or exceptional comments and those that present new questions, arguments or viewpoints.

Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence, 2021

News organisations often allow public comments at the bottom of their news stories. These comments constitute a fruitful source of data to investigate linguistic variation online; their characteristics, however, are rather understudied. This paper thus contributes to the description of online news comments and online language in English. In this spirit, we apply multi-dimensional analysis to a large dataset of online news comments and compare them to a corpus of online registers, thus placing online comments in the space of register variation online. We find that online news comments are involved-evaluative and informational at the same time, but mostly argumentative in nature, with such argumentation taking an informal shape. Our analyses lead us to conclude that online registers are a different mode of communication, neither spoken nor written, with individual variation across different types of online registers.