Behind the Comments Section: The Ethics of Digital Native News Discussions

Initially offered as a digital public sphere forum, comments sections became the preferred democratic arena for gatekeepers to encourage their readers to engage in constructive dialogue about relevant issues. However, news sites require commenters to remain civil in their interactions, which led users to seek alternative ways of commenting on the news. This article explores in-depth the contents of a sample of 98,426 user-comments collected between February-March 2019 from three major Spanish digital native newspapers: ElDiario.es, ElEspañol.com, and ElConfidencial.com. The main goals were to analyze whether comments in news outlets are deliberative, to assess the quality of the debate that takes place in them, and to describe their specific features. Discourse ethics were explored to determine the discussions’ impact, the language used, the acceptance of arguments, and the recognition and civility of participants. Findings reveal that comments sections in news outlets do not have a dialogic nature and that the debates have a low-quality profile. Nonetheless, the degree of mutual respect in interaction is acceptable, with slightly observed levels of incivility. Finally, the data suggest that the focused comments are higher on social media and that memes and emojis represent a new form of digital discourse

A corpus analysis of online news comments using the Appraisal framework

We present detailed analyses of the distribution of Appraisal categories (Martin and White, 2005) in a corpus of online news comments. The corpus consists of just over one thousand comments posted in response to a variety of opinion pieces on the website of the Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail. We annotated all the comments with labels corresponding to different categories of the Appraisal framework. Analyses of the annotations show that comments are overwhelmingly negative, and that they favour two of the subtypes of Attitude (Judgment and Appreciation) over the third, Affect. The paper contributes a methodology for annotating Appraisal, and results that show the interaction of Appraisal with negation, the constructive (or not) nature of comments, and the level of toxicity found in them. The results show that highly opinionated language is expressed as an objective opinion (Judgement and Appreciation) rather than an emotional reaction (Affect). This finding, together with the interplay of evaluative language with constructiveness and toxicity in the comments, can be applied to the automatic moderation of comments

Interactivity, the global conversation and World Service research: Digital China

This paper examines the relationship between a broadcaster’s research methods and aspects of the environment in which it operates, specifically its accountability to its funders and the growth of interactivity by its users. It is concerned with (1) how the BBC World Service’s funding by the UK government’s Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) means that it has to account for its activities to some extent in terms of the global conversation which it fosters; and (2) how the recent growth of interactive and social media enhances possibilities for worldwide engagement and conversation, but also increases the complexities of measurement. This is because users are dispersed across the globe (they are no longer confined to a geographical area of radio reception) and they are interactive: instead of merely listening or viewing, they talk back to the BBC, and they talk with one another. New tools and techniques are needed to measure these new flows and forms of interaction (and they also beg new professional and organisational practices). In a case study of the BBC’s Chinese service, the paper explores what the BBC knows of its audience or users; and, in a content analysis of online forums, it explores some of the issues and possibilities that arise in researching online interaction, the sort of research data and analysis that might be seen as necessary in the context of organisational accountability and the emerging interactive media environment

Online civic intervention: A new form of political participation under conditions of a disruptive online discourse

In the everyday practice of online communication, we observe users deliberately reporting abusive content or opposing hate speech through counterspeech, while at the same time, online platforms are increasingly relying on and supporting this kind of user action to fight disruptive online behavior. We refer to this type of user engagement as online civic intervention (OCI) and regard it as a new form of user-based political participation in the digital sphere that contributes to an accessible and reasoned public discourse. Because OCI has received little scholarly attention thus far, this article conceptualizes low- and high-threshold types of OCI as different kinds of user responses to common disruptive online behavior such as hate speech or hostility toward the media. Against the background of participation research, we propose a theoretically grounded individual-level model that serves to explain OCI

User sentiment detection: a YouTube use case

In this paper we propose an unsupervised lexicon-based approach to detect the sentiment polarity of user comments in YouTube. Polarity detection in social media content is challenging not only because of the existing limitations in current sentiment dictionaries but also due to the informal linguistic styles used by users. Present dictionaries fail to capture the sentiments of community-created terms. To address the challenge we adopted a data-driven approach and prepared a social media specific list of terms and phrases expressing user sentiments and opinions. Experimental evaluation shows the combinatorial approach has greater potential. Finally, we discuss many research challenges involving social media sentiment analysis